Poems of early January

I.

Dresses
Earrings
and absent hopes.
Another year perished,
another revolution averted or co-opted.

The acid lips of hairspray,
the cloying kiss of rum,
the taste of another wasted year.
-more poems destroyed
-more packages of pens
-more notebooks clothed in black leather
while we wait for oblivion
at the open bar.

People spend money they do not have
on vacations they do not desire.
Girls already beautiful prance like peahens
who have just discovered their
tails.

The general savagery of anisogamy,
the way valuable and lovely women
sell themselves for smiles.
They, who could have been queens,
standing with shadowed eyes and
heels estrappado.
Oh, such women make it
so very easy to not
fall in love.

II.

The palms are saddened by the world
and this carbonated air poisons us.

Cavitations in the ocean are going
to fuck with God’s titration curves.
A vicious spiral, but one of
finite cost:
we know history,
human nature,
and when persons are threatened
they turn murderous.
And while the birds are
burned alive
(planes too fast to flee)
they will not even have time
to wonder
why.

III.

We are pillaging the land
but this is nothing new.
The novelty is our perfection:
we have never been so good
at theft,
even when our fascination
was held by dark continents
and our own dark deeds.

and now our very beach towels
are the products of empire –
the poor of the world do not
even know how to dream
of what we have.

Soon it will be gone
all the lithium we can find
molybdenum.
titanium.
these are things we cannot replace
and we will want them
back.

but no solution will be found

We can travel everywhere.
We cannot change much.
A meal, a pair of shoes.
We’ve all got parasites,
worms twirling through our feet,
beliefs in god.
Oh well,
what can be done?
It seems impossible to know.
We underline our hopes and dreams
we give them permanence
it is unsure if this is a safe plan.

IV.

But everywhere there are strangers

Men with immaculate hair at four a.m.
although they’d just been sleeping.
Girls with micro-dresses,
like caricatures of nurses on Halloween,
blinding white but happily without the hat.

Even the sand betrays us,
with frigid spines fighting
our better natures,
the icy bite of Atlantic air
like a splinter from discarded hearts.

Icarus’s wings would not melt here,
no ambition could be considered.
Here he would have
boundaries
guilt
the bare heat of life denied him.

Madness is driven in absurd ways
on the wheels of a fictional chariot.
The faint greek rose of the sun
was painting itself on the tide.
The cruise ships like grand mountains
were bravely glossing over
the unmitigated death
of the previous days.
Then like snapping your fingers
they dropped over the horizon
and the salt was heavy in the air
so that no one could forget.

But soon they went back to sleep,
and I poured a bigger glass of rum
and walked down into the surf alone
and Aphrodite was smiling
and softly saying to me
“Yes, this is the way that I was born.”