I have worn you like outdated pearls.
waiting for a bygone era
somewhere in between
a rainy-day cab ride in New York City
and the Bogart good-bye
where we’ll always have Paris.

I have dressed in sequined gowns,
gloved hands to elbows,
waiting for your invitation.
I have walked miles drunk in high heels
through cracked crevices of sidewalks we once sweet-hearted,
passed dark hours in parks alone
until I got home.

No beacon light, no new messages.

I have packed my need for you
in boxes of old memories,
yearbooks, bad poetry
and various versions of my former life.

__________________________________________________________________________


I never want to wear her around my wrist like a watch
that infinitely loses time and
can't be fixed,
forced to adjust to lateness or still hours
in which time continues forward-
somewhere she is afforded continuous motion;

While I lie still
forever lamenting all the measurements lost.

jasmine blossoms behind bars

Pink Jasmine blossoms fall
pirouetting with the utmost grace –
like a rigidly trained Russian coryphée, whose toes
bleed after every performance:
the gun shot wounds of dedication and carte blanche
authority.
These Chinese blossoms whose every move
is dictated by a higher power
are slowly wrinkled,
crumpled at the edges (paper-thin rouge tissues)
and hemorrhage their life away
when touched.

It is true you cannot eat freedom.
It is equally true you cannot power machinery with democracy.

But the proletariat blossom
crushed in a hand and being violated -
it’s beauty spent and finished
like an explosive charge too small to be noticed
but too big to exist
is hidden away
where it should be, after all.
In darkness, in hopelessness, smothered
with the pillow of good socialist reason
gasping on the goose feather down
that is control.
A virginity has been preserved, god-willing
The virginity of thought.

The dancer and the flower
waltzing puppets attached to strings held by
governmental gods
in expensive pinstripe suits are dying.
It’s for the good of the world.
It’s for the good of the country.
But the gods in the pinstripe suits
still have bloody
hands.

Pink Jasmine blossoms can only pirouette
behind prison bars.

cover

i think you could have the gift
of making me feel absolutely tiny.
in oversized clothing
and my new, new hair
freshly washed
like duck feathers...
i want to shelter my face
but you already saw me
with bare, dry skin
and the remnants
of mascara smudges
as we stumbled through the summer greenery,

hungover

juxtaposition:
my ugliness
and your overwhelming beauty.
i am shy, love
and you are an exercise
in futility.

Elliptical

Elliptical

where did the day go?
I walked in an anesthetizing circle
a r o u n d,
a r o u n d,
and then was
interrupted
by the clock,
by the sidewalk,
by concerning friends,
by the flame,
blazing riotously behind me,
disbelieving as
it devoured the guideposts back
and now there is me,
with fire raging rampantly inside.
now, doused and scorched
beginning again,
walking in a numbing circle
coiling around the ashes.
nearing the end.

m word.

it's all her
and wrist-bones
and felt-tip nothings
that feel like kisses
upon your skin
and the soft
untouched carapace
beneath her neck-tie
where i stumbled in
then
took my seat
among her mystery
and watched our eyes dancing-
the waltzes of fancy
and the first flourishes of lust
brought us spinning...
our hearts spliced
but whispered a promise
a three worded us
a passing thought of healing
a humanly, sugary doubt
and a lonely-altering must

so, take me out
and make me
monogamous

con still lay shun

i am anti-aphonic inspired-
wild, wild, wild
when we are both in time...

who found Venus
under an ether,
hypnotized-
who told you to take your moments
and to rhyme and rhyme and
then to rhyme..

for now i ache to stretch out
and let the wanderlust manhandle
at my spine
but i will, cassiopeia,
i will roam out there
and pick your place,
carefully;
a little light in the sky...