Ocean View

Sight can be felt, unseen.

Eyes slicing into a spine, pushing,

like the memory of white waves, a body

into the undertow

of ocean view suite 12 C.

Now returning to the linens, riding the ghost of the sea

You speak without speaking, your sibilant whispers

Inarticulate, deliberate, slow.

High tides sigh as blind gulls lull in violet dusk.

Once again, the act replaces the memory,

kept in the distant shores of the mind.

Our primordial love song conceives no words,

As we conceive, in silence, no more than we.

The easy pain of faithless love

Wrings the laundry of our limbs

Slides aside, crescendos into a kind of mitosis.

Beyond the glass door, the obsidian shore

Is shushing the cackles of gulls who, unlike we

Are not seen, yet see.

The Young Widow

She wandered through the sycamore that night
weaving withered garlands through her hair
like tiers of brittle halos in the light
which hung their mourning buds in the evening air.
The grove illumined and stirred when she approached,
parting its pathways to let her wander in
as if to say, 'please, let us not encroach
upon the grieving you have yet to begin.'
No briar caught her dress, no rock her heel,
no owl breathed, for they already knew
the midnight living were the ones to feel
the torment of breezes, the agony of the dew.
Her bare feet rooted as if they had no choice,
and she lifted her ear, straining to hear his voice.

Ransom

Written because I woke from this dream, sweating and dizzy.

I awake in a prison cell next to a man with no arms and no legs on a cot. He is face down in a bowl of porridge, gorging himself. I twist and claw at my back, desperately scratching. Why are you here? I didn’t pay the ransom, he said, and continued eating, limbless and hungry. I walk out of the cell to see others standing under a massive steaming shower, naked, their backs bleeding like mine from the shoulder blades. The warden takes a scythe from the wall and the prisoners hold out limbs for him to remove. They shower again, armless, legless, singing hymns. Through another door they are wheeled, into a woodshop where they are fit with wooden replacements. A manicurist for the limbless paints their wooden nails, as they sing. They stand on new legs, and greet me with new arms, still singing. The warden turns and sees me. I escape and bolt the door behind me, the itch on my back becoming unbearable. I reach around again, scratching, back bloody, door thundering, until wings… I sprout wings. Down comes the door, and the wooden soldiers advance. I stretch my wings and run at them. I have to get enough speed to lift off the ground. I’m up. My ankles fill with splinters from their hands. The warden slices the air. Takes off a toe. I hit the ground. Wooden men surround me. I start running again, wings beating, legs burning. I think I’m flying.

A Lesson

Her paranoia was

Feverish

She

Should have

considered

these accusations

more carefully.

Pretty mouth

infected with such

nonsense.

Wild talk

Poppycock

Shut the window

and

There was a time

when

this sort of thing

wouldn't have

bothered

me

so much

but

should really

stop

straining

see

she

just needed a little guidance

from

me

see.

she

understands

so well now

and when it stops raining

we will take a stroll

hush

your

mouth now

stop

begging

I

give and give and give

show

your 

teeth

let me see that

smile.

Woods

Out past the tomato garden

men have chopped down the woods

we used to play in as children.

The few saplings left sit gazing

in shame at their naked state.

They quietly conspire in the wake of this

new beginning. All afternoon

my brother talks of the brook

that survived the demolition,

how it runs deep beneath the hills

of stumps and fallen bee hives,

secretly feeding thirsty roots

and nurturning the splintered warriors

back to life. Where is this brook, I ask

and find myself being pulled

down past the garden, into

the wasteland at dusk.

My eyes had never seen such barefaced

destruction; corpses of redwood, strands of

pine needle hair, and the limbless deformities

of half-survivors

huddled together for the night.

Further and further we plunged into evening.

Stumbled, lurched, and took another route.

This way, he hissed amidst snap, splinter,

Shatter and crunch of the unkind crippled wood.

And then we were there, gaping

like the moon's lazy eye, deep into the dark

crevices and veins of the pulsing earth

beneath our feet. It sounded like the womb,

each trickling drop bearing the burden

of an unseen child waiting to be born.

Far into the distance, we could hear our

mother's voice calling to us from the garden

asking us to come back home.

We knelt by the water's edge,

our faces turned down stream,

and waited for thunder.

Aftermath

The standards of the evening

now tell their tales of carnage.

Siren choirs sing their songs

up and down these soggy streets.

Men bow low their heavy heads

and start off for home.

It has struck the hour of aftermath,

the silent hour, the quiet time,

dusk ushers forth the steady marches

and cathedral bells

chime.

London

I wrote this after the 7/7 attack on London.

Oh, sweet city, you will not let them depart

the earth unloved. You led them knowingly

to that place and time, a rush-hour coincidence

bereft of reason and rhyme to that place

and tim, that seat, window or aisle

with yawning morning slumbers

that let them pass the journey. Meanwhile,

a solemn boy in the back slides a steady hand

beneath his coat.

Oh, city, I know you saw, you are not blind,

you cried your drizzled sobs. You are too kind.

Your mourning for the dawn-drawn affair

puddles quickly and spreads

beneath the feet of millions

marching their quiet ways, home to their beds.

Oh, city, you are not my city, I know too well.

You have seen the bulge of battles,

the ruins of hell smoking up the grids beneath

your childrens' quick and cautious feet.

You open wide your streets and let them pass,

you yawn with empty parks of un-trodden grass,

you close your shows on the night

and let them roam, for even you know

on some dark nights,

all children must return home.

Grandmother

The night before my grandmother died I promised to go see her, and to bring a poem I had just written so I could read it aloud to her before she went to bed.

I was in a convertible that belonged to a very handsome boy, and he was driving so fast I couldn’t hear anything except for the beating of wind against my eardrums.

I yelled for him to take a left turn, down the road that led to my grandmother’s house, and he slipped his hand between my legs, and I told him to keep driving.

The poem was in my pocket. We fucked in his back seat while, across town, my grandmother decided to shut her eyes for a moment, just before company came.

Home Movie

An epileptic dance of achromatic ants,

and visions yawn into clarity: a Technicolor

child, puffy cheeked, wrapped

in fur and sunglasses, blinks

at the lens and the man behind the lens. A mink,

her mother’s, trails behind like a wedding pelt

on her bouncing baby body.

Her fat face behind mother’s glasses, shaded by no son,

goos and spits in the kaleidoscope of infancy.

She silhouettes in their eyes.

Sound lurches in, static bursts

into loud and rapturous applause. She staggers

forward, pink fists pumping,

grabby at the camera lens, tightrope walking

with a bear upon her back.

This is the sacred dance of dress-up, chronicled

by a silent man, behind a silent screen. Then over,

she topples, facedown in carpet, and

the illogical screams of her infancy rise.

Camera pans to shrugging mother and adjusts

to the light.

These are the visions of an unremembered day,

on an unremembered street,

of a family. Zoom out. Mother

kneels beside the girl, out of focus, in jigsaw.

Sweetheart. Buttercup. Don’t cry, my

sweet, don’t cry. Her arms too thin to lift the girl.

Zoom in.

The fat face squeals as the focus blurs.

Peek-a-boo, ad nauseam. And, at last, she laughs

so hard she cries, pees, wets herself in mother’s mink.

Nevermind, she’s just a child. Keep filming.

It’s fine, keep filming.

The child squeals as the camera reels,

stopping, dropping, rolling around

like she’s on fire,

like she’s burning alive.

So much love is in this room.

Calendar

A dark account of a state of mind. Hopefully not poetic masturbation, but you can be the judge of that.

My calendar keeps getting shorter.

Years back, I began to erase the dates

On which unfortunate events had occurred:

A death, a disappointment, a fracture in my ankle to prevent hiking that spring, Hitler’s birthday, a high school reunion when I slept with Jeremy at last, and it turned out he did it on a dare, and wasn’t that so funny…

I haven’t simply used white out, or black lines to cross through the days.

I’ve ripped each day away from its page, square, alone, clinging to none of the good days left, unable to infect them with misfortune.

My birthday needed to go, of course, Mother’s day as well. It’s a silly holiday anyway, don’t you think? Useless for most of us. Twofold useless for me, now. Twofold useless. Useless now.

Valentine’s Day is gone, having always ended tragically. The 12^th of May, the last two days of June, and any evening that bore a full moon.

I look at my pure calendar often, yet each time I find it impossible to leave alone. There is always something that happened, if I think hard enough, something unpleasant, some memory that haunts that day, some ghost standing in that window to my past.

Those days are becoming more frequent now, and my box of unfortunate days is slowly growing.

More checkered than a checker board, my calendar waits beside my bed.

And when that last pure day is gone, I’ll put a bullet through my head.

Haikus

Coming to Christ

Fucking the preacher’s son

Means no obscene words

On a Sunday morning.

Beating Your Wife

Bruises no wider

than two fingers? Buy a horse

whip. Wait by the door.

Cannibal

You are what you eat

And though I look delicious

You’re too good for me.

Safe Word

Let it be "I love

You" so we can scream it and

Soften at the sound.