05 June 2009

12 May 2009

Tennis Bracelets

Tender Is the Night rises
from a desk drawer and I
catch up with you there.
This is a boom time for the manic
depressive memoir (you too bought
a spree of snakebite kits), the kind
you were writing when I knew you,
before you stopped and I went back
to red desert and gas-green lights.

Let’s remember how quickly we came
under neon-streak firefly trajectories,
dead like a story we already knew.
A story that wishes us one more
go around—you call by accident and I
pick up the phone and a tennis racket,
swing backhands, slice you away.
You come through the space
in the catgut anyway.

There is clay and a too tight smile
strung across my face as you pinpoint
that day defined by the sun gilt-edging
storm clouds, every elongated slide
a frictionless shot of memory.
The baseline side to side blurs
to nighttime bracelets of light in the town
below the sanitarium, I know
they’re interlocking, getting closer.

I touch my wrists and you touch your wrists.

Spring Is Sprung

01 March 2009

Last Time

The door left open
Your car parked in the drive
My last invitation.

You looked right in the heart of my eye
As if you were trying to memorize
My face indefinitely
And I did the same with yours as we faced
At the entrance.  A sad long gust swept through
Hushed around the back of my neck and ears
The way your hands once did.

Outside, I looked for indication from the day the sun
Blending with the clouds the grass
On your front lawn neither dull nor shine.

I didn't hear you walk away.
I half expected you to be there, half hoped.  Watching me go
Casting me off to face the rest of the world without you
But I'm glad you didn't.
I could never have left

In the dark, your sad eyes roam towards me in dreams.  

27 December 2008

Dreams of Eurydice

I dreamed last night of you in a crowd
walking with a rose, the pink one I bought you, pulling
away its petals letting them fall to the ground.
You were looking for me, you were with someone else.
I was gone.

I had another dream of an eerie street of brownstones
dark except for the sole decayed light bleeding orange
leading to a basement structured in steel painted in dripping black
a Man inside, sitting at an empty wooden table
in there alone, brooding with a crimson face
He turned
and His eyes shot through me as if to say
she is gone and there is nothing.
A car on the street pulled up to the curb, a brown rusted Cadillac
and the window rolled down smoke pluming out and I couldn't see in.
Eurydice, the wind whispered, and the car took off.

Through a fence with barbed wire I watched lightning strike
the ocean, a flash of a wave being surfed by a man under gunpoint.
In a wet jungle, lightning shone on the path as I searched for you
stealthily maneuvering around guerillas, winding trunks and 
slapping leaves to sinking mud and walls of trenches.  
Crawling through this never 
ending maze I cried out to the wind, rain 
pouring into my mouth.  
The wind didn't answer.
The rain stopped 
and not another bolt of light.  

Then, I woke up.  

26 December 2008

She

Strong first encounter
A planted kiss with beer on his breath
Vodka on hers
Leading the way hand holding down the pier promenade on a t-shirt warm night
The ocean a lake of radio silence letting them tune in to one another
Who pays for what
One night stand bluffs did you did I
On the brick wall he leaned against her at closing time, the crowds 
crookedly walking watching their beginnings through a film of yellow 
poisoning but not, just
alcohol.  
They didn't fuck that night.

A whirlwind of in between
Youth and adult love that we're told
Exists
Where past lovers are forgotten
And friendship becomes the basis before sex.

Instead, they shake each other and pop the corks exploding 
Out, and up the rickety elevator as high as they can
Hoping for the penthouse
Not the roof where all they can do is look down,
A dread remembrance of their ride.

They should have taken the stairs. 

11 September 2008

A Change of Season

Before, at the end of Spring
There was an open sky
Limitless and forever
The days would end in a brilliant blaze
A bright smile before
The tender breeze of night.
In waking, the day rose in a soft yellow
Everything full of green vigor.  
A brush of sweet air would wrap around me,
Your voice.  
There was feeling then.

Now, the coldness begins to reach my bones.
The ocean slaps angrily against itself.
The wind torments loose leaves and then ceases–-
Abandons--
Once they fall.
There is no pleasure to your giving.
A routine like the appearance of a forgotten sun
Lifted and dying, blocked by an irrational gray haze.
Only a noise now, a mechanical drone
The huff and rupture from a monotony of cars
Taking the same routes, hoping for the earth to crack.
A pencil scratching against a calendar.
Erase.
Fill in.  

I look out at the sea slush, the white peaks
Waiting for stillness.
The seasons have changed
I accept
And I know as a whip of wind smacks down against me
The season will change again.
But as I grow resilient to your cold,
I wonder if I will feel the same.