It worries me how early spring has emerged this year
for sun and warmth does not wait for souls such as mine to catch up
with labored footsteps.

I have no words for the royal skies
or the emerald grasses peppered with tiny flowers,
for what are they if not beside you?
I open a window to let in the clean lavender air,
and sticking my head through the frame I ratify the end of that gentle winter where I did not feel lonely.

I don’t like the way my heart within me sinks as a ****** to the sheets
Nor that my pillow keeps hearing your name
still to be spoken many times yet,

but I am told that all of this is the small price
for that beautiful little while
that I almost had you.

Let the Calabrese teach me love
And let him clear the air
When I have near me his olive skin
and salt-and-pepper hair
If my old love songs need added
some experiential charm
Let the Calabrese do it
When I fall into his arms

And when the Calabrese
is an echo in my past
He’ll tell me, had I learned to love,
I would have made it last

Your sweet voice holds to music
As a spring rain tops the grass
I did not love for nothing
But for this song to last

Why, of every signal
Does silence loudest speak
I did not love for nothing
But to have one touch to keep

O keep my lover saintly
In this scheme of crooked sin
I did not love for nothing
But to wear the sorrow in

As his name lays soft in poems
So keep him near to me
I did not love for nothing
But for sweet eternity

And so the song flows -
a messy trace of barbiturate haze,
the song flows,
tinged with a red-eyed, cathartic
sort of sparkle about it in the dark,
like the backalley streetlamps by my window
at one in the morning.

July 1st-
I take a step outside, climb to the roof.
My eyes swell from the sunlight,
glasses steam up from the heat.
I have no need for lifting my *** off these sheets anymore but to write.
Manhattan rooftop, why did you have to betray me?
There was a time when
you were the glistening silvertoned backdrop to all of my surreptitious loves
as I sat on you,
idly humming jazz,
peacefully watch the go-and-come
of the synagogue pouring into the
streets below,
pitifully bemused
at the concept of dejection.
You once gave me a view of opportunity,
and ever-alert, always-foreseeing eyes that could have seen all the way to the buildings of Stamford.
Now I'm eighteen and terribly myopic.

What at all at this point is to exist
with implacable certainty?

Manhattan rooftop,
Tell me that
solipsism is the universal truth,
then I will not feel as alone.

If I am to be remembered
Let me be remembered by stars
In her faltered skies at nightfall
Or simply as a face
Nice enough to write a few lines to