it's a lovely

pretty pretty is a word i hear pretty often like damned
eucalyptus insidious insipidly poisonous useless and futile til
hey

the landscape torched
it's a lovely fire

strangers strangers i see pretty often all of their faces
familiar to me like those fucking eucalyptus trees free of
identity until hey

i think i love you
it's a lovely feeling

pharmacy the pharmacy is a place pretty often i frequent
the place where my money is spent, a twenty honey fifty cents
but hey

it keeps my wire spooled
it's a lovely mercy

Stuck (a song)

You tell me who abandoned who on the dock

You tell me who turned away to chase the

Neon of the boardwalk

When the ferris wheel went around I wondered why 

I hadn’t just left town 

And in the fun house mirror all I saw was your 

ignorance and fear and 

The reason and the order of the past

All tumbled back

In my white dress gaze arrested on the one 

That loved me last 

Refusing to act in a way that would betray a lack

Of that thing that could send good people to heaven

If there ever was a heaven

Now it’s behind bars

Instead of heaven there’s a train

It has its hedonistic cars

And you can ride with the leaden eyed

Or keep quiet where you are

You’re not a martyr if you’re not having fun

You’re just stuck thinking of some one

On Billie

I have loved Billie Holiday since I was a sentimental thirteen year old. Now I am a sentimental twenty two year old, and I sing along to her songs with words rustled from memories of nights alone, tossing and longing, nine years ago. It is so sweet.

redbeard

redbeard

simple with wet sand smeared on cold hands

a skull we found was mythical huge of proportions perhaps unearthly

and i did not assume to know and i do not assume 

to know the nomenclature of the beast entombed beside the beach

and i do not assume to know the future or its friends

the bough of our fortuitous beginning heavy with our end

i am only the sum of lingering loves and futile fears

the accumulation of books and years

only the perpetuation of that which we must all abide

that as we grow we take our small steps toward the tide

gazing silly sidelong into another’s blossoming eyes

redbeard, i find it old as stone, unnamed, deep and wide

now in ghastly glowing parlor i recall a finer light

how it shone oyster-gleaming on your sweet crown

and the churning currents sung it down, down, down

ours, ours, ours again

12-21-10

proclamation

    In time, I proclaimed it in my bedroom. “I am a poet,” I said. He asked me how it felt, and I said painful: it feels like pain, and it does. Yet I could have been more explanatory. Being a poet feels like being always in love with someone who sways you and jerks you like fishing line. It feels like the constant nausea of anxiety pressed against the headiness of desire. It feels like the dread of a thing left unspoken, only noticed when the dust is blown from nostalgia.
    And it feels like three hours of dancing alone with eyes closed to the sounds of pipes and bells. It feels like a simple memory of love. It feels like absolute nakedness. And it feels like gazing at the nakedness of all around you through a lifted trapping of gauze. It feels like every one you see has a chest as open as Mary’s and through the window a burning heart exposed. Including your self, including your self.

pharmaceutical daze

Pharmaceutical Daze

Suspended in vapor by
a spindly thread
langorously caressing the night

she is shaking like a maple bough
sweating
in the bedroom

and it is not easy,
though she thinks
that if it was she’d say--

lover, make me want you
because i’m floating
away

seduced by this
synthetic
felicity

(which begets
yet more
forgetfulness for me)

only within
the pharmaceutical daze
are the helicopters stars

and what is fine
seems good
and what is good seems best

and then it is easy,
if only to think
of how she would say, would say--

you are a woman of
near-mythic
fortitude

a woman of
dreamable
softness