Chasing

Snow, it falls; i called
a stranger i used to know,
and it was just bars on tuesdays,
lounge spaces, and dirty plush cushions for lovers,
all empty in december, but for the soft, raging music
that drifts in the air and finds no home,

and myself,
with a drink, in a sturdy glass,
drunk, but not piu troppo, too much.

Some people called, looking 
for me. They want 
me to be happy, yes, but please, 
don't be piu troppo, which they don't say,
and there is a scent 
of acrid hunger, the stone-pit pangs of wolves in winter.

Who is this stranger who walks in rain, and leaves us 
to our devices? Are you sad? I think
this is making you sad and angry, and I am worried,
so i say, yes, yes i am, i am sad and angry, and i am

lying, on a couch, in a dim bar, 
in the dark of the city,
and promise, to come home 
when i am done. So they go. And they sleep.

And a glass of something golden or silver, 
sits safe on my chest,
and i am alone 
with the ceiling and the walls, and the space 

of the solitary bar, feeling something 
secret, and raw, & most certainly piu troppo.

misanthropy

Your sunned hair dangles,
O child of Pierus, against the drooping
of unmade sable sheets, like stained ribbons,
or the chafing sugar hem of perchance or rubs,
which grazes as it billows,
like stillborn grass beneath the bent, branching wind,
of January on the wintered skin
and a sleeping spine.

In the ill ebbing of veins,
hollowed intestines, & the silk-ridged flesh,
the waxpaper'd soul knows the taste
of salt and leaf-breath, and glossy insects,
Only in the warm gleam of hardened tree blood,
flourishing sweetness turned into a buried memory stone;
O Mnemosyne, your refractive scent, your mouth eludes
our self-regenerating, self-devouring cells.


There are girls, and boys,
who bathe & soap themselves: 
god-destroyers and gods,
masturbation-blessed, metal-wrapped iconoclasts,
with their halo-molassed lips, their seastorm eyes.
 
My stillness hides my pulsing to the loveliness,
to the breaths that go shallow-quick,
I dissolve against their blood-rosy cheeks, the satin jawbones,
but tracing the corded pathways 
of their opuses, movements,

O muses,
there are only bird shadows,
jackdaws and magpies in grey rain.

new york

moving crosstown cos i've got problems
and took disconnected trains
i told him on paper that i craved schulyer's raindrops
in chelsea, panging
for artistry of modern,
early twentieth century, american,
and i am drying
bottles of furikake in dark oak cases,
thin glass, the windows panes are chipping at the frame,

bracques' neighbor, 'beginning' spins,
they've moved the prescription from october, and a painting,
leaving tanguy's fogginess, i shake
a sob, it is a baby in the museum, i go
with my migraine, sneezing loudly, the rain
has caught me in my flimsy winter coat in may.