Rivals

In their hard chairs, the people are somber.

I sit, improbably, in one corner

Of a room draped in black, funereal

As the water in my glass of whiskey.

I notice melting curls that the ice makes.

My hand holds your essence more completely

Than the coffin on the dais ever could,

To say nothing of those with tears held in their beards.

Women accompany your retinue,

They place their hands upon a darkened suit

Attached to some man who dared to love you,

Though you loved none, as if to soothe that pain.

I have seen into the eyes of women.

I have seen true hurt, but these, these rejoice.

I drink until ice clashes with my teeth,

I permit myself to laugh at them all.

Your true friends? Such a farcical display!

Your dregs there? They only wish to be me;

They weep always from impossible desires.

Their companions? Tonight, honest women;

They will shed their dresses, sweating on your past,

Smiling because they think your heart made you alive.

Carmen 33

A flood rises on a foreign city

And I wake. The sun glows. My love, she stirs

As if she does not remember this choice, this day,

(But how could dawn smile without her consent?)

And her eyes are blue like the sky never is.

She considers the time. Softly, she asks

If I will retrieve her shoes. I nod assent

And heavily step across a small room.

In chains, I feel the Bird at my liver;

I thirst sitting in a pool of water;

I wrestle with the mightiest boulder;

But, knowing my evils, why this torture?

Anything, any blood or pain or want,

I can endure; yet I curse my breathing

As my thumb brushes on the leather in my hands.

She hides her feet away; the ocean is boiling.

She stands; the comets fragment in the cold.

Oh, agony, to hasten her vanishing!

Moonshiner

My friend is a large man, a behemoth

Lurking in shadows of certain nightmares:

His woman mocks him sometimes, she calls him stupid.

I do not eat enough? He buys breakfast.

My mind sends itself to shambles? Like god

He makes salvation fit into a thin wafer.

He is a creator, a moonshiner;

His mason jar is like absent lovers:

You can pay for it, but it's better if you don't.

Pomegranate

There is a crow standing in the roadway.

Doom flies quickly away when it hears my coughing.

Autumn comes again with all its colors.

Trees are prisms for a moment, ‘til the weeping.

I have seen memory’s broken glass door.

It opens like new seeds from fruit, or a woman.

I recall Pirithous, long at his feast.

It is an ambitious thought, to steal the stolen.

Lady, dark as angry skies, forgive me.

I gave you no choice, now the earth is perishing.

Carmen 32

If I died today and all my thoughts were written on some straight line,

onto notebook paper that stretched like elastic or stars,

that summation would probably

be more than what you or your favorites did,

but I accept that it may not matter much.

Three Thoughts

Sometimes when I am not yet drunk enough

(and Ovid and Virgil are left on their shelves),

I intentionally get in emphatic arguments

regarding facets of life,

and I take a wrong side

purposefully,

to enjoy how people find aggravation

in finally proving themselves correct.

I have sometimes seen people

doing enough cocaine to dust the local mountains

and they speak loudly because they have important things to say,

as if their voices (thicker than straw and quick to burn)

can make their ideas into wordless towers.

I once read a lot of Bukowski

but I stopped because

I kept being tempted

to write poems like this one.

Meditations 10.29

I was thinking of the way she kisses

When the moon has died, when night is very dark,

And then about a serious question.

Yes is the answer, Marcus Aurelius,

Wisest of all men who wore the purple-

Though I would amend that simplicity,

And note that you would have become poet

And not philosopher if she had shared your bed.

Razors

There was a soft glow from another room

Lighting the hair on her calves like cobwebs

Or the fresh delicate silk of spiders,

And I think them mad, the other women,

(Modern as the make-up on their bathroom floors)

For drawing steel upon their wintry legs

As if exposure made them beautiful-

Trees without bark holding succulent fruit,

Fish cold like ghosts swimming bare of their scales.

Some times, my love does imitate those girls.

She shaves, she scrapes, her flesh is a mirror.

Upon that sheen I see the face of death,

But she sharply grins when my eyes are upon her.