everything just takes me there

Unharnessed horse riding

Spiked midnight juleps over

The double life of looking in

the mirror slanted, canted angles of

The body new and formed, muscle toned

Harvesting new life out of an old life,

New nights spent at the bar bending beneath

Racks of dirty glassware to emerge

Halo-topped in the misty history

Of cloud cornices to be strutted

and the great sighing of the city.

Wissahickon runs through it like a vein,

As my soul pulses through the work.

Would that the ivy would crumble these statues

To silence and the trees would spread their hearts

To help us breathe.

She is standing tall, fully clothed,

With a buzzer in her hand and the porcelain

Toilet is cold and the floor is full of the past

And I am choosing here the dark path,

The path of eyes closed, the path of

Slit my throat if that will help you breathe.

The time is shaking itself over and over,

Disbelief over “where it’s at”, droplets of water catching sunlight

Slinking away from the trash like a dog,

A fall, turns into a spring, turns into a summer

And I cannot have another thing I cannot control

While the refusal to choose shade wakes me

at dawn to her sleeping. I always

take a moment at the edge of the bed,

Back bare, breathing deep and dark and my head down,

Then I get up and go to work.

We are knowing ourselves into meaningful existence;

The great choice already made and now only to follow,

Use the right words, hold yourself

to what you have made yourself,

and win,

then it will be full,

Wont it? I haven’t the faintest idea how to produce energy

Without hurting people. The options are nuclear.

Life mimics life; though the body renews itself,

Water pours through like the recycled mires

Of the city’s sewers sold back.

She is she is she,

And while plunging headlong hurts noone else,

The hunt heaps yourself onto yourself, bald pain

Into misdirection and then you’ve got a bad scar

Under bright cloth. You’ve got a bad scar.