for a poet in a city (ii)

what joy to hold another golden
plume, forevermore,
of dust that keeps the vernal gust
enamored of his chore

yet bittersweet to only meet
the rose from which it soared,
with thanks unto her absence
four-and-ninety years before

the seasons thence securely fenced
her graceful bloom away,
in sacred woods of sisterhood
that keep storm-winds at bay

and so he bows in kind to her
who winsomely eludes;
a lowly air to kiss the glow
between their solitudes

a mist and not a tempest
overlays the zephyr’s word,
in prayer that she forgive his song
its wanting to be heard

for a poet in a city (i)

alike the soils allowing seeds
to rise unto the stars,
pretend you’ll let this drifter spend
tonight between your bars

i humbly found you underground
before today was through,
where into throngs of barren songs
they tried to bury you

but sending two resplendent plumes
of golden-dusted breeze,
[these stanzas seek to say] you sparked
a certain soul to sneeze

and should these beaded couplets fall
beneath their lofty worth,
my petrichor regret would pour
asunder from the earth

but don’t coerce yourself to nurse
these saplings wrought from clay;
this boy could fall in love another
hundred times today

Easter in North Carolina

Caffeine, intimacy withdrawal, that familiar-ish dissociative state where I can’t recognize myself in the mirror of the café restroom.

Ego death, or ego overdose?

Maybe just jittery eye muscles, unable to focus under fluorescent duress.

Spent the afternoon folding emails into corny origami animals for faraway loved ones, while tiptoeing through the slender mechanics of dispersed family trauma in the book I’m reading.

I pretend not to wait for responses but my phone ain’t buying it, chuckling at me like a wily karate master:

“Flash floods no longer an imminent threat to the New Orleans area. Reply YES to confirm.”

(m)orpheus

There’s a sacredness about another living thing trusting you enough to fall asleep at your side.

Be it an old lover, a new friend, a baby niece, or your arch-nemesis incarnate in your landlady’s cat, as long as they don’t fucking snore, it should be cherished as a revolutionary act of vulnerability. A license; an invitation. A conspiracy. An incitement to eavesdrop on the unspeakable secrets of their dreams.

It is the ultimate affirmation that you are not an enemy, that you alone have been chosen for the divine rite of smuggling them back into the realm of the living.

Don’t Call Me Crazy

Said did I mind if he smoked.
Said he was headed for Glenwood Springs.
Said he didn’t know how to use a cellphone.
Said it was his first day outside of prison after seventeen years, nine days. Said he was forty years old.
Said his sister was raped and he killed the five guys that did it.
Said his daughter was turning eighteen in December. Said he was still her hero.
Said his nickname was “Crazy Peckerwood”. Said they don’t call him crazy anymore, said names and behaviours precede one another.
Said goodbye from the payphone stand across the terminal.

Chameleon

recidivist philanderer, convenient unforgetter of fraudulent schemas from highschool playbooks

awestruck prepubescent, demiurge of daydreamt universes through dusty passenger windows

barren mute, gaze deflected in transit, sheathing his uncomfortable affliction

bourgeois aggregator of secondhand intellect, little black rolodex of opinions

vengeful unwinger of dragonflies, silvertongued forger of whys and wherefores

serial altruist, infrequent imposer of narcissistic generosity upon the undesiring

nostalgic reactionary, tattooed in tribal silhouettes, acquiescer to privileged simplicities

vagrant troubadour, moonlit bard, decreasingly tragic aficionado of mind alteration

insatiable scientist, hunter of patterned quarry, unwitting patronizer of chaos

lowly stenographer of this unholy warfare between a thousand selves

One of Those

My grandma once told me speed bumps were what happens when lousy drunks fall asleep in the street and freeze up forever.

Call it that, call it a preternatural recognition between kindred sponges; either way I don’t regret waking him up.

“Alright down there?”

“Oh, yeah… Just inspecting the uh, sidewalk integrity.”

“This your place?”

“I’d ah, say it’s more theirs than it is mine.”

Dorothy Parker of his generation against the lamplit picket fence, one of those friendships.

Three endless blocks of beers and roadtrips and best man at each other’s weddings.

Rashid, I wish I’d seen you again.

Location Scouting for an Apocalypse

A furious West Portal traffic junction channels its fleeting multitudes, their trajectories uncountable to a cursory observer.

Lifeblood streams from an unbound pentagram where convergent tramlines vivisect a suburban arterial.

Another boulevard pours westward across the ensuing mayhem, downhill from an irony of baseless opulence named for a medieval ascetic.

Chaos in equilibrium.

And pause.

Thirteen endless seconds. Mass-produced corpuscles hover before an inexplicable lattice of red lights, an apparent serenity ill at ease with the industrial throb that persists.

Green. Circulation resumes.

***

Far overhead, Nemesis nods solemnly and departs, her baleful reconnaissance unknown to the mortal interchange transpiring below.

Fulgurite

obsolete shanks of stained glass
align in her kaleidoscope of reasons
to spell words once wagered on
and long since forgotten

moonshine silhouettes of lucky numbers
on a drycleaned lottery ticket,
daring to be redeemed for more than a story
but here it is:

[fools waltz upon monsoon sands unaccompanied,
to the fulminant tide let them offer their loves:
these transient whispers they leave phosphorescent
relinquish no cinder, no wake in the frost]

november subsides,
battleworn vagrants in pairs
comb lacerated shorelines,
weary of thunderous solitude

trophies of petrified lightning to share
for the ones who withstood
in charmed resilience

Civic Centrifuge

What unknowable rhythms compel the dervish? What sacred fugues imperceptible? What hellwind choruses are wrought upon those whirling talons, stoke the smouldering flare that he cradles between sawn-off glovetips, some semaphore to his celestial brethren?

What fleeting tyrannies of human sense can one impose on this son of Chaos, this otherworldly conductor of downtown crescendo? Eyes under the leprous bandanna? Nose behind the double band-aid, bifurcated tongue behind maniacal shards of a grin? Some antediluvian childhood when bedroom mirrors once framed these esoteric contortions?

And yet he spins, these questions unanswered, scuppered already upon the tempests of our own creation.