Coming down with something
     blame summer
     point a finger at the city
worn-down pizzazz
     drunk trumpets
and I hide in my coat
    
trees look better without leaves
is it just me?
   see the sun bellow
   into buildings

student affairs
   like heat rash
bounce along hallways

foreign mumbo-jumbo
   mishpelt words

they say him met her
saw six pictures last night

I haven’t met me
   books know truth
not brunettes

good poetry
better than ***
   they’re running running running away with it
between spritzers
   and sandwiches
   now snooze until Halloween
   brown back in fashion

    caught in the middle
    piedra de aguacate
I handle guitars
    they fiddle with women

now  
   let apple juice trickle
from my lips
   and a man gets out a taxi
    drops his phone

liver damage
spritzers and pirouettes
of smoke curl
through canals
in cracked plastic
lip skin,

can
a void thrum?

bob dylan’s
time out of mind
sheathed in my ears
cigarettes burn
all of me,
can
entropy
explain

kaleidoscopes?

if yes, if
only
that I see
you in
everything
is
a trick
of cones
and rods
and nothing more.

They were drinking white wine or spritzers
I was at the pictures
watching a rerun of a rerun of an old one,
which I hadn't seen before
but for half a crown I expected more,

they had the right idea
the right place but the wrong year
and somewhere near a cat was wailing,
not a cool cat
just some alley cat.

It was the eighties, Berlin,.
the falling of the wall
when the East came to call
on the West,

they drank Schnapps
I was looking for the traps
which I was sure they had laid.

he counts the money
I count calories
he dresses up like he always has a board meeting to attend
you can usually find me in pastel coloured tees and black tights
he eats like he is on a diet
I eat like I just broke up
He leafs through big old dusty encyclopedia's
I have my nose in one of his mothers many cookbooks
he drinks spritzers and tonic
I have the weirdest craving for Smirnoff
he sits in his lazyboy and flips through the news and sports channel
all I have been watching a lot of is Gordon Ramsey
he lost a deal
I lost my recipe cards

It’d be different if we had never met...
But we did
Not some bar or library or clumsy
Coffee shop coffee date
But an airport
Not a Friday or Saturday or Monday after
Work nice to meet you...
But a Thursday night into Friday
Long into the morn
It’d be different if our
First drink was wine or beer or one of
Those spritzers to ease into knowing you
But it was coffee at midnight
And conversation
3 hours felt like 5 minutes
And it’d be different if we hadn’t
Laughed and looked into
Each other’s eyes when
We made love
But we did...
It’d be woefully, painfully different
If we’d never met.
But we did...

I didn’t realize how late it was and kept eating cigars and spritzers.
chuffing on a spoonful of Mercury and bath salts, while having a debate
with a silent Mime. a mime, so ascetic that a grain of invisible rice
was a banquet. And pulling a rope made of empty-
was the gravy on the biscuit.
a flag at the summit
of a goosebump you were pawning
to a merchant
for a chill.

a bespoke menagerie of awkward McGillicuddy
carefully abandoned by the Hour… toppling the swiss clock
of our glockenspiel, over the horizon of my Optic Nerve.
serving the inkling of a thing is more rampant than devotion
to an actual god… and love has all the trappings of genius
as our serenity is an eternal war
that begs the Question
blindfolded

without asking.