Its a nice night I suppose
Nice enough to enjoy being outside
Few thoughts occupy me
Although that girl across from me
Has been still for quite a while
Looking slightly upwards
Its gotten chilly
So she hugs herself
I pull my jacket closed
And I go inside.
Resolutions written in the late "night"
Are dangerous Things
And we most earnestly stress for you to
Please disregard them completely.
For want of conciseness
She buys a travel-sized bottle
To lend me, for the burn
I obtained two weeks earlier
I took a day off and went
To a baseball game I left early from
So present day
It sits on my desk discretely
In the same place she had
Forgotten it while packing.
Its not social, he says to me
Regarding that which she could not bear
To tell him in person so she wrote
An email to him that she soon found
Impossible to send
So you had better get some sleep
While I pull myself together
And figure some things out.
She had just assumed it would end in April
And was confused by your misunderstanding.
When you awake we eat and I ask you
To play your songs for me and you do
And then you ask me what I think and
I feel as if I could spend the rest of my
Life listening to you apologize for your
Imperfect piano playing and I tell you
I liked it and you look unconvinced
And I cough and write poetry later
That night.
You stuck a lemon slice in your mouth
And I took a polaroid of your face
And asked you what you most
Disliked about yourself
You said, "Want of conciseness."
In pondering your sleep
I find myself- watching
A choreographed scene
I somehow see
In the after-hours practice room
Behind closed eyes-
Feeling serene and refreshed
As if I had just awoke.
You hold your arm up by a single nail
Between your teeth without apparent effort
Steady with a poet's observation
Until I hear something?
A sound from you
and odd pop
To set things in motion
Your eyes call quickly
Far back behind them
Looking for confirmation that
Rushes (not a moment to waste!) out your mouth
In a mirthful cough
That sends you back a step with the recoil
And you bow with reverence
For life itself.
With the heat almost too heavy
He is passing through a wood
The shortcut to the train station
Just a few blocks away
Wading through leaves
That smell of autumn high tide
Reaching almost up to his waist
Reaching for trees like ski poles
Careful. Sometimes stopping.
The trees seem too full
And I am tapering off
To a smaller and smaller endlessly smaller point
As the trees become immense
And the wood does not end
As far as I can tell.
A dream-work barrier gone nova
Collapsed under the weight of
What he took from the vast
Imposing and unfathomable world at large
That moved away from him
Speeding up
The more distant the more unreal
It became the faster and faster it receded
Then despite impossible geometry
He took in his grasp
The distant hems and pulled it closer
Closer closer to him
Wrapped himself in it and
Dove headlong into a deep cold state of frenzy
And was happy?
He is survived by a few lines of a moment's rest.
The mattress of stiff wood
That serves to fix my
Stressed back and to
Let my spine wrest itself
Free from my clenched muscles
And doubts.
My body feels good
In the morning
And I am healthy and
I would kill
To have gasoline and matches
And a halfway soft pillow
The cold remains very much the cold
It still creeps around corners
To gnaw at naked ears
And punish the ungloved hands of smokers
Who soldier on bravely
Their slow paced suicide attack
A defiance that says
They will show the cold and they
Will not be left numbed
Any longer than they can help it.
With ocean visible in all directions
For as far as one chooses
An odd shape breaks the surface
Of the dark placid waters
And forces up in a stream
Pillars of water that quickly
Turn gaseous and similar to
Sulfur billows
Not quite like a horse's head
But better approximating some Victorian Queen
Twisting and turning
And moving with unreal consistency
And they are squeezed from within
To dense pockets
Expelling anxieties
In a stream from both poles
Until they cease to compress
Into a single bright point
The core not beating
But still and laden with love.
Warmed by the focus
The lens grants the sun
On an oddly serene March day
And falling as a needle does
Into the grooves with a clang
That echoes and sounds
My reflection is illuminated in short
blip blip
blips
My vision shaky
in and----
-------out -----
my eyes sting
I hold steady on other figures
I pray they see more clearly.
I have, I think, not yet really begun
That journey so ardently traversed in the epics.
The being that takes my journey
Stretches but a few years backwards in time
The “I” that was myself then
Is as unrecognizable to me now
As the faint sketches I have of
Something new and daunting
From the center where to which from out of the corners
And pockets of my being is dragged a vast sum of weighty thoughts.
From there has emerged this fear of -------
That lurks just further on ahead
And hangs loosely upon me
In the same anxious manner that the damp ocean air
Settles down over the dark side
Of Route 88.
The beaches down in that other state
Fill the air with salt and drizzle
And the muddy endless vacant lots
Swell in the roomy darkness
I drive through the light rain
Past the miles of marsh and industrial skyline
On my all too familiar route into
Jersey City
I see the ghosts beheld by the eyes of poets past
Our circles ring up and up
Like an Escher onramp, hopes abandoned
And left in desolate breakdown lanes
I am holding tight to the wheel
In the long dramatic jug-handles
Where it just feels right to lean in
It feels right and comes from
The image of something beautiful
That I maybe want to make people see
And share the sense
That myself in another
A line of mirrors with my image
That I strained to see and where again it just felt right to
Lean in
All the way and see maybe where this endless reflection ceases
And is covered by the earth under the blank horizon.
More strength to my hands
Warms them and makes them vital again
After having been numbed by ice cold handlebars
That kept steady
My early high school bicycle
In the times before the family car
With far too many miles on it that they kept around for you
And you know still runs very well
Became your means
Of negotiating the crossed parkways of the state that birthed you and I.
Cigarette smoke escapes
Through the thin window crack
Meeting the rain on its way in
I move past the towers
Built of shipping containers on the port.
A few miles back
They excavated the marshes
And upon finding two dead bodies
Disposed of them to make room
For Xanadu.
I enter into the city
My teacher and my muse
Are close to me
Green signs look with recognition
At me in my car
And that recommend that familiar way.
And there lies that long plot
That kept me awake
Feverish and entranced
And writing lines in praise of it
Before it ceased to be
And now calls for me to hold my breath as I pass.
The verses come in memory
And as witness to what is left
And that soft ground not to be trodden on.
My headlights point
Where thoughts are let loose from everything
Flanked by the core and the frozen crust
But I am reliant on the eyes of my machine
And their beams that strike the van
In front of me at two points
Grow brighter and more defined
As I creep close and stop.
They do have free parking here
In the back alleys and secondary roads
Where strangers and nonresidents
Can rest unmolested.
From these streets
From which I am now exiled,
Watered and fertilized by the skyline across the river,
Given the faculties for growth
By greater souls
Whom I had needed to believe could see more clearly
And call forth luminous depths
From beautiful surfaces.
I had hoped for some sort of guide to come forth
From their ranks
To aid my travels and give me cover
In the deepest ring
When the shelter disappears
From the mute landscape
The ice muffling cries of anguish from the shades.
They who spoke
Revealed to me the image of things
Their beings and deeds and words
Illuminated much
Of my benign lost dreams.
Following the threads they offered
To their ends without ends
I am growing weary in the pursuit.
Without a guide to carry me
Up the steep cliff face or through
The closed gate.
Under the city I feel it will be safer
With no place further down to fall.
This destination asserts itself at eye level with me
When I turn onto the steep hill
And begin a slow descent
Under the city’s passive eye.
The dome sits bright against
The intersection’s backdrop.
The light here is tinged orange
And never fully dark-
We have almost succeeded in the death of the night
Replacing infinite points
With an insatiable dim glow.
It is mesmerizing
And keeps my eyes drawn still
Beneath this dome and through the turnstiles
I move among a varied crowd
Of late night drifters and
Others
Like me looking for the stars
They keep their gaze up
For air they breathed in another life.
I lean into the tunnel
Crane my neck
Try and see what it is that is approaching
In this tunnel unseen by the absent stars.
Vents on the bus bus
Scream like an opera singer
Who in turn howls like a turbine.
Its a solid and unyielding
IAOO
(pronounced with a proper
Italian accent)
It becomes an enchanting
Industrial lullaby
Once pledged a fermata's detached support
Held held and held until
It seizes and consumes me
And I am engulfed
For an indeterminable time
By this single note
Constant and expanding
A shuffling and bouncing
And slightly damp
Deluge of envelopes
Cascades down the dirty
Staircase from the mouth of
A bag held by a man
With thick glasses and a
Cigarette tucked behind his ear.
He scans the stationary river
For something other than coupons or
Bills or magazines or
Official-looking confetti
From the top of the steps leading to
The second floor of his
Damp-looking house behind a
Mail truck with screwdriver in the ignition.
He finds a handful of what promises to be
Love letters
And, gingerly stacking them before him
Sits amongst the paper
To read.
