2011
11.27
I received a message at 8:43 p.m. Eastern Standard Time
She says “hi”
Three minutes later she asks me what I’m doing
There is no answer on the other end,
I received a message at 9:12 p.m. Eastern Standard Time
She asks me why I’m avoiding her
She asks me if we’re still friends
There is no answer on the other end,
I received a message at 9:44 p.m. Eastern Standard Time
She asks me what’s wrong
She once again asks me why I’m avoiding her
She asks what she did wrong
There is no answer on the other end,
I received a message at 10:17 p.m. Eastern Standard Time
She calls me a fucking asshole
She says that she regrets ever fucking me
She says it ruined our friendship
There is no answer on the other end,
I was taking a nap and didn’t wake up until 11:28 Eastern Standard Time
I took a sip of coffee and scratched my balls
I lit a light flavored cigarette
I saw her messages
Even though she was acting a little psychotic I say “hi”
There was no answer on the other end.
2011
11.26
Children run amok. Boys as tiny Arthurs
charge-smashing into sand Camelots
while damsel-girls dip frantic toetips
before spraying water with prancing kicks.
Summer bathers leave bathtowels behind
as they submerge. Lapping waves leave
no trace. We trace lines like cartographers
across each other’s backs at night,
our quiet explorations, our tight lies.
Here on the beach we can be strangers
again. I can give you Coppertone kisses
to soothe your pinked ears, your burnt nose.
I said later, through a mouth full of laughter
that we should probably stop seeing each other.
2011
11.21
A woman walks past me
Her lips
mouth the song that plays to the shopping centre audience
I smile at her singing and she smiles back
I finish one of my 25p plums
And throw the stone 10 feet into the hole of the bin
As if it were a new Olympic sport
the old woman lowers her head into her shoulders and smiles
A woman with a young girl stops
the young girl screams and cries
The old woman goes to comfort her
and she screams even
louder
Then the woman and young girl leave
as she walks past me
the young girl looks
at me
and I smile
eventually she laughs.
As I walk to the travel agents
I turn around
look at a woman I don’t know and say
“There you are, I thought I lost you.”
She walks straight past me and into a shop.
In the travel agents
Jenna tries to find a
good hotel in Rome.
She resigns herself
as her large breasts rest on her desk.
I am almost sure she
is about to say
Computer says no
when I get up
and leave
2011
11.19
last day of summer sounds an ominous note
back in the sand hills someone has nailed up
the notices for the beach domestic help to clear
out of town by dusk
on the wall going into the general store
and on the little cluster of clapboard cottages
that housed the domestics all summer. the
nails and the white paper with its stark message
echoed in the silver birch and in the sunny beech
monarch butterflies floated over the sand beach
like there were no injustices in the world.
turkey vultures lined the shore like men smoking
cigars at the track. there was a storm at sea in the
night. the dead would be coming in green and still,
glinting with sunlight.
the domestics left town like a row of ants. they
walked and walked under their broad rimmed straw
hats until they became silhouettes and then nothing
at all.
2011
11.13
We did not go into anything unseeing-
in itself it is an act of knowledge – though clouded, myopic
eyes opened, we traveled, blinded at times by the horizon
stumbling through mountain passes, sinking in river crossings
Successfully traversed we momentarily found the route –
yet lost are the hosts of strange nature gods that provide sustenance
the inn-keeper’s delivering hands, the depth of desire that propels
a red stream at dawn is no way to leave
the city where our child was left, with the mourning of no one
from streets where hunger is known, where thoughts are not nourished
Your bones are pavement, your spine skyscrapers
basements, your womb
we cannot tumble down urine soaked subways stairs without purification
without cleansing in every corner dry-cleaners
libations from stars dimming through hazed night clouds
lying on piers as barges glide by and laugh
our folly was not short-lived, it existed whenever either of us left
it died when city sparrows fled from the parks to the highway underpasses
Eagles, condors, hawks, peer at strangers, waiting for opportunity –
cracked rib, separated limb, our swollen necks are the talon’s only recourse
when the land has all but sunken beneath your venom
the path a blood-let
stream of never no mores.
Do the guilty aspire to innocence ? – no
rather mere acquittal, a night of reprieve
one day further from the gallows