Category: 2009 — 1.2 (Spring)

Things seem simpler then. 
      Oh sure there were those nights of
                    passionate   young
      rage.
      Lust.
      Backstabbing.
Too many whiskeys-
        not enough pot.
      Never enough pot. 
      We partied 
      until our bodies  heaved onto mattresses.
       Voluntarily?   Involuntarily?
 Of whom?            Our own?     Yours?
       Some poor lad falling in
       love with the   unattainable? 
    Some creep who fed us drinks
        all night and offered
        rides home?
      No thanks,     we’ll walk. 
 
    I had you. 
                                       And you had me.
                 And we had each other.
      Sweat-drenched,
dirt-covered.                Bleeding lungs.
      Ridiculous
      kissing games with rockstars
      we’ve danced to for years behind closed doors.
A bottle   of champagne
  and it aint no thing.
 
In the morning there’d be
coffee and cigarettes and
never more satiable conversation.
Never feeling more complete.

In it from overspending
for the most fabulous gift,
and seeing it after
a fight with his boyfriend–
on Valentine’s Day,
he takes off down the road
in the brand-new Mustang
gleaming with the flashiest
shade of it.
Revving the engine well past
its caution marks on the gauges,
and then missing the signals
flashing it in warning,
he plows into a wall of it,
painted like a barn with it,
but speeding down
parallel rails.
On force of impact,
it gushes like a geyser
from his punctured heart,
and the siren-lights
of the medics
swirl it too late.
After his family has chosen
a coffin silk-lined with it,
six men carry him down
a carpeted aisle of it.
At the wake, their eyes
streaked with it,
friends drink glass
after glass of it,
toasting the memory
of the flaming young radical
whose real name they had
replaced with it.

Bright daylight sometimes makes 
paradise too real to love, 
glinting off traffic snarling 
through high-rise hell, 
flashing lime-green tourists 
dodging the defeated, drunken homeless 
to admire motor launches always docked 
and little terriers in fancy-dress. 
 
But tonight a fairy-mist of fog 
dances with surf along seawalls, 
encircling the gilded faux-Venetian domes, 
making faint the bridge’s curve, 
softening the cruel edges 
of a soaring condo block 
that, like the masts of sailing-ships, 
now reaches into Neverland: 
 
The barks of dogs revert to primal howls, 
the vestigial memory of oceanic chaos 
whirlpools into present time. 
With its mysteries re-forbidden, 
paradise, for an hour or two, 
returns.

Some days she got so lonely she went outside
dreamed of the days to come when
she could be intoxicated
with his love.
The waiting left so much time
for lust, for longing and aching for
his perfect body, sculpted and beautiful.
She ached to be in his
strong arms where she felt
cherished and owned. He
possessed her and
captivated her with every
movement, every
word spoken with sweet passion, every
smile – that gleam in his eyes. 
Those days she was in agony
in want of him. He was
forbidden, so she had to wait
in anguish for the moment when they could be
Free! 
Free!
Free to be invigorated and
enraptured by each other’s love. 
Until then, she would
go outside
and dream.

The old oaks moan in ashen night
to a choral, rattling breeze,
as the moon slips again from sight
into the cloudy seas.
Dim skeletons dance to each gust,
bodies scratching along the earth,
staggering to their pace of lust,
and to their place of birth.
In growing light the chill departs
and at long last the day may start. 
And I reply to the words on the wind
An unsettling phrase, “Please forgive my sins.”

Ingredients:
1 father
1 son
alcohol
cigarettes
cancer 1
cancer 2
pain
football
movies
tv
coffin

Directions:
Mix father and son, add a dash of movies and tv, and a cup of football. Include a modicum of cigarettes and alcohol. Let sit for fifteen years. Add a mountain of cigarettes and a lake of alcohol, mix with a tablespoon of pain and cancer 1. Let marinate for two years. Finally, add cancer 2, and drown all other ingredients in an ocean of pain. Serve in a coffin.

I gladly vanquish eternal rest on earth
Holding the image of perfection
In a lost place of repulsion
Winding my mind around a path
Just to loathe the end
Reaching out of life’s redundancies
Past the edge, jogging over the slope
Slicing the urge to fall into doubt
Raise a pedestal to flaws
Raise my eyes to yours
Brilliant like the sun breathing
Over the field one last time
Before creeping behind the trees to sleep.