new york in memoriam

i’ve been watching far too many chair backs
not to feel—and don’t mistake me, love,
there is no treachery here. i am only alone
in a city with memories. ha! that’s trite.
just imagine how many thousands, how many
millions of billions of memories are
begun or rediscovered in a city such as this!
it must be overwhelming, to
whoever keeps track of these things.
that’s a comic difference between us and
them: we believe someone is keeping track.
but wait, say they’re right, say nobody is
waiting for us to disembark life’s train;
how silly would we feel to find it all pointless?
well, i think it’s a sad question, because
i’ve met the point. that, too, is trite,
which is something she never understood;
but you can’t love a song you’ve never sung.
so then, say my back was hurting and
i was watching people flirt, thinking
they’d act differently if it hurt to stand up—
and then say it suddenly reappeared to me,
that mahogany memory explaining why
they are all but memories:
this city, her dream, postures its own vapidity.
nobody faults her; dreams are ever clouds,
but this dream is all steam and no mist.
well, having this revelation, i would say:
so much in contrast, though always
you ever shine so brilliantly real, my love, while
all this city’s but silly posturing mannequins.
store fronts make an even sense if nobody is
keeping track, if he’s not waiting at our station.
but as i think he is, i wince at the emptiness,
watching the chair backs at my tables.




7/14/08 - sitting in a nyc starbucks before a meeting for W, watching people.

why equally

i can see myself can
scare myself even if
i look too deep into my deep eye wells
shadowy sweating stubbled sad soul
what a monstrous saintly angelic devil
confusing words to pass like poetry
y=e without punctuation
means only ye you like thee
and you could be the mirror
or whats underneath
do eyes focus on the glass or behind
i want to know because
it makes a nearsighted difference
true too in poetry do i
read the words or the mind beneath
speaking in such short gasps
compelled to tell as once before the
foolishness of calling this poetry
it is no more than my glassy image
full of questions and scaring
and with laconic smile
greasy parts ask why equally
of God and his mocking pharisees
and me too because
i have looked deepest into my own eyes
and know better than to trust them.




7/10/08 - trying to write the news, sitting in an odoriferous hotel room with most lights off and the laptop is propped up against a mirror because that's where the desk is, but sometimes i look up and glower at me because the one in the glass doesn't look as innocent.

fifty-three

it's not failure, i mean

we saw failure at the farm, doug was

fifty-three with bleary tears dripping for so much time lost

to whatever it was he did, i don't know

much about drugs, less about him

but he wanted to do and be

better now, he

wanted at fifty-three to be what i am at twenty-three:

i'll bet he never guessed how i ached, oh i ached at failure

not a week before. i'll bet

fred didn't know it in the interview when he said

they're the ones nobody else wants, well

i thought he was talking about me.

but no, i realized sitting this

is not failure, this

is just a long grey dawn, and

there's no telling what dawn really means.



7/3/08 - W had me visit a rehab charity last week and i realized how small everything is for me, how insignificant are my emotions: there was a 42-year-old grandfather whose kids wouldn't come see him because his life was a wreck of addiction.

italian shoes

i lied today, baby, i
wore those shoes her dad gave me
they hurt and they're from italy
and black, so black and
they shine a little,
they shine a little less now
because i was walking, baby, i
was walking in the gutter and
people were looking at my collar
they saw my buttons and my belt
saw the briefcase i carried on the bus,
and people dropped their eyes right
into those shoes, and the shine,
it kicked them all right
right in their perceptions,
kicked them all into believing
i have more money than
the check for $72.69, in my pocket,
and it won't pay for rent, baby, no
he'll come, he'll come
knocking on my cardboard door, and
those shoes will be worthless, they'll
watch him ask for my soul
in rent; i pay in excuses, because
i'm so good at lying, baby, i'm so good.
everyone in the city, they were all
so proud of me: the young american, so
white and successful and male, or
they hated me: moneyed bureaucrat with
all the race, all the luck, all the
hope i never had, even though
i have italian shoes, you know,
from someone's dad, one size
too small for me, and i am one size
too small for their muttered novels
of me. but we liars, baby, we're
used to the feeling, it's part of me,
it's the lie i told today
before i crawled into a dirty bed
and shook with guilt and tragedy.
and i know, baby, i know how
i could change this death, i could
use my luck and race, the money
we all presume i have, i could
cash in, you know: get ahead in
life, as they say. but it's not for me,
because i'm carrying these sins, baby,
carrying the sins of the City on my breast.
we're all, you know, on business
and, you know, we're tired, those are
the reasons we don't, you know, smile
at beggars, you know, we don't spare the
dollar cuz he'd buy, you know, heroin with it,
baby, he'd buy another high with your smile,
so we're careful to grimace, but
that's the sin, don't you see,
those are the sins of
the City i carry in my heart,
refusing my race and money and luck
which doesn't come free, baby,
it costs exactly one failure
and so many lies in
italian shoes.




6/24/08 - i worked in the city for P today. i guess i don't know if i could actually get a job. i figure if i tried harder i probably could; that's what g says all the time and she has a job so she's probably right. something keeps me from trying harder, i can't explain it. this is as close as i've come.

valentine's day

when we think about love and valentine’s day and everything do we ever think just of love or do we, must we, always think of someone whom we love whose love we enjoy—and do we ever think of that love without recalling the brilliant conversation we had with them and the feel of their eyes, or think of those things without also swelling up inside just in such a way that we feel a bit fuller and perhaps more complete; is it possible to separate our love from the person we love, from the experiences we have had together, from the feelings we have for them—probably not—but are any of these things really love, or is love commitment, is love security and trust and faithfulness and all the sappy things those counselors say, is it even that, or maybe is love chocolate (which might be closer to love than anything intangible, in the end) or love could be time, because heaven knows it’s easier to love each other when he doesn’t need to take pills for sex and when she doesn’t doze off in the middle of it (getting old will be wierd) or love could be the dust we’re constantly breathing, which only sparkles in the sunlight (inside the window on a warm afternoon they cluster and trickle through the air on the other side of the book in our hands when we look up from the words and think how quiet the world is right now) or is true love the serene dance of a slow flickering flame lit in a cathedral with thoughts of other altars (“be it flax or temple burn,” she said so many years ago, though true the words remain) or is love the music pulled from an old piano in a quiet room under the quiet graceful gaze of sparkling appreciation—but maybe that’s all just romance and sap and so much vapid hyperbole and love is making dinner in a bad mood with the kids making a mess in the living room, and still kissing in the doorway and asking how did your day go and letting a little bit of the bad mood drift away because, well isn’t that what love might be after all, after byron and shelley and keats and browning and shakespeare, they were probably just sappy and high on something, because love is probably much, much grittier than what they said; and is this a test of love’s grit, this distance, this grueling exhaustion of never seeing each other, tantalizingly abstract voices in tinny phones that can’t hold hands or capture an eye’s sparkle, is this the abused truth behind all those clichés about enduring love perhaps, well perhaps, and anyway it’s how we love each other for this day, it’s the tiredness of waking up every morning alone—but not for too long, and that’s the cleverness of it: endure a little longer, love, and all that is love, beautiful and ugly, we can find together—which is to say, from quite a distance, will you be my valentine?




2/14/08