bleak midwinter
disinterested
and as then to see
she turn
and from her shoulders
does her hair
shake
the lithe frost
The Caribbean heat piles down from the sky
Pulling myrtle flowers
Down
Through the dense rain
Relieving the heavens of their drenched and beautiful burden
In the doorway
I sit
Barefoot
White dress
And see through
Both ways
Claiming my corner of relief
My bit of the sighing sky, its shoulders dropped
In a heavy exhale
just ralphie
In our thirties
somewhere
he wound our teenage love
into a poem
sent me a copy
claiming he sacrificed and
penned it in blood.
a wasted knight errant
charging in to kill
a monster for the love of a beautiful woman
only there was no monster
just ralphie
metro
On the levalois line,
I sleep.
The trains halt and clang up
through earth to let me feel the ground,
their ground,
the tracks and oil and rats. Up through the floor boards
And the dial down stairs I can't read it. I want to find out what it is but I don't want to know bc then there would be nothing left to wonder about and I would pass and know why the knob turns and the spiget in the garden doesn't flow. And I want to wonder.
Unmarked: a Poem for Melvin
The earth has won, as is always the case. New grass reclaims its old place Along the metal rim of the in-ground vase where no one has left flowers. Petals of the roses I've left are captured and held fast to the ground, somehow, each a notch for a week gone by. I could, you know, tear the earth, reform the ashes, petition god for the breath of life he gifted Adam and raise this Cutis to his private Eden. But there have been too many roses now and this grave, this last home of the wild prince...it's all just earth now, sadly, elegantly, perfectly earth.
Sussurus
I want to fire offinto an ancient canyondeep and unstirringonly to wait above the hollowed spaceand answer to the reportwith your name.your name,peeling like a fractured dollwaging war with the silent slopesof eons old rockand then louder, say it louderanswering that old echo of a fired gunover and over.then leaveyour name to rotwith struck down birdsand dismantled trees andunbuilt homes.leave your name to be weakenedby the silence it meetsand the buried bulletand the amount of timethat absorbed enough earth to buildmiles of rock between meand the canyon floor
