Slim Chance Moon On Drunkard Prays

Sean Mitchell Finney

1
Copyright © 2019 by Sean Mitchell Finney

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PORCH (Postcards Under The Bridge)

When you had a porch you thought the cicadas knew your
name.
They sang it to you in warm night as you pissed from the
edge.
Seedlings drank merciful worm cycle fence line that would
bend at your touch.
Distant traffic across fields would watch for your crossing
to tend vagrant gardens where they buried themselves.

When you had a porch your father was alive.

"Did I do something wrong?" He asked of your palms,

Of your breath,
With prayer bead Christmas morning.

Glass never stayed broken when you had a porch.

Nothing was locked,

Nothing was owned.

Those days were ahead of you.

2018

3
I THINK OF YOU

Thinking of you with the twist of a cap,

Down to the bottle's bottom,
A twist of orange and the light in your streaks reappears,
Spanish harlems and I think of you,
Safety glass in the cobblestones of an unfamiliar street,
An unfamiliar town,
I think of you,
I think of you warmed and freckled,
Sunlit in a fog,
Alone in a crowd,
I think of you playing in the shower,
Twisted in covers groaning,
"Five more minutes and I'll get up,"
My hands remember your form,
Your warmth to the touch,
And like a body memory my fingers think of you,
Dust in the lights through a broken basement window,
Songbirds on Italian pear tree branches,
Dogs barking across from deeply forested lawns,
Repetitions of an ice cream truck,
Its merry song,
Young boy chasing desperately after,
Discarded furniture in alleys,
Workers digging holes for fence posts,
Watching for color and fluidity in a koi pond,
Listening to my breathing in bed in the dark,
Watching the lights change,
Tying my shoes and wishing I could whistle,
I think of you...I think of you...

2012

4
TUESDAYS

Dogs...fighting,
Stains in the mattress,
Cover it...torn sheets...wake up somewhere,
Embarrassing river stink wet erection...live wire
performance still child...and in the AM cleared throat of a
flooded engine,
Frayed scenes through dusted windows,
Dancing cracks in the windshield...Dogs...fighting,
"Teach me to shave and let's have a catch but I forgot where
you're buried,"
Body in shrouds,
Awkward laying it down...every kind of a blame that we
can cast in a storm...

2013

5
OUR LADY'S HORSES

When that old soul crow finally finds her river to piss in,
The current will bind her in branches,
Weaving ribbons in her hair...

Her holy dead men will guide her to a spider red gallows
where she'll rape every stone in her riverbed sweetly,
Lady of the outside,
Our lady of the gone...

Her songbird breath,

ash feathered and carved into fences of broomstick shacks
lining embankment passage to storms over horse bone
horizons...

2018

6
HICKORY STICKS

Named the fire set to claim the shack,

But daren't speak it aloud...cast ye brother to mourn on foot
and riddled stone,

“Childhood is all spider bites and scraped knees...needles

dig and puss squeezed out...but scraped knees are easier,
Momma kiss the booboo...”

Spoke hell to unblessed lepers,

Under exposed...lift crawl the wound,
Lift crawl the wound...God promised,
But she drowned...river dragged,
We dragged her back...it's woven in leaves,
it's trimming its wings right next to you...it rode out for
hours with holes in your chest,
This one way ticket don't want you back...birds in every
third room when oils cascade the walls...drying up to bark,
Coarse rigid scabs into scars...electric little bird,
Chirp and chime the nightstand...her paper volumes are a
weight of themselves...bells and red string drag the
contours,
Broke a parchment seal...double razor bent between
fingers,
Edge enough for job at hand,
At wrist,
At stake...or maybe the throat,
A real mess of things...oh saddened and ruined a pretty lace
blouse...lipstick on mirrors,
Running the bath...on the toilet out the dusty window,
Little squirrel hides nuts in a hole in her tree...no one sees
her keep her secrets there,
And you won't tell a soul...

2018

7
SUNDAYS

Running from mind to the forefront of trenches...through

the hunted...with duct taped wrists...as word comes down
that this day is poised...rescued sparrows from the mud in
your lungs that you kept for emergencies and they fit in
your hat...

Attendant to fog,
Want of silent...aunts and uncles line the door in Sunday's
affair,
In wait.
Absent cane leaning cobwebbed in a corner.
"All right,"
Eldest stands at hallway's lips,
Straightening his tie,
"Let’s go see a man about a God."
Backseat station wagon crowd,
Littlest cousin blasphemes,
Earns a smack on autumn bitten knuckles.
Lesson unlearned and shrugs,
"But aren't we all just shooting stars fallen straight out
through our mother's cunts?"
Bought himself a wedding ringed backhand upside the head
with that one,
And the cranium shook the winds,
Pulling out into oncoming church traffic.

2018

8
VULTURE SONG

She's the dangerous sort of thing that you pick up in a

diner,
Split lip,
a fake name,
a dark purple shiner,
She’s a stone in the cradle,
a flat tire on a hearse,
With the intentions of a pitchfork and a rot gut kind of
thirst,
Her hips move like vengeance,
that little dress just wants to burst,
I am a fire in her flood and it goes from love to even
worse,
The skinned knee to the bandage,
Or the moth to every flame,
She is a symptom of the illness and a cheater for the game,
She could have been the light between my shutters or the
answer when it's right but she's a vulture in my sky tonight,
She’s a rattle when it's shaking,
A right hook in the making,
She’s no rhyme for no reason,
She is weather without season,
It doesn't make any difference to keep your head hung low,
Life really must be something for what they charge for the
show,
Coulda been the sea of my calm,
The hymn to my psalm,
The lick to my bite,
the wind in my kite,
the ransom for my hostage,
the eggs to the sausage,
a shade from the bright,
or the hind to my sight,
She could have been the light between my shutters or the
answer when it's right but she's a vulture in my sky tonight.
2011

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SPINDLE MAN

Spindle man stumble ‘round rain soot corridors,

Arms waving,
Head tilted,
Hair tussled and greased...eyes manic,
Hands of a tailor,
"You can use words like 'mass grave', but do you know them? I
know them. I can tell you mass graves. I know mass graves you
can taste."

Wanders through halls and wards up to intake and back for

someone to believe him.

"You're a silly daydream of what a man could have been."

Hands cupped beneath as if trying to hear the sky.

Ghosts rattled themselves awake and crawled from out the lamps,
"We’re hungry," they said, hands on the table.
"Well. I didn't invite you."

You wouldn't want the empathy that comes with being

affected...blurred a kiss, Green nights in the engine house, Sugar
cane fields in the straits...

"Somebody breathe for me, The walls that I lost,"

An aging murder ending, dead weight in the ether...varicose in her
panties, Christ, that boy was born on borrowed time...your
grandfather's the God to your father's golden Christ of
himself...and you stink of somebody's suicide...
given a traveller outstretched delicate form...shaken bare beneath
branches...oh but I Indian gave myself...I Indian gave myself a
wisp in a locket, torn broken brackets from thorn linens in a peach
fur cedar chest...rose a fainting vector, peripheral,
Tongued the pits,
Or petals,
And whispered in fading lisps for the absent...

(April 15th, sanctuary is burning, unraveling shell speaking back to

the old world, another un-ringing bell singing back to an old
God…)

2018

10
JEALOUSY'S HAND

Somebody's stranger scribbled eternity like it meant

something,
Throwing stones in your head...mind the gap in this root
bridge,
Held jealousy's hand in lime room window frame over
supper dishes in the wood silk,
Cast salmon splinter bones down machine teeth trickled
downstream...cobbler nails in the marmalade,

Jars lined in strobe flash of elevators descending,

Hatpins in rising yeast sealed round to rope knotted greasy
hand and bare feet dragging through dust and flour
thresholds,
Rubbish bin simmering yesterday's potato barrel fire,
Gnaw marks on soft enamel of pulled molars in table wine,
Grimacing dawn's ghosts in faces framed down hallway
doors left inviting horned musk,
Blurred gowns and flower plume church features faded,
Misshapen accolades to bit lip questioned occurrences,
Bent utensils in misaligned drawers,
Bisected insects of gelatin molds,
Static gray moods of spider webbed medicine cabinet
mirrors,

"This is not my red maple barn wood forfeiture...this is not

my brownstone accommodated secret in the misread
lantern lit riverbed at dawn…"

2019

11
EVERYTHING IS WEATHER

"A divorce. Really."

"I'm sorry."
"It sounds so grown up."
"I'm so sorry."
"There's nothing to be sorry for. It's good. We saw it
coming. Better as something else. I love you."
"I love you, too. Thank you.”

But it's funny,

Things lost,
Staring at
Yourself in
The sky,
Thinking, "I
Am a good
Man.”

(Bed sheets and oil cans cross stitched in requiem

decorum...rust scraped from light fixtures fill cracks in tile
where little bare feet leave faith of habitation…)

"Looks like we're going to have some weather."

"Isn't it always weather?"
"Yes. It's always weather. Everything is weather."

(Her bare feet imprinting spider web dewdrops descending

foothills to woods...fingers digging claws into dirt breath
upwards exhaling a solitary spring…)

"One more,"
she said,
and they fell into it.
One more kiss and she didn't know it was a song.

2018

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THROUGH MYTH PASSED

"I thought you were going to help me,"

need...the only resemblance anymore,
and the boy far gone...

"What does that look like?"

The Doctor reflex...mother waiting examples of
mouth...drilled to dust...one...then another...third day...and
cycle states lasting longer in the patient that paints the
response,
"what does help look like to you?"

Eyes like hissing through myth passed...mothers want of

lies,
"it doesn't look like visiting me every night in the hospital
you put me in,"
dormant in her world to speak...trees for brother...his orders
drawn down...coordinate hands of engines...gaps between
stone and soil,
"and staying with me there until I didn't die,"

toward end of calling chimney...another response...accept

this shouting...sell it for parts...

2018

13
PAST OF ITS PROMISE

The strength to lift a hand to close the wounds in a hallway,

Things after getting out of bed for the green crayon and
write a letter to where magpies have nested using bits of
wonder...and about your dog,
Remember more after the third night in your bed,
Tongued with ferns in overgrown insect nibbles to
comprehend,
They say it’s a warm cheek,
Isn’t it where a soul is supposed to be put back to those
dead summer nights against the other way around…
Or to forget with a peppermint in your mouth you
remember used to hold cliché anymore when it was the first
time you lost something,
And gravel in the driveway smell of gasoline on wet
asphalt,
Her favorite color,
And Easter Sunday,
Another memory window events taking the rubber sheets
off and never came back,
Or how it startled ocean water in your mouth and meeting
her died to curl up in her lap,
Candies and comics,
Lies to the cradle of a ball of fur and not afraid
anymore...to side crawl her eyes open and smile for the past
of its promise...

2019

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INSIDE IT DID

"Do you remember it?"

Less walls shatter...wool spinning on empty fists through
night metal hinge...ship split apart...paper creaking
mast...wheels...feathers fail,
"do you remember hurting me?"

Ocean to breeze crickets passed through high

chair...flapping down the worlds,
"No. I didn't, I mean. I didn't hurt you."

"How do you know?"

Scatter and sound of objects wake every man in cut apart
keys...manipulated colors,
"how could you know that?"

"It would have rained,"

figure shifting of dreams...wanders and grooms itself.

"Somewhere it did,"
sleep in its eyes...coarse skin...fall paper hats and opaque,
"somewhere inside it did."

2018

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NO TRAINS, NO FIREFLIES
(MAKE YOUR OWN MAGIC HERE)

There are no trains or fireflies here but it has happened in

your heart before,
when the turnstile winced and passed to mourn, and the
fumbled fingers went night blind to the gates that couldn't
open to the traveling big
top circus that never shows up,
no whistles in the distance and you have to make your own
magic here,
it's why Father Christmas is still real and why the scared
horse sounds in night fields are really just fairies dancing in
mushroom circles,
you have to make your own magic here so that your heart
will dance again,
worshipping mountains and earthquakes that nudge us out
of bed to begin again where everything is real and you
believe in it again,
to be known outside your village and don't have a village,
to wander the outskirts watching over your own and don't
have your own,
wander and wake the careless and care given,
carry the light and make your own magic here...

2019

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VISITED

movie ache of motion,

hands slid month of milk and processed...buttons and clasps
buried it to the "always forgave me" rhythmic emotion of
words between her lips...light horizons through wandering
thunder in a distance,
shake illuminated form rising like secrets...

cab fare in a dim of waiting room magazine...she felt like

muscles tightened,
fluorescent recognition trying to make this look easy...this
sort of hospital...oh I didn't notice finger prints on clear
plastic,
found those down pills...something to keep tasting soil on...

from the years before a fountain pen he will write his name,
just stands and stares at a bookstore downtown
anymore...the old man in aching way,
old cuckoo waiting to be fixed...old Mexico decades
before...missing them stunk like mothballs,
pocket and letter openers to use,
who never visited...

2019

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ONE THOUSAND OF ITSELF

Rinsed bring wretched aligned fathers and fire steep incline

trusted approach,
Buddha trinket fall,
Bindle and rushed info glory,
Walking stick oh bashful fling,

For want of wander and ill dressed warmth undressed in fur

sacks waiting groomed for lean-to tarp stitch hemmed
oranges fresh in wholesale market fronts and pigeon holed
finance gems set apart in handshake bazaar.

This is somebody’s Americas.

Salt in the fields back there where they mourn themselves,
Allegorical grievance accosted birth startling tolerant trim
resolutions...

Brought tangerines to the smoke in the tent with such

affection,
Tuned blues under stars in the scent breath undressed in the
ways of naive and being so sweet,

Oil barrel gas can tin pan and tin can junkyard trash bin fire
escape papa was an oboe mama played of dim throat
rhapsodic moods,

Walking punchline to a joke never told because all kept

cutting it off just to laugh at the awkward inability,
Leave the bum in the folds of the cut scarecrow sewn and
scorned,

Bashful tinkering wavered winds and wafer thin roads,

Ambition as busy work to fill the days before end is
deemed noble or inevitable, still...

2019

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INSTRUCTION

Watching lights change in the city through bedroom

windows with snow cover outside silencing mid winter air
and it felt as if something had been strangled calm.

Reminded to breathe and every necklace clasp was

instruction to undress.

There are some things that don’t need to be said,

and these words are some of them,
but how else to be certain we are all watching the same
movie?

2019

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II

Watching the lights change through contorting windows in

goose down stains across the park at 11:45 red as a
warning,
An absolute yellow wary for the misguided green,
Trilling a spell,
Graced evenings in treacle vine,
Warmed transcripts,
Downward elevate…mired complete,
Exaggerated…hype laced whim like a pillow…

Danger and magic,

You can’t bring it back,
Not even the ending or absence…

2019

20
ABSURD TRUTH

Years after and years ago we were having drinks on a patio.

It wasn't long before she told me, "I have something to tell
you."
And nothing great ever starts that way.
"I was doing sex work most of the time we were living
together,” She said. “Mostly food play."
"What's that?"
"Men shoved food down my throat on film. Mostly
hotdogs."
Okay. She was paid to cheat on me with hotdogs and still
never had money for rent?
"I'm glad you told me,”
I said,
and she laughed.
I suppose the question was why was I glad. Maybe the
answer was because the absurd truth has to matter to
somebody.

2019

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REGAINED

Three figures regained inertia barrel and fest crept marked

and mocking fifth of something irreverent ,
Nocturnal prosper elegant wafer and ways,
To be known outside your village and not have a village,
To wander the outskirts watching over your own and not
having any own,
Wander and wake the careless and caregiver wanton youths
prosper and progress downtrodden wash,
To liver worse off and before the lost drunk wears away in
the wake…carry the light and not have any light and don’t
want it,
Awake in the wash and won’t take to a wash,
Aligned and back to basic trained origami wake,
Front lobe of ear and want of worse off,
Worse before,
Ignition prolapsed spark and discharged stain,
Blaming progress on the weakened prostate,
Leaked milk nocturnal submission,
Wonder waken eyepatch reprobate rotund immense
calculated drop takes,
Laundry needs leaned and learned behavior,
Wisened prop tasked and polished whine,
Made your own magic and wept like a predatory moan,
Winced and woke,
Wander blinded unarmed,

Wrong to worry,
to hope,
kept her out of the ditch but not because they called it out

2019

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BOY

When the boy was a little boy who was still a sweet little
boy he didn’t know he was different until he was beaten for
it.

Struck and strung and hanging from asbestos rafter is how

his scar tissue will remember it later in somebody’s bleach
clean bed.

The stink of fear and boy’s fingers entered him and rubbed
on his face,
stuck between his gritting teeth down his throat,
whole laughing tugging forced down behind and no one
kind was there to be sweet,
to be right,
and the doors didn’t even need to have locks.

2019

23
LONELY CITY

Driving through midnight

eclipsed
anatomic
under bridges
over expressways
the city is heart and veins and rhythm
the city weeps exhaust
bleeds traffic.
Blurred streetlights and pedestrians and God outside the windows.
Past numbered streets and low-income apartment buildings, past construction sites and
factories bellowing hot steam of fire and smog into invisible ozone.
Pock marked urban decay post cards.
Freckled boys in uniforms sweep beneath your heels.
Old nuns lost in hiding behind wooden doors blistered with age, varicose veins.
Gray street lamps, bus stop benches, empty and painted by bird shit and rust.
Old horse race tickets sewn into the inside elastic lining of boxer shorts worn by the
homeless and mentally handicapped on Sundays after church when the crowds get out and step
into the sun where the cars honk and swerve and stop.
Elephants wander past police brutality barricades into traffic where family station wagons
are mangled and murdered on the five and seven and eleven o’clock news.
Clowns and contortionists molest religion on Sunday mornings behind do not disturb
hotel rooms.
Windows that won’t open.
Birds that can’t fly.
Old abandoned falling apart towers and needles penetrating the dawn past gas powered
electric engines and false telegraph reports following failed assassination attempts on foreign
leaders by the governments who put them in power.
Buildings collapse under the stress of termites and firebombing and looters.
Planes fall from the sky.
Hotels implode.
Laughter is medicine.
Love is narcotic.
The rest is foreplay, pillow talk, then death.
Buildings tower like giants, stab the stratosphere, and topple down, down, down.
Young boys strip under yellow bathroom lights, their rug burned cocks hanging stiff and
yellow, leaking pre-love onto linoleum floors.
Construction workers lighting cigarettes in the middle of four-lane traffic.
Transients breaking off needles in their arms under bridges in tunnels where they hang
curtains and tighten their neck ties and make up their own television programs.

24
 Drunken nurses and sailors arm in arm on Saturday night after the poker games and horse
races and a taste of the second bottle of scotch walking through two kinds of fog trying to find a
way to drown in each other for the rest of the night.
The city drinks warm marmalade tea, munching on stale toast crusts, asks for another day
to explain itself under these vast and unfair circumstances.
Children grow to love each other, flowers grow through sidewalks, cracking the cement,
window wipers wear their underwear inside out.
The sun will rise again.
Girls read brail on goose bumped arms in the darkness of subway tunnels blind to the
light deaf to the sound of anything but hunger, sweet and catatonic embraces follow at your heels
through midnight and autumn and gas chamber sonatas in the key of D.
The city is an orphan who doesn’t understand its own language, speaks it in a slow
sardonic lisp, drawing out the letters and syllables like some kind of ethereal Down-syndrome
parrot.
The legs are removed, the stubs stitched up and bandaged.
The meat is shot down suction tubes to the basement, the hospital banquet room.
A last supper for the sinners.
Our father.
The hands close into fists, twisting clockwise at the wrist.
Old tattered men at the corners of downtown amidst the smoke and fog and the sewers
breathing out, then in, then out again wearing black tattered fedoras, moth-eaten, old world
workmanship.
And the hand that bit left a mark like a stitched together crescent moon in a sky of pale
scabbed over flesh and freckles and blond hairs, course but thin, invisible to the eye, but to touch
them is to rub a peach skin.
Bite marks like territory urine.
Taste of emotion.
Pleasure of a bite to the throat, the soles of the feet, the genitals.
Little girls cut lines in their arms, in their shoulders, crossing out their eyes.
Never be able to hold a rosary again.
We’ll never know God.
Hard wood floors.
Blankets marked with chicken pox cigarette burns, stale urine like stagnant water passed
through the digestive system of a mange hound, black iridescent photosynthesis incubators of the
brain.
Foul tempting picturesque nightmares, twilit, stagnant and incomplete.
Bearing false witness to the inclination that we are either alone or not alone, or real, or a
dream within our own minds within our bodies within machines, structured impressionistic
emotion.
Bullshit poetry.
Dreams and drugs and sex and emotion.
The word rubs on empty air, thrusting aimless.
Take a deep breath.

25
 Close your eyes.
Relax.
This is the lonely city.
She doesn’t know herself.
This is tomorrow. It happens every day.
The city spreads her legs and reaches out her hand across rivers and fields and ancient
burials in the name of logging and faith and mass-produced history.
Industry.
Cold and tired and at a loss.
A loss, a blank space, casual and endless and incomplete.
The city is a lover and a stranger, a dead horse, hollowed out sockets, teeth torn out with
the lips and jaw line, the face of a hundred dollar bill staring out through the holes where the
eyes used to be.
Moth-eaten minds, historically documented, posted on a plaque at the bottom of the
ocean and bulldozed for shopping centers grocery store saline orthopedic hemp shoe laced
orgasm neck braces.
You scream tears, bleed milk, ejaculate blood.
Pull the lamppost apart, drive across the country, get married.
The child is born through the eye socket of a grinning sunlit dawn. The parents hold life
like it is a basket of eggs.
This is love, this happens every day.
No one knows a single digit temperature.
Bologna sandwiches, mowed grass, chlorine like sun dried bleach hugging you skin tight.
After the rape, murder, orgasm, confession, assassination, voting registration, and discount super
market coupon books are sold for the price of two packs of cigarettes, or one raw cellophane
chicken.
High dive into swimming pools, concrete fish bowls, bulletin road sign attractions, time
on our hands like a brain dead task of staring through the fabric between layers of dry wall
asbestos and isolation.
Elephants of the mind.
Cross-stitched reservations on soiled playing fields, too much thought, laughing out loud.
How else do you laugh, she would ask, under Christmas tree light halo moon evenings in
hell.
Under cover of sunlight, behind age lines, wrinkles grooved like scars beneath the eyes
across cheekbones, peach fuzz acres of beige and strawberry red and pink Mexican nightmare
houses set on hills like eye sore knives like fences stabbed through the side of mother nature,
mother cloud, and so on.
Communists! Christians! Perverts!
You cross your legs, a sitting dance.
Some flowers don’t have a smell at all.
Strap on dildo lingerie.
Exhibitionism in July.
This is the lonely city.

26
 The koala bear, the toddler, the nuns and lovers and soldiers, the loneliest monk playing
dice in the straw huts.
Fire, brimstone, romance, fireworks.
Faith loses you.
There is a sense of joy that sweeps up with a breeze out of sewers and windows and falls
again, comes with the weather, comes in all seasons.
Faith loses you. There is hope.
Dim the lights, whisper prayers, blessed are we.
Blessed.

2003

27
A CHANCE LAMENT

Delays.
Routes and reroutes.
90 minutes to kill at a bus station.
Young man with violin plays experience muted notes from a song book laid between his
knees.
Baggage, purses, cowboy hats.
Language like a handshake.
A quarter buys you fifteen minutes of chained down television adjustable screen volume
control.
Lobby floor like bathroom tile.
Long hair and beards, shake your head at nothing.
Carve your initials into your neighbors arm.
Get married.
Leave, return, dream.
Weather grows bitter like love toothaches wool coats, flask in the jacket sneaking sips in
restroom stalls.
Breath mints.
Self afflicted hair cut, love won’t seem to mind.
This is the anticipation.
Waiting for an outcome, a beginning to an end.
Tomorrow.

II

And I tend to sabotage myself sometimes.

Yes.
Like right now.
There's a knock on the door.
The lights go out.
Some one off in the distance lays down on their car horn.
Close your eyes.
Somewhere. Right now. A baby just died.
You can hear your heartbeat in the bath water with your head beneath the surface.
You could crawl into my bed at night wearing whatever you wanted to.
And I probably wouldn't be there.
I'd be in your bed doing the same thing. And neither of us would ever go home again.

28
III

This is not a test.

The sirens, the flashing lights, my hands are cuffed behind my back, blood runs down the slope
of my chin.
Knife wounds.
Slit throat stains the asphalt.
I didn’t want to ever feel this alone again.
I guess,
It’s just
A little bit about luck and choices.
Empty whiskey bottles,
lament to five minutes ago
when the cards were scattered on the table, shot glasses knocked over.
I wish it could have been better for you,
but it’s not always going to be that good,
either.

IV

Scars the color of vaginal pearls, ribbons running through bleach blonde hair.
Bit my lips so hard the taste became sucking on a mouthful of quarters…and we were married in
a way that no church could ever understand. What of the money, she would ask. I would shrug
with a grin. I was a stupid bastard.

Down, down, terminal. You’ll wish you were asleep. Snort powders for the pain, pain and
cocaine razorblade cuts.
Blood and white powder, turning blonde water black, liquid smoke, smell of honey, cigarette
smoke, moisturizer.
We said we were sorry, we were just in love
With
Something.
And maybe it’s not supposed to be any easier than this,
But,
It sure as hell shouldn’t be any harder.
“Stop complaining, boy. You’re only gonna piss off fate.”

29
VI

You were there, wearing goldfish sewn together. Peeping through windows, shattered glass. Tear
out your eyes, lick them dry, dive into the glass surface.
Make a wish. Make a wish. Maybe you’re not dying the way the rest of them are dying. Maybe
you’re dying for real this time. But I loved you fifteen minutes a day, and for that you shouldn’t
have been so kind. But you wanted it that way, I suppose.
And I don’t even know who the hell I’m talking to half the time when I’m talking to myself. Is it
you? Are you there? Is it you?

VII

There is a fixation
Obsessive gyrations of the hips
a slow spanish guitar
playing
Playing
Waiting for the shacks to never fall apart
Houses flooded with rain water,
muddy
like the feeling of being alone in a room full of people.
And children
Voices in the air the water the soil
(love)
Wear the feathers.
I can't dream of anything anymore, except for violence and profusion bleeding.
There is a madness somewhere that is laughing at me for thinking it's out there in the open all
ready.
This is only a beginning.
Pain makes you want her, little boy.
Shut. Up.
I know what I'm doing.
The only thing not static.
My crystal ball is covered in mud, blood stained, fogged up. Too much moisture in this world.
Can't seem to see very clearly through this fog.
I hope we find our way...the address in the cold rain.
Give me some of your feathers.
Tear. Weeping a kiss. Warmth in those red cheeks. Impossible to know when to let go. Maybe
never. Definitely never.
Our eyes. See the world that way?
Warmth between for a second when embraced. The air felt cold outside but maybe there wasn't
any air at all.

30
Cold repeat armchair New Hampshire castle igloo epitome trans-metropolitan envelopes.
Luggage. Infomercials. Gastrointestinal butterflies.
I experienced death back there in that blank white room as a child cold blue wire rope looped
around the neck hanging there blue or white skin the memory turns a white car red a cat into a
dog.
This isn't starting over. It's starting again. Starting again. This must be.
Oh yes.
Gone fishin.

VIII

A man walked into a Doctor's office and said, "I would like to be put back into my mother's
womb please, where it is safe and warm, away from this cold dusty world."
And the Doctor said, "I'm sorry, but it is impossible to perform such a procedure."
The man asked, "Is it because such a procedure has not been devised to place a full grown man
into the womb from which he came into this cruel, cruel world?"
"No," The Doctor replied. "It is because your mother died just this morning. Didn't anybody tell
you?"

2004

31
LORD WILLING

The old man stood at the window for fifteen minutes and thirty-three seconds in the
morning.
Too old to go jogging anymore, but he could still cook the hell out of a bowl of oatmeal.
He didn’t drive his Buick. (1955)
Never wrote letters that didn’t start with Dear Sir or Madame.
A rope hung from the rafters.
His face hung in folds, down to his chin.
Clean-shaven.
Washed.
Hung a flag on the wall above his television set (Black and white).
He had his meals delivered to his front door, which he ate in front of the television set
that didn’t work.
On cold nights, the water would freeze in the pipes.
His hands couldn’t handle a wrench.
He wasn’t good at repairs anymore.
Had a picture of his mother in a frame above his mantel.
An image of his departed wife hung above the bed (Borrowed from the YMCA years
before).
Tomorrow he will take a single napkin from the roll in the kitchen. Using a fountain pen
he will write his recipe for apple pie on the napkin and let it flow out the window.
Today, he just stands, and stares, and thinks to himself.
His son was middle aged and had a job as a security guard at a bookstore downtown in
another city.
Didn’t write, or call.
Had a new address.
No one wrote letters anymore.
The old man stayed in his apartment.
Junk filled what little space there was.
He hated to give anything away.
Old grandfather clock, along with the old coo-coo clock that sat in two pieces in a
shoebox, waiting to be fixed.
Old records, and cassette tapes.
A guitar he bought from a market in Juarez, Mexico, decades ago, missing two strings,
covered in dust.
A wardrobe of white shirts and black pants that stunk like mothballs.
Pocket watches.
Money clips.
Old bottles faded and warped with age.
Hats and canes and letter openers and magnifying glasses.
Old cigar boxes filled with broken crayons for children to use, who never visited
anymore, who weren’t children anymore.

32
 He stopped smoking his cigars only a few months before his ninety-second birthday.
Around the time he stopped jogging.
When his grandchildren were younger he would wake every morning at five and jog
around the neighborhoods in his shorts and under shirt.
Even back then, he was no young man.
He lost a brother in the Second World War, and a sister during a famine in Texas.
Lost both testicles in a hospital downtown.
Prostate cancer.
Told the nurse, “I’ve had my fun with ‘em.”
The nurse laughed.
He did not.
At night he held his rosary in his hands to pray.
He used to pray every morning while jogging, and every night before bed, for the lord to
allow him enough time to take care of his ailing wife.
He was given more than enough time.
Now his wife was gone, and he didn’t know why he was still alive.
I’m willing if the lord is was all he ever reflected out loud on the matter.

2004

33
COUPLED

Valentines day alcohol as emotion.

Love on paper, baked in chocolate.
Romantic rave kids take ecstasy pills and lay together on
candlelit lofts in small apartments.
Poems scribbled into tattered notebooks with old lovers
names scratched out on the back.
After dark the parks are closed due to curfew and the
homeless have to find somewhere else to sleep.
There aren’t enough shelters for every one who qualifies.
And everywhere there’s a bridge connecting two surfaces
together isn’t safe, the news tells us, because that’s where female
joggers are raped and murdered by the homeless.
I spend nights alone lying in bed with candles lit around the
mattress, my dog lying next to me, his eyes begging for something
new to happen.
Or maybe he just wants me to rub his tummy.
He whistles, and moans and rolls around and around on the
bed until I can’t reach his belly anymore and falls to the floor,
panting
I give him a treat when he doesn’t bark at visitors as if he
actually makes the connection between silence and treats.
No one around here understands the connection between
silence and anything else.
In a city like this, you have to learn to live without earmuffs.
An open window in the city lets the sound become invasive
noise, and everything that happens outdoors seems to happen inside
as well.
Children sing outside the window, open to the warm spring
winds, and my dog begins to bark.
The children flee, and run around the backyards connecting
neighbor’s houses together, with out fences.
The woman next door, she has a man over a couple nights a
week, each time some one new, and at the dawn of every morning I
can hear, from the almost slumber of my bed through the open
window in Spring, voices from the porch whispering secretly in the
wind.
Instead of saying leave, the voices seem to say stay, without
really saying much of anything. A car starts up and drives away The
woman is alone again until the next night.

2004

34
DREAM STATE

restraints unfastened. Sedation down the hall. Search the

ward for a weapon. Kill a man, dream state. Phone call, it is
done. Assigned a room, interviews with Doctors, case
study, family photographs. Progress Report…prolonged
build up to a strangulation. Portrait, routines, new
roommate. Pull the legs off a spider, chew through the
padding on the walls. Land in the bushes, rooftop, pigeons,
television programs, broken legs, abstractions, slam head
into the bricks in the walls, blood on the mirror.
Wandering skyline blowjobs, daycare pregnancies. Keep
the baby, keep the baby. Sedation, padded walls, isolation.
Isolation. Meeting, proposal, wedding, pregnancy,
childbirth, one year, two years. Calm, focused, hidden
agendas. Reunion, warmth, ribbons in her hair, smile.
Smile. Stems, thorns, petals. Awake. Awake…not awake.
Dream state. A place between the stones. Smile. A picnic…
in the rain.

2005

35
DUMPSTER SHOES AND WALL

Dumpster wall fingers pointing shirtless face down to guard rail,

Belly grunt and growl your breath off…nothing for disagreeing lovers,
Tumble separate and rolling in asphalts emotions,
A swinging leg,
Hands on knee the wrong way,
A sense of the man as a fist…

Because it will get him into more trouble,

Neck from extension cord wrapped,
Alcoholic transient attends his father’s funeral in a rooming house,
A small hole,
His disaster,
two girls running errands for payment,
Overdose in a bathtub helps whisper into darkness and it begins…

Breath force of a driving boot beside the window…a shift of ducking sideways as old feet rolling
beneath an alternating view,
Sky and bricks fall over the fire out florescent light bulbs…

“Blood in my mouth…how do you think I’m doing?”

the situational wet laugh unseen through dumpsters pulling himself out…bony shallow shards
catching his side cursing,
Holding rope around the man through shoving,
Pop and click breaking of the bridge of a nose,
A stranger’s hiss and elbow to collarless dog with one good eye off an ear and the two gripped
together pavement before the blunt and break of the fall,
His feet,
Blood on the face of circumference to bend the leg at the back,
Pressure on his chest and a glimpsed intimacy…

“Knew a guy in the ward couldn’t stand people either.”

“People. What is this if not a people business?”
“I’m really not as bad as all that?”
“Really. Tell me then, what are you as bad as?”

Scraping tones of grinding teeth,

Pin drop stars and a silence…scent of twisting cap,
“This ain’t no peep show, scratch me up a little.”

Just detain the mother street folks carrying picket signs,

36
Himself upwards protest ascending…black wing tips securing your names by the way hard to
kill,
Sound of a gunshot from goin’ south…

Coming down watching a stranger yawn a loose board from a shipping line,
The back of a scalp shiver of it behind a strained groan and nose revolver in your mouth…check
his fucking…

Mud in the staircase…angular,

Lit his haircut in the back of the form on a mattress in the corner between them,
“What are we going to do about all this glass?”
Drained and fallen still,
Dust and sky tightened,
Delicate tremor of television muscles tightened and predatory from behind…

He hummed himself to sleep…hands on his knees…rocking sweet melon,

Incense musk,
“Tie some Johnnies, bitch.”

An ear,
What’s with you tonight,
Well slick it’s like this for cheese,
Check it for lint or little exploration,
Grooming and need,
I’m saying I don’t know…

Edge of a dumpster for the girls,

Exterior day street…dancing blonde strands,
Flower windows of a ’73 Buick,
Stabs the guy in the gut…

Bare feet dangling in third floor window mind,

Knuckles bandaged,
Spotted secluded thoughts between cans,
Visualization,
A gesture between Illuminated teeth in windows,
“Wolves at the door little brother,”
Nerve prompting paper covered singing beneath matted flesh in hissing tiny birth…

Look like a headache,

Gonna let me burn in that room every time…

So…no…fell in a dumpster,

37
Oh the gravity of the hands pulling at the lip of the man climbing out through windows behind in
sunlight,
One arm wrapped around like beating a potato sack,
Spiraling violence of searching the responding sensibilities of the flash of a blade takes the lobe
over the edge,
Silence of moments in puddles and oil stains,
Elbow used as a point crying protest awkward…

Face of a brick wall,

Bristles of beard beneath chin,
Sunlight for diminished mother on bare mattress,
Aching burn marks on a trigger finger tremble,
Thin bones of a cotton moan beneath her throat,
Mattress lifting upper spine,
“Why are you sleeping in a suit?”

Walking passed a man’s support I want what he’s having…

Shy prints and lingerie,

Soapsuds bound in half,
Knotted,
Gagged in prayer…

Do birds fuck in the air?

That’s a stupid question.
They say there are no stupid questions.
You’ve disproven that theory.
Why is it stupid? Fish fuck in the water.
Fish don’t have anywhere else to fuck.

Cheekbone thoughts of wet to a crescent wrench if you want saturated knitting gear or
whatever…

Downward glance,
Shallow breathing,
You’ve got a real wood and wire sensibility,
You know that slick…you can go anywhere,
Any room,
Bottle ink stains…no one will know…having the rest of us…well,
The rest of us just go on…need to clean your cock…or you don’t know if you need to clean your
cock…

38
Third floor window,
The door,
Rising to his feet,
Finger pointing,
Shit bird,
Blood through chicken pox pores…

Shift in the air,

Somewhere a man’s voice,
Muffled torso peering in through torn curtains,
Baseball bounces off the opposite dumpster,
Arms panicked flapping equilibrium,
Torso engine escape…brief moment of frightful packing peanuts break the fall…Christ are you
okay…it stinks in here…

Surreal cryptic scenes and metaphors in the strange impossible…safe support is scheduled to be
shut in coma dream which translates the tarp draped over a large tree,
Roped,
Other end pulled out the neck,
Unconscious…

Her lighting matches and throwing them, might be best to keep out,
Might pop up here and there…the girl might carry but he’s not the type…watching a ballgame in
her face…

You’re still wearing red eyes and warm bruises,

Thoughts of police sirens in the horizon through broken shards in frames,
City is nothing crowd,
Scratch and hiss of another stretching muscles in reading small print behind her lines,
White and red sheets pinned,
Hair slicked…

Through the building and knock,

I’ll help you leave this alley like you’re sweating greasy through the front crowds gathering…

Commands through megaphones dropping the fire escape ladder pulling tanned throat,
“Economics or things always something I reckon,”
Floor escape,
Sorry about calling…

Reaches outward,
Stretch marked thighs,
Gravel lisp over sounds of traffic window frames,

39
Eyes this plurality breath sandalwood in her focused expression like dogs barking between
clothes and cleared throat humming…

Pucker can’t catch up with exits circling passed,

Sirens louder,
Muffled in the street,
Hands grip shoulder,
Greasy palm of left hand,
Rubber ladder,
:I Didn’t now people still protest things,”
Shifting glimpse of crowds at alley’s end,
Balance swinging torso onto second…now how to act around certain people inside…

A second between them,

Lights got something right,
Front me excuses,
Dead Christmas escapes,
Get someone to front and gag of stairs upward to third windows cracked…

Light of bare bulbs in the walls,

Wore a raincoat in the shower,
“A pimp who can’t stand pimps beat their girls really tell me then,”
A startled breath beneath chair in the corner,
Eyes on your shoulder,
“We’re going out,”
Hands on a bottle,
“Fancy up your bait…”

Slipping away lips pressed together blowing smoke,

Teeth grind and the darting eyes at the boy,
Watching flames claim your ‘sorry’,
Know I’m good for it,
Nut your need,
Dumpsters and crates,
Sirens and horns behind,
“Way too charitable,”
His echo in brick walls,
Ladder hanging from escape,
“Climb to three,
See you there…”

Cracked and glowing loose teeth biting down on crate,

Rust stains bled through grains,

40
Swing and strand sideways lying on his shoulder,
Bubble of spit at his face hovering a little black snub seeing double…your shoes off and
lightening bugs…
Darling when I find your eyes for you,
Unshaven pubic hair…

All the while there are passage interactions within coma dreams down as it were into the
experimental nature of a possible sense,
Blue tarp in limb from beneath is startled and lets go of the end…

Gentle on his cheeks,

Don’t worry,
Spider webbed in shock,
I will shut your pointing a gun to the head,
This is the introduction…

Tremors,
Thumb and finger smuggled raised pores and soft skin of his windows,
Another match flung poorly knotted tie…slumber state to the throat…soft breath between her
thoughts on thumb,
Her hand like a baby bird,
Quiet voice you could touch,
Scrambled Christ what time is it,
Leaned against a wall,
Daytime,
Striking another suit,
There was a funeral…that was yesterday,
Yeah well it’s something to wear…

With a bum in the alley,

Shit girl let’s get you home…bedroom in nude building burns,
Realize one of the thoughts bleed to death when I find you,
Dead lids…

Fuck some rent money out of gutters,

Shifting feet reclined and white spotted skin of the damn rain,
Get a sandwich kid,
Turn of a can’t buy shit with a quarter man…

Applied pressure…blood down shapes of feels like giving eye socket birth for pain…needle and
thread would be appreciated,
The room,
Embroidery shit,

41
Grandmother…

From trouser pocket,

Lit and blow,
Footsteps stop in fog walking away passed hoarse cries from standing beside floor windows all
cracked…

Fingers grazing brick wall torso on wooden crates,

Wet asphalt lips blistered raw,
Dragging feet wrist flips a quarter,
Lands between shaking grin and steps…

Rosary rags twisted in her moan,

Fingers tucking loose strands behind you,
Pull your cock out,
Check it in intimate little moments of self,
Strapped the ceiling,
A fire gets out of hand that someone starts…

Pockets at a diner,
Wet handkerchiefs to right socket,
Marrow through sausage casings,
Eggs over medium and buttered toast,
Coffee,
Wanted something to know the color,
Pain you ain’t worried about…

Within sound of wood cracking beneath panic leaning its back into blurred motion shatters the
glass wall and sails downward,
Landing near flightless,
Losing balance…spinning forward focal point of guard rails and peace,
Illusion of suspension and burrowed…

Vomiting in an alley,
His hands braced on sunlight fading through bent branches reaching down thin arms,
Side panels and wires under the bridge,
Choked and beaten under breath,
Holding the belly moon knuckles scraped and wrapped…

Reclined and postured rocking chair,

Glass discolored,
Damp…red in gauze,
A study of immobile bins in alleys,

42
Thin acre of smog between glass blisters and shards having danced in window framed twigs and
fingers in red polish of a matchbook,
Thoughts of slow motion and apprehended…

Wall surfaces,
Fog rising through manholes,
Orange hands in jacket pockets between the boy’s wet shoes,
Fingers wiping oily water from the coin…

Bare torso,
Nipples hardened,
Pubic branches,
Petals,
Wet brambles,
Horizon,
Running water through rusting pipes,
Hands pressed on elevator beyond capacity,
Another lit match,
Sizzling bacon,
Inwards breathing sunlight through dust in the air,
Eye socket straightened tie in broken windows and shaking in a breeze…sunlight bathed,
Covered over the sink,
Thin yellow stream…

Interspersed through conscious use of woods,

A rope extending from beneath end is poorly tied,
They wander the city…

Wooden matches struck along textured edge with ash,

Flickering burn through throat…awakened to gritted teeth whisper through dust,
Left breast of jacket,
Delayed movements,
Hands brush lips like peppermint candies…finger positioning another match,
Static between channels,
Cleared throat,
Hands on another,
Watching it flare in her fingers,
This is only today…

2013

43
GREAT WORK

First time was the red,

a lover's thing,
the shift in the air when it just gets bad.

Stereo in a paper bag and sweat in my hand,

felt the wrong things to say and the bag swung,
impact in driveway,
circuits and wires,
plastic fragments scattering away from the scene.
Her form disappeared to the house,
my force pushed, spinning, hand on the handle locked, her
form through the little diamond shaped window in the door,
that needle point of a moment where something just clicks
and trembles.

My fist through glass in window frame.

The shards scatter inwards, her form spins, her arms spread
out and downward, crying out.
That needle moment, my eyes on her, until the curious
trickle down my fingers.
Thumb torn down to muscle, the silent alarm of blood
draining downward,
little puddles in the dusty porch wood as I stand,
little puddles in the soil as I stumble downwards,
crying out for help, help.
Dirty hand towel in soil and debris, gasping firmly into
tissue and nerves.
I know my voice crying out help, help.
Her voice crying out, I can't, I can't.

That breath of a moment where the sky is still, her hands

like a nurse in the restroom, wounds rinsed and dried, blood
wiped from arms, from hands, phone calls and decisions.
Gurney and curtain, washed, sterile, needle like a hook they
use for trout, color like gun metal blue, young hands
sewing two gouged lacerations, one in the first joint, one in
the second, each stitch separate from the others, thoughts of
wrapping bows on Christmas gifts. Many examined the
work, no one said much.

44
Forefinger grazing thick threads in the skin, fascinating
sensation, driving home, forgive me, forgive me.

The second time began with legs in my hands, brought

down, blurred visions and splinters, cubist fragments
spinning midair, the chair bursts apart.
Her eyes, so much in her eyes before I know my voice and
its echos, cursing, cursing.
Troubled skin in the mirror and a curious tickle down my
neck, hand to the scalp, hands in the mirror, my blood runs
down those trembling fingers.
Driving through snow, her hands on the wheel, steady,
breathing, my hands otherwise, pressing hand towel against
laceration in my scalp.
Emergency room, waiting, blood drying in my hands, the
fabric of my coat collar.
Breathing, breathing.
First room, wound is rinsed, sterilized, something
antibacterial is applied.
Second room is not a room but a gurney with a portable
screen for privacy. Sat beside me, hands gentle with her
purse.
Second Doctor, bearded, kind eyes, needle, with its curves
and size, looks like a hook they use for catching sharks.
Sewn shut, his hands work methodically, she later recalls
thoughts of an orchestra as she watched him work. Blue
sutures this time holding it all in, I'm later told, by those
curious to examine the area, “He did great work, there will
barely be a scar.”

2012

45
SHOULD HAVE

Live long or hard enough you

lose a decade here or there,

Find yourself contorted to

exaggeration of expression,

Laughter second guessed itself

and you have too much face to
save...

A mistake:

Man at the bus station asked,

"Is it always like this?"

You answered his question.

Should have left it to the wind.

2019

46
WHERE YOU STAND

I suppose when you don’t know where you stand,

Maybe it’s time you just make one.

You know that scene in a movie where the hero is in

between the set up of purpose which leads to a failure or
downfall,
and the moment of great epiphany when purpose is
recovered and a breakthrough victory is made?

Between all that,

when you’re just wandering,
often depicted as hitchhiking on the side of some desert or
snowy highway with nothing but a pack or a guitar on your
back.
Cut loose,
not much hope,
not much purpose,
and therefore somehow actually limitless,
free?

I wanted to pause in that moment of the film forever.

The wandering vagrant,
the no account drifter,
dismissed and free.

But read between the lines and it’s only because once you
unpause the film everything great is ahead of you again but
it’s everything that can get fucked up again, too.

Keep it paused and you have that inevitable potential ahead

of you forever and you’re stuck always NOT fucking it up
yet.

That’s the moment I wanted to stay in forever.

The moment between fucking it up and fucking it up again.

I wanted to be read between the lines only.

2019

47