high-powered couple

put on that black dress, baby
we'll run this village dry with alcohol
tears of rodeo laughter. chemical work
makes tired smiles, but you swing now, you
swing when you walk--not i. these papers
only speak the death of families, souls,
children, love, honor: papers make no smiles
nor swing, only a strange empty sleep.
ah, but why tell the tender? we'll drink
the finest ones last,
brag above ourselves and link
gilded arms with real gold. absorb every
slipping frenzy, grin wickedly
at last second's unremembered joke
grasping on someone's arm. who are we? i'm
the lawyer, you're the doctor so
we own this town! we arrived here! banish
the grim visage, false respect will flush my
exhausted veins: most potent drink tonight.
but when we're in the car driving home
you can see, if you will, that anyway
i'm not that, not that, not that, not
a lawyer, not worth all that
much, like you're not a doctor
and the gild was always so sugary:
it rots the teeth you know.
and from here to fifty years from now
there might not be many left.




6/29/08 - i made a phone call today and someone called me "sir" and such and such and they probably had no idea that i'm the office sludge that puts together other people's desks even though i wear a tie.

coming home

shouts didn't really matter: he
rushed down steps to see a train
taking his luggage home, bending
inevitable metal around long corners. between
distant trains, our lipid air hangs heavy
with growing iron rust and oily rail
silence. his pocket-thrusting hands recalled
only travel-suppressed memories: his
brown wallet in the faded green satchel
sat alone on a window seat eyed by that woman
up the aisle and the mustached conductor plying his
trade. "well, shit," dusted his chest with cheap
revenge on luck; his pacing platform vigil
discovered last week's paper. he cursed
his station, pitched burnt cigarettes into the track,
blamed trains, schedules, conductors: the whole
outdated system of inconvenience. but
quietly when night limped over that bend
on down the line, he sat on dirty tiles
confessing guilt. nothing changed.
but he made the bench his bed with an inky paper blanket;
powerless yellow guilt for a welcome home.




7/26/08

radio woman

it's so easy in the movies! luxuriously

binary equations decide emotion. "i was

such a fool," he tells her between raindrops:
like the plopping drips

her anger blips into forgiveness and probability

of sex (that's how those chiseled jaws

get laid) while we, so foolishly

real, have no such luck:

she'll hurt for a week and make no love.
why should she? "your touch means nothing
anymore," she might explain,

if she speaks at all. years go by, veins push

out the wrinkling youth preserved

nowhere but on film; as she passes

through the years we'll watch the distance

grow between the starlets and the mirror.
all this! but unseen on the shadowed porch, her laugh

was always glamour's brightest gleam.

7/22/08

twilight, bad neighborhood

tense! that’s how we feel
when one of us and you
notice each other on the bus
or sidewalk, and remember people

whom we never knew but feel fear because of
them getting lynched or raped, mugged.
it’s in your dark brown eyes (

filled with graffiti and drugs

or just grief and dread?

) and my sea-gray blue, dilated sometimes
in fear of things i’ve never seen
but in your faces: two white boys watch
the black girl jump at a cop’s door knock,
but he & i didn’t understand. and

from the lazy-eyed disheveled bus grandmother

from the invulnerably slouching sidewalk teenager
from the burly do-rag bank door gangster, you're
watching me, watching me. broken gutter-glass
glints prettily for us Afternooners,

but Nighttimers bar windows and

sleep deep in bullet-slowing houses,

and you can't solve it. changing suburbs won't

get cousin Jamal off crack: even
long after the kings return to govern justly

my heart will beat quickly when

you laugh manically in the bus-bench

behind me.

7/21/08 - after going into town for P i rode the bus back, very conscious of being the only white kid around. i had pizza because i was hungry and bought it before leaving downtown; eating it on the bus, being watched by people who seemed hungry, was a searingly self-conscious experience.

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.