re-post, updated

Come, Summer

it’s like finding a picture
of your mother in her wedding gown.
you want to be there,
 but you don’t want to be
 a bastard.

it’s like concealing the congeal of blood
behind your teeth. your mouth becoming
tough and inhuman as iron, your gums
sick with the sweetness of your own body,
and feeling it knot in your throat
  before swallowing.

it’s like hearing the shrill and distant
why of an ambulance siren,
or the whistle of the train,
asking simply who
  before it leaves,
  and continues to move along
  steadily.

  but mostly it’s like you being you
  under the dandelion yellow light bulb
  of the diner booth,
  glancing up from slate black coffee,
  your eyelashes, gentle
  as the trigger hairs of
  a Venus flytrap,
  and me being me
  across the table,
flat, cold,
unmoving,
stone.

Fleeting Wishes of Early May

At first i thought myself the breeze
through the torn screen window
that rustled the papers on the floor.
So brisk, so sudden,
so carelessly motivated.

Then, the reflection
of the soccer net in
the neighbor's second-floor window.
Iridescent, and holey
in the shifting light of May noon.

Then the spider web,
in the crevices of the
desk in the corner
of the bedroom.
Made invisible until
they are touched,
then lingering helplessly
before being brushed off.

Until it came to me how lucky it is
to be alive at all, as my
gracefully loping human form shut
the window, and continued
dusting off the desk.

tanka for the anxious

I find myself still
taken by stresses. I find
myself, lying still.
Remember! any motion
is a step towards something.

i have forgotten how to speak
fluent human,
the sounds of wind on windows
eating, drinking, standing
around waiting for
my memory to return.
i can recall this only:
the work i did yesterday,
but not how i did it.
the face of a cashier
at the supermarket in my hometown,
but not when i saw it last.
a line or two of Shakespeare.
let me not to the marriage of my
present and future
admit enjoying watching
my memories leave.

Making an Offer on the Brooklyn Bridge

I have been long from home,
from the sight of an open field,
the forgetful pines,
even from the deer who chew
the heads off flowers planted by
the mailbox.
I’ve been simply stewing solitary,
I’ve been brewing, brooding, boiling, bubbling over in this city.

How do we translate the fumbling,
lucid poetry we create
when we are together, when
we are away from all others?
I wish I could read your volumes,
dog-ear gently your chronicled pages,
but instead I
crash along selfishly with, perhaps,
tercets, un-rhyming, ugly,
baldly blank and bashfully, badly, unsteadily
yet readily composed.
Sadly, these days, my mind cannot flow in free verse,
but instead only reverts to the constraints of form,
my memories written in reverse, explicated, I play my part, confessionary.

And how do we mediate this war between
obsessions and compulsions?
We can act on feelings, yes, but
quietly we will damn our guilty hands
come morning, when you
rise to leave before eight, and I make a move
to kiss your neck once more. Tell me,
if I cannot claim New York as mine,
nor yours, and certainly never
ours, am I a fool? And if I am delusional,
then why do I dream of
oddly erotic subway stations, where I may find a token,
and paying with these guilty hands,
ride their sleeping rails forever back toward uncertainty?

Shore Leave

When you leave me here, by myself,
I find you leave behind something else; a void
of you. If you should check in on me after
you were gone, you would see my company;
you would see my worry and my longing,
but I doubt you would recognize their faces.

Because in them are the parts of me you cannot face,
the living ghosts that I have allowed to make myself
a mess of, each stretching out their ghoulish fingers long,
tight around my voice, my sentiments now void
of meaning, become like hollow offices of bankrupt companies,
just desks which have not harbored life, neither before nor after.

But soon enough, you will see us begin to move; after
all, what is life without the feeling of continuance? Facing
the open moon, I too become a ghost, the company
aboard the ship of my heart’s direction, a crew unto myself,
to scrub the floors of my heart, to steer and avoid
the brutish wild waves of my uncharted longing.

My ship will dock and I will enter the port at some locale along
the shores of idle time, my heavy boots dragging, my worry following after.
I will take up space there, and fill all voids
with residence in the bars of waiting, guessing what I may face
alone. I give my worry what I have. I buy a drink for myself
with what I have left. Sometimes misery comes without company.

Eventually I do not mind being a ghost. They are good companions
if you aren’t one for talking. I don’t mind their moans of longing.
I try to become no one, like them; I try to forget my self
and my notions of me; after all, what is the after
-life but one long bout of continuance? I will face
them for now, these empty friends with personalities devoid.

But in writing you these words, my solitude voided
onto the page, I realize I’m being followed by other company,
your emptiness peering over my shoulder, doing an about-face
when I turn around to catch it staring. You, your ghost, it longs
for me as I long for you. Without you gone, it has no place, no story, no happily ever-after
of haunting me. Yet I cannot stand to be with your absence, nor with just myself.

This is how I face the game of affection, dealt a hand void
of hearts, in each black spade or dead clover lies myself, each bleeding diamond my company,
longing simply to see my Queen come in, and I will bet all of me there-after.

Lights of Life

I know I’m growing old, my youth detached
and shed from me some time ago, and so
I mumble to myself and light a match.
I find myself dwelling in little, scratch
my scalp and take off where the wind may blow.
I sense I’m growing old. I felt detached
today, I saw what dreams of mine could catch
the ends of threads from time’s forgotten glow,
the mumbles of life’s twilight, which parts match.
Denial drifts along like trash cast
beside the highways of my mind—but lo!
I am aware I’m growing old. Detached
from this and that, I am, from time elapsed.
And my prayers, unto heavenly ears, go.
My mumbles travel out. I light a match.
I heard it spoke that, somewhere, all things last,
but my doubts linger just like swirling smoke.
I know I’m growing old. My youth detached,
I mumble to myself, and light a match.