Condemned

What was it that I intended to say?

Some vague vision from the past, vacant stairs,

The stare of a sunrise, these all compete

With her handprint burning upon my cheek.

The heat on my face recalls my father,

He is not the monster I remember.

Bukowski no. 2

Before she slams the door, she yells out at me,

“Be a man!”

In anger, I briefly consider toppling my bookshelves over,

But do not force Gogol and Goncharov to fall into Borges and Cervantes.

I want to ask about the men who drink their families into bankruptcy,

The men who beat jealous bruises into their lovers,

The men enthralled in evil who assault children,

The men who remember nothing of war except the color of France’s soil.

I sit silently on my bed.

I wonder which she wishes me to be.

Carmen 43

“With the right wind,” he said, “you can catch the scent
of the flowers from up to seven miles away.”
The jasmine sprawled white on the eastern wall
of the last small house he owned before her eighth birthday,
before he began to move away from the sea.

Bukowski no. 1

Between savagery

and honesty

falls the shadow.

I won’t break his jaw just because

you left me for the smiles he gave you

and now you talk to him,

but I’ll have six more vodkas and feel young again.

When you finally die it will be from my carving, curling knives,

or maybe it is my flesh beneath the steel.

I can no longer tell.

Devotion

I struggle to reconcile a series of phenomena:

unsettlement a sibling's betrothal or divorce can bring,

four books by Spanish and Latin masters that lay upon the table,

red hardwood leaves bowing to the seasons as I grow older.

Much has been forgotten by swamps

and trees that perish like my lover's cigarettes,

to say little of myself- but I attempt this.

A library was once burned to the ground; which is to say that

this has occurred many times. Philosphicically, irrelevantly,

if a record is not altogether lost it can be said to still exist,

even if no force can unearth or produce it.

Our lives subsume light or fire and piety is the mother of sin.

She is beautiful but I cannot betray the opera,

viewed so often by those who no longer hear;

the story hates and rejects the air, tears fill opaline eyes.

I will not read a calender's page or tell her name.

Carmen 42

Just last night, the queen kills herself again

As Aeneas sits on his ship, sails set

For Italy and the glory of war.

Oh Elissa, heart like sand at low tide,

You who fall to sharpened sword and bright pyre,

The man you broke your solemn oaths to hold

Does not weep for flames that rise in Carthage-

Dry-eyed, he shrugs at the desperate flare.

For the son of Venus, love weighs less than duty.

Carmen 41

if god is a river,

the devil is the riverbed