because it has been a week and i still haven't called him back

First, there were dreams of crystalline horses in hiking socks

Catching the last train in the blizzard

To a deeper part of the storm--

5^th avenue shut down and blinking red lights highlighting a solitary figure

dragging a shovel behind him in the middle of the white street--

“if I have a bad day I say I deserve a drink and if I have a good day I say I can afford to drink.”

today josh has $100 dollars in savings,

contemplating giving up on josh the sportscaster

newsanchor daily beard trimmings

a learned puckering of the mouth and warm

laughter following everything he does not have

a ready response to.

Like the wind rush of a car, birds overhead

get a late start for winter or spring on this day.

My body lights up in 50 degrees asking to have socks off

And feel something.

Dreams of grandeur and pink sky in

The writer’s row home

Make a stunning set to the silent film,

Each in his room, computer whispering,

And the studio filled with a depressed woman and her lover

Trying to paint what can make it better or

Just paint it at all.

Harry potter was forbidden Josh

But he ended up gay anyway.

And without saying it,

There were no comics in my home on the edge of middle class boston

And my mother, who I love

Fought to change everything,

Not knowing much about what it means

to be an Italian construction worker

with a mortgage in the suburbs.

As the train starts past 52^nd street,

Josh’s head droops towards his phone

And he swipes his thumb right

Once, and then again.

I come home to a menorah by the window

Arcing its waxed back at the setting sun.

Young people are always outweighed.

But the whole future, with months of travel

And sex and snow and homelessness,

And something else is determined

by more odds than that.

The politicians are singing America now,

And the farmers are coming to the empty nest,

And the firestarters at university are hoarding PBR’s

And the dock workers are laying down their arms

And liberty herself is shrugging

As a thousand boats leave and a thousand boats come in

And every day is looking in the mirror saying

“I don’t feel so old as I look,

but I’m proud of what has marked me so.”

My grandmother was married in a letter to Iceland,

And she died in a queen size bed in marblehead, quietly,

With her rugs still white and everyone expecting

The EMT’s, or whoever came, to recognize her and say,

“Barbara, it’s been so long. You were so much then,”

then look at all of us with tears in our eyes

“and look at all you've made.”

Her china set is breaking,

Plate by plate,

Party by party as I grow older.

I had a dream the one who stole my heart first

Sat cross legged over the pieces,

Arranging dinner for us

Before we would take a long journey.

I input Josh’s story to the database late in the evening,

And clasp the duct tape on each end of the screen shut,

Hoping these great fragments will grow

And bond and change each other

Along with something I give

That pushes us towards something new.

Today I woke up and saw the man who drove the trolley

And all the ones who ride the 6:36 trolley

And I thought I caught a glimpse of a former friend

And then I saw the grand hotel Monaco

With its chandeliers spraying light into the snow

and I saw hundreds of people

Storming in for brunch to celebrate this Sunday

And then I saw my life as if from one of the windows way up

In one of the buildings in the city of dreams.

It looked lonely and driven,

And I looked tired and hungry

And had rough hands the size of small towns.

And I don’t know what to do with that.

“man,

but it gets cold quick in Philadelphia.”

1?20?2017

We are breathing heavy over

The bar at 1pm, deep in it,

Changing neon across our faces,

Big bear bartender who refused to put it on tv

Turned with us now, falling on the sword,

Throwing out jabs like bottles from a group of protestors.

Part of this is quiet,

The way we would pass through security at 4am

Sleepy eyed guards ushering us through

With thoughts on their husbands in bed

Or bag lunches crowded into the back of podiums.

He speaks behind a golden eagle,

Wing tips pointed up for freedom carefully,

And interspersed with his wife’s strange garments marching to gold cutlery

Are images of young people in the streets,

Shaking their fists at a row of well trained facelessness.

I am in the stall-less bathroom

Gunmetal showing through the walls

And floor canted down to guide you in.

My ass cheeks are numb and my brows swallow,

As I pass by the mirror, my eyes are low.

My lover is with the miners,

With the nurses in the hills,

An audiobook away, and coming close

To the leatherbound violence soon.

I see a woman clutching herself on tv, hood turned up

And with hand over wrist obviously squeezing

As tightly as she can.

The handing over of power--

A strategically worn bible, casted across the country

Into plains and over mountains, through the hollow parts of cities

And the gullies of the suburbs,

Blotchy white, frozen over pupils,

Calling for blood, the same blood to be shed.

Do not stop, do not stop.

We are calling out to friends

And hundreding glasses left

With only foam along the edges.

If there is a thing to be said here

I think it must be

Held between fingers dry like a cigarette,

Wet like mud.

And definitely broken. I wrote before, “I am broken speech revived”

But these words, broken over themselves

Like backs over a folding chair,

Mustn’t comport themselves like a bourgeois patio garden

And mustn’t tell themselves they are doing the right thing in the fight

And mustn’t simply sit and get drunk over vinyl.

We are up at 6am, launching through rain spilled streets,

Wheels spitting it contemptuously onto our work pants.

She has two children,

But when she cannot control what floor she is on

She crushes her knuckles in the concrete

So that her finger dangles off her hand

Like a climber at the edge of the world.

And she is crying, slowly.

Then they take her to the hospital.

Some days, my lover’s eyes

Say only “see this,

See this with me.

We are the ones who will not look away

From the fire or the blood

Or any of the poetry bubbling bubbling bubbling.

If not, then who?”

Before the birds come out, I think if there are children

 in that crowd I think they are on fire like the trash,

Block bloc is adding fuel and blocking intersections

And they are hated and they are putting others in danger

And they are making me feel better.

White ladies holding signs are named diane

And they want their voices to be heard.

Rose flies to California Wednesday

To take her kids back from that abusive pastor.

I wish I had not gotten kicked out of her bar

Last night.

Or eaten that cake,

Or burned myself on the stovetop.

She was cool against the wood frame

When she whispered it was not our fault.

When I dreamed, it was very deep in the cavern.

First night of more than 2 hours this week,

And it was packing up for a long journey

Where I could not bring much,

But everything I did not take would be destroyed.

Fire is the one element man can create.

First I packed a bag of sentiment, of black porcelain Scotty dogs

Then I dumped it out on the floor,

Some breaking some not.

Then I packed food and knives.

And dumped.

Then I saw at the back of the room,

A tarp still wet with cold rain.

And I knew exactly what I needed

And exactly what I could not take.

Today flirts with apocalypse

The way the ladies at table 53

Look at me and then undertip.

Today is 2 bottles deep.

We are waking in the same dirty sheets

With the same sleeplessness

Wishing for the same pills we cannot afford to take.

Something about today costs too much to speak of.

You’ve gotten down on yourself

And there ain’t no way out

But through.

And before you can say anything

she is coming

down hard on you.

After, she rolls over herself,

And asks, sadly, where you are.

“Where are you?”

Where are you?

acid trip

life is in itself good. Look, a tangerine is perfect.

Soak it in ransom. Lift weights. Paint on yourself in black ink.

Listen to the river 7 times in a row. Always try to play a game of magic.

Giggle at the outside. Giggle at yourselves. Blast off. Try to play it off as if you—

Stop juggling stories. Work through tough new energy and guilt. Sliver of icicle like a path to openness. A thin layer of glass over everything so it isn’t sharp.

Then space in front of your heart like a turtle shell.

and counting

These grey rays of sun in winter

Sing still-born days to stoops of clutching

Hands and loose rolled bitters. They

Bring with them haunting futures and backs

Hunched against them as if against The Wall.

The future is not a wall. Perhaps it is more like a moon.

We collapse in warm bubbles,

Bathing each other slowly and with great care

As pores open again in safety, and we remind each other,

Like 1999, we are still here. We are still here,

We are whispering with every kiss and cheers

And gyration. We are still here. That is something.

I refuse to say the coming days will bring strange fruit.
it is too dark. And it is too light here.

We are, with eyes open against the cold,

Whipping down chestnut to approach the city like an invading force.

I want to whoop and cry with you, I want to shake my arm up high,

Sword glinting in the sun. We are brandishing courage

In an empty amphitheater. We are mumbling oaths beneath our breath.

We are cleaning our houses and preparing for meetings.

We are still here and we are continuing on.

Our lives are bulwarks against them. But

They must be more. My bed has several blankets,

And when I wake the first things I see are my grandmother’s trinkets

Arrayed across the desk. We are reading poetry together—

It is preparation. And something more.

We are trading massages, we are throwing each other birthday parties.

I am leaving the grey of the fences open. I am refusing

To cut the grass. I am making plans for weddings.

I am strong enough for this.  Fire, security,

Eyes watching. They will continue to take our bread.

They will continue to hunt us to the corners.
We are strong enough for this.

We are still here. the new moon is coming.

on the night of the orlando shooting

On the night of the Orlando shooting[1]

In my new room on the 3^rd floor, I found

A pint glass, mysteriously shattered.

I put my bare foot down, and

Swept the glass onto a scrap of paper

Because I could not find a dustpan.

---

[1] (50 people dead

they paid to get in

 in the dark  gyrating and dreaming

holding nothing in their minds

or some things:

getting laid,

what to have for dinner tomorrow,

their parents,

who made this beat,

how to get ready for work the next day,

how to keep the sweat from sticking to their shirt or

if they smelled good enough for him to be excited or

why the smiling white guys were always the ones to buy them drinks or

where their friends had gone)

Potomac Falling--2013

Maybe it is the time of year, but

Potomac, where are your swans?

Your cold churns dreamily clip

A piece of brain for a slide,

Sliver it across glass,

And it is my hands, which

Without me, hold it to the light.

This is where 8 a year lose their bones.

I will address you

The undress of a lover:

Time after time

Inch after inch

Address after address.

River of swans you draw eyes like Picasso--

Pull them in with the suggestion

of a dangerous line— like a poem.

Above you, bundled couples

Tread the treeline

In some approximation of a ritual

Circle. you spit up like a child at their blindness,

You reach out like the dying.

You rise up shallowly

Like the alcoholics at a thousand points

as if a river of mouths growing desperate

For air runs just beneath your surface.

Where is the air you breathe, river of swans?

Wherefore? Why?

Potomac if I jump,

Will you carry me like a swan?

Will you cherish the whirls in my bones,

read the calligraphy on my skull?

Will you scatter my memories,

Forgive my skin and the contents therein?

Potomac, we mouth the same cold, exultant language—

We lose that bit of foam others need to speak.

Your rocks hold it, hide it.

(If she plays “Chicago” I will cry

and turn my back to her,

and if she asks, I won’t have the words

in her language. The sobs will just collect

like foam in an eddy.)

Potomac, do you recite Hicok, Whitman,

Or something older?

My sadness must seem young to you.

Do you see my life behind me,

Like a stretch of muscled water?

I must seem terribly forgetful.

Potomac, you look like one

Who has never spoken of the end.

Some things are not worth talking about.

No, but that is something learned.

Potomac, you have not learned

Those things you should not learn.

The hardness, the shortsightedness of the road,

The strange numbness of the soft skinned,

To miss the swans who no longer line your shores.

Potomac, I know one.

She plays like a peacock

And speaks like a soul

Of a body larger than her own,

Some great river.

Sometimes we fuck to dispel darkness.

And sometimes we speak dates through

Printed glass: causes of death, single sentence summations

Of each other.

We make poems of only words.

Potomac, I am in love with her

And have learned to forget

The false old histories of those words.

Potomac, I may have just learned the name

that she makes me feel fashioned in the image of.

Potomac, no, she makes me feel fashioned in my own.

Potomac, I will remind you, you are not my first.

I will introduce you.

I was forgetting her when I asked about your swans.

savage detectives

lost breaths turning to smoke

cohabitate with smog and the folds of a new, old

jacket. What’s outside the window?

Dark bar straining over the final pages—

I move close to the medical devices salesman humming

Sinatra by the door, covered in curtains.

On the penultimate, he reaches across the bar,

Taps me on the shoulder, bottles of Amador and dalmore

In the mirror, catching my own eyes brown and leafy,

He asks me “how it is”

Dark sky, dark moon, shake of her thighs,

I am remembering here fever dream wrapping day

In its warm mouth—turning ashamed with mice

Limping barefoot over frozen tiles,

Encountering beth 2 days out of work,

Blurry eyed on speed wanting to talk until the morning—

Here’s a story – pathetic dribbling face on the L with unshaved upper-lip,

Two teenagers obviously skipping school with pink lip gloss slinking

Under the arm on a crowded train, the sound of giggles and the brush

Of nylon on nylon—

I wonder this man’s red cheeks in his corner seat

Into a cloudy present—his money against

the shoes scraping sidewalk salt just outside.

I think of kissing him suddenly,

Feathery hair and 60 year old jaw.

Danny forgets the Guinness he was pouring.

In the house, the co2 tank plinks away

Time, empty like time—

Sean drags out my bedroom window,

Skin singing painfully in January,

Charlotte bunkers down south discovering

The jungles of staying away—coming and coming to

In foreign begs, unromantic at the houses

Of the rich and gay in a city she can’t figure

How to leave.

Paul is holding the last arms back before

Clocking out, hunkering his chin

To the train.

Maybe I will make $100 today.

There’s a story here, of course,

Wholly dark and rainy eyed, bitter

Like bark and green in small ways

And growing with a bit of sun—

But

a new one seems to start so soon on the last

and that’s ok, hell that’s good.

But

I am looking out the window

1.     at kb raw and something big and far away, seeing her river eyed power

2.     at the slow blood of past loves gathering, shoring nursing schedules against their ruins

3.     at ativan gored pumping and thinking and loving sid, a family ahead and a family behind stretching farther than either of us can see

4.     at who I might have been had the story telling impulse been just a bit weaker.