Samhain 2006

As All Hallows go, last night’s
was a dud: maybe 60 kids
in all came up to our door
for treats, leaving our black
plastic cauldron half-full by
night’s end. Good treats too,
plastic bags each filled with
Mounds and Snickers and
Milky Ways, Clark Bars and
Almond Joys, Reeces Pieces,
salt water taffy, Mary Janes,
Twix Stix and Blood Drop gum,
Starbursts and Whoppers
and Paydays. The works; my
friends in AA will make out
like bandits today when
I dump ‘em all on a table
at the Central Orlando club.
We’d decked our front yard
out with everything to lure
trickers too -- the witch
moon lit up in the second floor
closet window, big plastic witch
and cat-pumkin in the garden,
bright yellow Beware! tape
strung around the perimeter
on stakes (to keep kids from
trampling through to the house),
paper luminaries up the
driveway, plastic pumpkins
with votives inside on the steps
and round the doorstep, a
greeny lantern hanging above
the door, a carved pumpkin
with a merry long stem curving
up and left sitting on the
birdbath. Lots of extra
touches too this year: a tape
of groans and moans and
wicked night storms playing
from a boombox hidden
in the garden; a demon
hanging outside a window which
I tripped with a string, causing
red eyes to flicker and moans
to wail from it while the
ghoulplast knocked and flailed
against the house siding; my wife
was in a witch’s getup sitting
on the porch step with
the candy cauldron at her feet;
and I wore a rubber ghoul
mask and perched inside
a window holding a flashlight
up to my face as kids
approached, growling &
snarling & whispering “mmmmm
mmmmmm good” or, when
they left, “don’t forget to
brush tonight!” For those
who turned up
it was a blast -- Draculas
and clowns and hockey
players and ballerinas
slowed in their approach
slack-jawed and calling
to their friends to check out
the monster in the widow,
slowing down again to
ask the witch for candy. And
my wife up there with black
fabric over her face with
eyes & mouth cut out --
she feared getting remarks
about Hey witch you don’t
need an outfit -- her kid’s
bluegreen eyes smiling
and cooing to the children to be
careful coming up the steps
and praising everyone’s costume --
perfect. But this year’s crew
was for whatever reason the
thinnest ever, and by 8 p.m.
the night was mostly done.
It was too warm perhaps
or the church events were
harvesting more kids --
or maybe it was Halloween
Horror Nights at Universal
down south of Orlando,
the big-time boogaloos --
but our small town’s streets
stayed mostly empty last night.
Witch and ghoul ended up
sitting together on the
front stoop, bored and dejected
over having worked so
hard to create the best
spook house in town &
end up just sitting there
with all that fucking candy.
Last year we gave out
80 bags, the previous year
more than 100; our
expectations were not
unfounded: but for reasons
we could only guess
All Hallows had lost its
creaking chain and thunder.
Goes with a year so
ripe with woes, my wife’s
family in arrears, her
business going bust, money
woes for us, health only
OK, so many young
American soldiers dying
for no reason in Iraq
& a growing spectre of
more bad news to come.
Maybe it’s all just too
real for everyone to indulge
a night’s dark sport in
Sidhes lost long ago.
Do ghosts disappear
when living minds are
too tired and afraid
to indulge a boo? Perhaps.
By 9 p.m. we’d stripped
the dread but empty
delusion down,
blowing out the candles
& shuffling everything
to the back porch except
for one more night of
burning figures in
the garden & up in the
closet window. I also
I left that carved
pumpkin smiling on the
birdbath with his crooked
elven cap. A last night’s
farewell to No Time
& the sacred pleasures
of the past. Back to
work today & its the
last few days before
the midterm elections --
2 billion dollars spent
on attack ads on TV
& who knows what Karl
Rove has yet to hatch
to hatch a zillion
drone Republicans
all marching to
the polls. Back to
all the ugly pressures
and hard facts which
rob us of the treasures
which were once the
ore of night. But you know?
We did all that stuff
for Halloweens still
treasured by our kids,
the ones inside my
wife and I who we
can indulge, having no
children ourselves.
And so now, speaking
for the child who got
exactly what was best
about his childhood,
I’d say we made out
quite well in our
little local jaunt in hell,
where all the bones
surfaced in the garden
and danced creaking
and merry round us,
exactly where the
most dire need for play
is utterly profoundest.





FRENCH KISS

Oct. 31

As the new sexual aim ((of puberty)) assigns very different functions to the sexes, their sexual development now parts company. The male sexual development is more consistent and easier to understand, while in the woman a sort of regression seems to appear. The normality of sexual life is guaranteed only by the exact concurrence of the two streams directed to the sexual object and sexual aim. It is like the piercing of a tunnel from opposite sides.

-- Sigmund Freud, “Three Contributions to the
Theory of Sex”

***

Is there a temple
precinct of the soul
forever in first flush
of puberty? Is that
why Athena’s priestess
would dispatch two
girl-vestals to carry
alms of snake-shaped
phalloi on their heads
-- mysteries to them,
“unnamed” -- into the
Gardens of love at
the north and south
ends of the Acropolis,
leaving them at those
altars no blood was
meant to stain? Does
that same priestess
bid me build by digging
down & singing up
the leys and dowses
of a hidden temple
deep in my, in history’s
bones? And does my
thrall of those awakening
years keep vestal fires
burning, the waters blue,
this heart forever yearning
to merge the white and blue?
Perhaps. My body’s shout of
salt exult those frothy
windswept days of my
13 and 14th years
are seared into the
inward temple of my
being -- like Poseidon’s
triton carved by
lightning on a rock
near the Parthenon ---
singeing the air I sing
with the orange blossom
scent of first-smelled
ecstasies, the sweet
draught of fresh-squeezed
orange juice become Sue’s
deep kiss one night
on a dock of a lake
near our houses
in a development that
had cleared away most
of an orange grove near
Cypress Gardens Florida.
The fullness of split
oranges envowled in
her wild tongue as
it coiled and sucked
and slurred mine.
Ding! A light went on
like a moon more brilliant
than the sun, lamping
a landscape I had never
seen before, not that way,
nor every quite so
royally again. Where
before I thought of girls
as movie truths who
saved Bonds from
abysmal worlds,
suddenly one was right
beside me, laying on the
dock that reached out
onto warm black water,
Sue’s blonde hair spreading
on the sun-aged wood
as I pressed down
into our kiss, my weight
no master for the sizzle
of her mouth’s pink
perfections sucking
at my tongue.
The satisfactions of puppy
love -- my silver ID bracelet
jangling on her wrist,
the conceit of saying “girlfriend”
loud and proud to the boys
at school -- were suddenly
perplexed by high
and lower ignitions of
an older eros, eclipsing
all I once believed of love
with a sudden frantic
girl getting down harder
to french kissing than I
thought was possible.
My hand was trembling
at the border where her
t-shirt and jeans ended,
aching to reach up
under and grip her soft
fresh breasts; my entire
insides were shaky
with terror and desire,
my trembling fingertips
like a populace in swoon
of mysteries behind
bronze doors now slowly
opening, the one door
inscribed Thou Shalt Not!
and the other Do It
Dude! — a majescule,
it seems to me now,
scribed by the same
black artisan.
High and lower heaven
greeted on the beach
of a Sue’s pale belly,
revealed when
she stretched out
further beneath my
weight and began
to slowly thrust
against me in a
soft nocturnal tide:
motions I could not
yet understand, much
less dream of pressing
further -- not that night,
at lest. And so we kissed and
clenched and frenched
on that dock between
dark lake and starry night,
the roaring in my ears the
blood-pulse of the sea
which had us both so
urgent there, seeing
in each other what seemed
just over our mashed
shoulders, somewhere
between the treetops
across the lake and
the moon so naked
high above, beneath
the lake’s black mirror
of jewel-bright heavens,
a Brigadoon beneath
the waves inside one girl’s
wild and wilder kiss.
And then we broke
it off; lay there panting
for a moment as the
red god embered down;
then talked a good
while beneath that
night sky teeming with
poured diamonds,
talking of what we’d do when
we at last turned 18 for good.
That night we satisfied
the goddess, I now believe,
the one borne of water
in a petra’s teeming brain,
our ritual accomplished
in accordance with the
gospel of our species
written down a million
years ago, tasks which
tend the temple and
make its gardens grow
as we linger in our
trespass, as we vow
to go again.
What it did for Sue
I can only guess,
knowing how differently
desire plays us, man and
woman I mean, the
way I think upside
and down of hers
like Oran who sailed
from his grave beneath
the Iona abbey to
the free North land down
under, his bones soaking
in a blue infernity,
his tongue gestalting
words which broke
the abbey’s calm
when Columba had
his dead friend’s mouth
unburied. Let her speak
then, 35 years down
love’s primrose road;
maybe she has kids
of her own, grandkids too,
living and already dead;
she could be happy
to be almost 50 and
done with diving men,
a divorcee or widow maybe;
maybe drugs & booze
got her just as bad
and maybe she survived
or maybe she’s dead herself
of all she wanted to become
or simply dead. Or maybe,
just maybe, she’s just
happy, happy to be alive
for whatever pleasures
are in the day.
Whatever she is now
is some how a salt
refrain of one night’s
first kisses with me on
that long dark dock.
I don’t fool myself that we had
a destiny together, but
this morning I believe
we did set something in motion
when we invited Eros to
our kiss. For she is as
equidistant as I am
from where we entered
that deep tunnel with
a kiss, our wakened
hearts become a
cathedral -- ruined or not
-- on the heights
of own vast depths?
From the evidence I get
from my wife, the news
is still foreign for both
parties, more strange
perhaps from all the
years you can spend
with someone.
And in the end,
does any of this matter
to the whose aegis covers
us anyway, regardless
of what we think or how
we lived our lives?
Last night our last gesture
was one simple o-so-light
kiss followed by a glimpse
of water with each others’
eyes: I love you, we said
both ways, and I reached
over to turn off the bedside
lamp. The night still dreams
down from that kiss;
it also dreams that other
first one on night dock
years ago. In gardens north
and south I smell the
flowers sing a distant
gently music, a sound
which our own garden
outside the real window
is faintly echoing.
Tonight we’ll scare the
kids but good and
give them goody bags
filled with all the candy
in this souring world.
Her rites as ever
will be performed
even as these temple stones
love and desire raise
bleach and tumble to her sea.





MASTER OF REALITY

from “A Breviary of Guitars,” 1999

Fall 1971:

I.

That my 10th grade
sped so smoothly
like a well practiced
12 bar blues
meant I had
coined an identity
that sufficed,
glinting with
the plural
golds of Jesus
and Fender.
In the mornings
before class
I gathered with
my fellow
Christians to
hold hands and
pray for
our school’s
salvation from
sins we feared
so reverently.
With the bell
I fled to
the safety of
classrooms far
away where
my faith
was of a different
order. Amid
the drone of
instruction in
chemistry
and French and
world history I
drew cartoons
of wrestlers
and guitar players
and made
ligatures of songs.
My head a teeming
sea of teenaged
fancies, of muscles
and guitars and
girls, girls, girls.
I reveled in
the opportunities
unfolding
in each class:
Dawn who sat
behind me in History
copying my test
who smacked
her gum loudly
and made
extravant noises
when stretching.
Cathy Sims
in French with
her blonde hair
and freckles
and shy eager smile.
Renae and Katie
in Typing like
bookends of
my encyclopedia
of longing,
Renae moonfaced
and beautiful
the (virgin goddess)
whom I wanted
to save and
succor and
Katie the
blonde breasty
Venus who
reveled in
teasing me
to distraction.
Why either
cared for me
much was
a mystery - both
were juniors (two
years older than
me) -- perhaps
I was just a fresh
innocent safe boy
whose delight
in them was
brilliantly clear.
My eagerness
to drink in
everything they
offered required
no actual touch.
I sat there
like Ferdinand
on Miranda’s
beach drunk
on the sweet
sounds swirling
from their
eyes & smiles
& hair & perfume
& voices & laughter
& tanned arms &
legs & undulating
walk & the
Venusian peaks
rising from
my startled Earth.


II.
.
At home I
finished homework,
practiced my guitar,
lifted weights,
listened to songs
on WORJ and sketched
psalms of baseball
and hippie love.
I was by
then skilled
at self-amusement,
yet my room
was no longer
a locked cell.
On my wall a
livid cerulean
poster of Peace
with the peace
symbol cut out
(Satan’s claw,
my mother proclaimed).
Without a black
light it didn’t
much matter,
but the hole
in that poster
was a door
leading out
of my room.

After dinner
I’d head out
for an hour
or two of
fellowship
with Christian
brothers.
Dusk a rich
saturate of
late gold light
& the air in
October still
citrus sweet with
humid urges.
I’d light a
first cigarette
as I rounded
the corner
and inhale deep:
and out the
hole my poster
I would seep,
no longer
in Christian day
heading now
into rock and roll
night. Each step
away making
me feel lean
and hungry,
wide-eyed at
all that was
too perilous
to embrace
hence impossible
to resist.
Kids on minibikes
and knocking
those clacker
balls on a string.
Ululations of
swamp music
rising far ahead.

III.

In Sue’s room
she and I listened
to 3 Dog Night
while Sue told
me all about
the terrible tack
her life had
takened after
moving to
Winter Haven
from Sparta
in New Jersey.
Cruel teachers
& her parents
telling her
she could
do whatever
she wanted now
because they
didn’t care.
As proof
she would change
in front of me.
Silk green panties
with a flaming
heart on the front.
Once I play
wrestled her
on the bed while
she was half
dressed and
ran my finger
up the hairy
thatch on
the front
of her panties.
Sus stilled
and looked at me
with frank
invitation. But
I just giggled
and pulled
back, my
heart hammering
so loud I
swore she could
hear it too.
We usually
ended up
out by the lake
smoking Marlboros
watching the
moon and
stars glitter
cold blue on
black water.
She’d tell me
about all the
boys who’d
had their way
with her and
how she
couldn’t wait
to turn 18 and
get the hell
out of here.
I sat and
just listened, enthralled
with how the
world had entered
her so many times.
There’s a music
in a bad girl’s
tale that I’m
an absolute
sucker for.
All I wanted
was just to
hear it
rock and roll
the precarious
motions
of the night.

IV.

Where I thought
it was safe I
wreaked my
totem-guitar
havoc. The
Parties with
my old pals
from Ridge
Independent
where Everybody
Dances With Everybody
became a
specie of my bedlam.
I’d weep aside
that dreck by
Cat and James
and Carol and
put my new
Black Sabbath album
“Master of
Reality” on the
turntable and
crank the hard
stuff. The dancing
now darker and
pulpy with desire
as I pushed
and pushed at
the next boundary.
Each party
I picked out
one of the girls
and worked her
for the night,
smiling and then
scrabbling my
name all over
her dance card.
Following her
to the snack table.
Stealing kisses
during the slow
dance. Watching
her eyes progress
from first glint
to widened surprise
on to languid
release. It was
always just a kiss with
darker implications:
a tip of tongue,
hugs strong enough
to forget the
boundary of clothes,
a fluttery heart
pounding harder.
By night’s end
I got what I
wanted. The Yes.
Having heard that
sweet chord in her
body, I slammed
down my guitar
and scythed myself
free. I’ll call!
And sashay
out the door
with her yes
clutched in my
hand to take home
and cast it
with the others
I had collected.
In the dark
I diddled
with what I
could not do,
dotting each
of her circles
with a jot from
my pen, standing
over her
with one
killer of a howl.




HIEROPHANY

2005

It is important to bring out this notion
of singularity conferred by an unusual
or abnormal experience. For, properly
considered, singularization as such
depends upon the very dialectic of
the sacred. Most elementary hierophanies,
that is, are nothing but a radical
ontological separation of some object
from the surrounding cosmic zone; some
tree, some stone, some place, by the mere
fact that it reveals that it is sacred, that
it has been, as it were, “chosen” as the
receptacle for a manifestation of the
sacred, is thereby ontologically separated
from all other stones, trees, places, and
occupies a different, a supernatural plane.

-- Mercea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy

Every few seasons it seems I’m back at
this, combing my history for blue-boned
sooth they way one walks a morning’s
beach searching for what shells the
sea bequeathes. What am I looking for,
what do you bid me see inside those
rounds of time You ground on down
in tides of blue eternity? The poems of
late have all focused on the upwellings
of my teenaged years -- puberty being,
it is said, the trysting ground where
white and blacker shamans grow their
wings -- the fonts are singular: A white
big white bra swinging on a high
branch of an oak tree, my father’s
loving boozy smile, the heft of a red
Fender Mustang guitar as I played that
Grand Funky music back -- Luminaries
on the darkened wake behind which
catch my eye and then begin to sing
like well-buckets of blue silver spilled
and ebbing back across my iambs’ naked feet.
It’s like a tide, this backward glance
on personal, profaner time, where deities
are merely fealties to surficial gobs
of gleam: Like that afternoon in my
fourteenth year when my friend Sue
changed in front of me in her bedroom,
sliding down her jeans revealing panties
stitched with”Burning Love” across
the crotch. The sight -- just for a second
or two -- speared me clean and true
all the way to here, 34 years down this
salty strand to here, though she quickly
turned away to yank another pair of
jeans from a dresser drawer ( was
that turn from me in which her pantied
butt stared back at me the undertow
which had the surer hold on my thrall?)
and zipped them blithely up. The end.
What had I seen, what had been revealed
which elected me right then to sing
forever of that wild tide till I had seen
and later sung it all, until the entire
panoply of the naked world was
spread fully to view? Nothing supernatural
in such eagerness for eye-candy; what
randy boy doesn’t jam an eye to the
keyhole, praying for just one glimpse?
And Lord, all I did to count that coup
for all those nights, notching my
headboard with each pubic scalp
my eyes offered up to You -- so adolescent
and in adulthood wrong, so tediously
irreprehensible; so many bottles emptied
to fill those beds just to get full-frontal
for ten minutes with Artemis -- And oh
the dogs unleashed by looking, the hells
I’ve paid to spread those pages just to
read that singular line! Astounding,
sad, predictable ... And are these poems
just gouts of long-counted cunts an
attempt to squeeze the last blue voltage
from that juice which used to amp
my balls past all limits of all sanity?
Certainly and perhaps: My intent here
is not imprurient: I offer a peek at
pubescent pantied snatch because You
knifed me so that way right then.
It took me years to write that moment
down, but once I had -- five years or
so ago -- the constellation I call
“Burning Love” whirled into my
starry pantheon, a name for fate which
is that wave’s shout which rises at
the shore and careens into a
collapsed roar delving to my feet
a precious whelk -- smoothed and
broke and almost fully faded, to
be sure. Those two or three seconds
when, getting up from her bed where
we were talking about the misery
of classes and parent(s) and the
dream of running free, Sue unbuttoned
unzipped and shimmied down her
jeans, kicked one leg free then
the other, and paused for just
one second in front of me, looking
some other way, like a Venus
off the half-shell to my shore:
an me agape and staring hard,
my heart hammering, my desire
drowning every other nautilus
inside my soul for good, drowning
every high heaven’s white-washed
wings which only fly as they
should, drowning every word I
sing here in a sea of Burning Love,
a silky blue oh-so thinnest pause between
the wildest world and You. Upon the mantel
of my verbally hot heart I put these shells
on view, each an eye a sight a song,
a nether wending way in which
the beach I dream I’ll never reach
will welcome me at last
when the last shell swoons me down.


IF NOT HERE, WHERE?

2002

If not here, where?
I gasped, my hand
half down Robbie’s jeans,
almost there, almost free—
But we were sitting
round folding tables
in my ninth grade
English class (I’m not
dreaming here folks
this is history)
discussing Homer’s
Odyssey.
What time or room
had we to proceeed?
She hissed Not Here,
to which I could only
gulp the lava and
fire back Where?
Well, she never said,
or I stopped listening,
& so in a day or two
my lust ravened
on toward other
nippled fonts.
That’s Poetry. Today
this entreaty, this wave,
tomorrow some other
vexing scree. But today,
this mount: why pair
verse with that 14
year old nurse of
my budding lust?
Sweating at some table
while voice above droned
round Circe’s isle and
below my hand inched
closer to a mons of fire.
The sense of desire
mounting possibility
against the certainty
of refusal, heights
grown slippery,
perilous, penultimate,
as if only the gasp
of yes could ever do,
and it worth the
entire predictable
tumble hair nose and
eyeballs to the
gorges of this page,
end of the poem,
another failed ingress.
But who cares! For
three seconds I was so
close, the air tense
and bright, my fingers
under the softest
fabric and brushing
fine hairs steaming
with white fire.

O evanescence,
my trellis rising
and falling from
a sound, the scent
of the sea.

Tomorrow I’ll be back.






LONGING

2002

There is a longing in us
that grows from sigh
to starry shriek. Perhaps
comets are charred
furies of that pain,
a whirl of frozen fire
which ghostlike tears
to God’s knees and back,
insatiable and unanswered.

Perhaps. All I know is
that it’s infinitely perilous
to think that longing has
a human end. In my cups
I once believed a woman
waited on the moon for me,
her longing the white
welcome of my million
nights alone. I met and
passed her many times
those bad years, so blinded
by the aura of her name
that I never saw her face.

When great longings touch
it’s as when waves collide,
the wild sea witched flat.
That deepest thirst can never
sate: as each draught of booze
cries for the next, so each
embrace tides a milkier door.

I recall a young man
walking home drunk
on a frozen night
long ago, his beloved
nowhere to be found
in the chalice
he had named.
Winds hurled steel axes
through the Western sky,
failing to clear the
cruel foliage of fate.

In his defeat
he was greater than
any angel summoned
by that night,
his heart so hollowed
by longing as to
chance in pure
cathedral, her
absence the ringing
bell which forever
shattered there,
trebling the moon
without troubling a sound.




WHEN ANGELS SIN

For God spared not the angels that
sinned, but cast them down to Hell,
and delivered them into chains of
darkness to be reserved unto Judgment.

-- 2 Peter 2:4

Lord knows it’s hard enough for
mortals not to sin, but what tempts
those big wings to fly dark nights?
You’d think their fortitude against
blue tempts to be celestial,
girdered with the dizzy sense
of how much further they must fall.
Or did they know, who had
only known the right hand of
the Father, whose every utterance
was psalmodic, the pure white
spunk of silvered starry praise?
Last night I dreamt of going
with my partner in poetry readings
to a play he was stage-managing
at a bar somewhere in this town,
a place which summed all the
ones I entered with great hope
and desire and blue thirst (every
bar I’ve drunk in, then). We talked
about his play and what problems
to expect, but I was mostly plotting
drinks, what and how much here,
where to go to next as I walked
home, how much cash I had
to drink, how many more drinks
I might cadge somehow along the way
and who I might meet and romance
along the way. The inside of this
bar proved to be the outside of
this winter’s night, the bar set
in a field facing Lake Dora, that
broad water somehow also the stage.
I ordered a beer and then a shot
of tequila and drank both down
fast, dreaming what that booze must
feel like on the tongue, and what
reciprocates in kind spreading
wilder wings as the hooch spread
out and down. I found a tree beneath
some trees facing the lake and sat
there a while, waiting for the show
to start, promising myself to watch
a bit before tearing off to drink
my way home, my mind revelling
in all the drinks ahead and what
black doors they’d open my
reverie gossamered with that second
to third drink glow we call in AA
the Golden Moment -- eternal
and sweet for ten minutes or so
which we leave as we drink down
to the bottom of the night.
I woke up on the couch at 4 a.m.
(having settled there an hour before)
utterly relieved to be both sober
and at home, far from the black
iniquities I dreamed. Recalling
now that dream I wonder what
could have knocked those legion
angels from their first estate,
what arrows from whose quiver,
what sort of gold-tipped barb of
eros -- feathered in thanatos --
could have shot so high
to pierce them through and
make ‘em such rebel divers from
the height of stars, singing down
the depths of hell. I can only
guess my dreams are theirs,
my leaks their ocean roar.
Shots of Rebel Yell delved
up by abyssal Jezebels
with circummortal cleavage
can woo the nth of heaven
into the greasy bung of Hell.
Let’s have some sympathy
for those augments the devil
deputized into honky tonks;
they are truly just the augment
of desire, that tidal ache
for shores not found on
any continent. Their wings were
molted in our hearts when
I and Thou were cleaved
in one kiss of welcome and
surrender to forever parting ways.
Who does not hallow every
heaven to the harrows of their hells?
If They truly wait in chains
and darkness for our judgment
then I light a candle here for Them,
enemy combatants in God’s war
against essential sin, Their glut
and frenzy all the bottles in my
dream I dreamt, my relish Theirs as
I lifted that mug of cold draft beer
up to my lips, surrendering all these
years of saying No to one more sip,
that one substantial draught which
drowns heaven in a wilder bliss.
Fare thee well, blue augments,
and fare me forward through that
dreadful pass You faltered in so
I can live another day of this.
May I never lose respect for
the clout of endlessness which
You are every link to. By Your
chains, this paper kiss, this
dry and paupered boozeless bliss
which wings me hell to heaven.




SHAY

2002

Shay was never good with men.
She always ran with the ones
who ran over her in the end.
Maybe it’s all Bad Dad, she groused
to a girlfriend one night over
tequila shots and chasers at the bar;
a grim succession of dirtier shades
pulled over the old man’s grave.
Lord knows they all drank like him,
proud and cocksure at their end
of the bar, little boys so pumped
on bullshit you’d think their tattoos
glowed like the neon Bud sign at the door.
She’s danced for ‘em, rode astride
their Harleys, fucked ‘em every
way and how, even placed a
white rose or two on their graves.
She lights a Marlboro and inhales deep,
staring at herself in the bar mirror.
She’s not young enough anymore
for an merely honest charade. Now there’s only
the same slow dance at closing time,
late leers poured down onto the next
morning’s chilly cringe, rants and beatings
like a metronome clocking their
last footfalls out the door.
She remembers Saturday mornings
watching cartoons while Daddy slept
off his rages on the couch. How he’d moan
and curse behind her as if stranded
far at sea. Once in a while he’d sigh and
whisper baby I’m so sorry before
your Daddy wants you. Well he
never rose much higher than that couch
before falling into his grave. All she asks
of these men who shamble into her
is that one I love you before
they commence on falling through.