Cardinal vine, cucumber vine,
what say you. Can you climb and root
and hold strong in storm and wind
without your tender tendrils,
which, I observe, are not quite
so tender, rather bracingly strong.
Strong yet tender enough to give
at my hand’s pull.
Wild strawberry, creeping charlie,
what say you. At my hand’s pull,
your not quite tendrils not so tender,
rather bracingly strong,
you burrow down in storm or not,
your vine’s strong hold
is all.
A quadrilateral amputee wearing shorts,
flashing his titanium arms and titanium legs,
flirts with the barista at the Baltimore airport.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
Thanks to surgeries and algorithms,
the rock climber dallies at the counter,
propelled by an exoskeleton, a dude,
a cyborg with a brilliant pick-up line.
O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world
That has such people in’t!
Like a snake sheds its skin, uncomfortable but natural,
familiar and awkward, painful yet temporary,
Here we go.
There’s something lovely in finally flinging to the wind
in turning loose, in letting fall
this broken skin and all its kisses
For all it’s let you slow down, savor, let you touch through time
discovery, becoming familiar, to dissect into separate instants
and love each one entirely on its own
to let each moment resonate in empty space.
Song is sound and time, don’t rush the tempo.
Where you’re going, I can’t follow
shouldn’t even watch
although I do,
marvel at the mess the world makes
give you a kind of privacy by focusing on the leftovers.
Clearly you’re otherwhere in the ether
separating into smaller, more basic components
able now at last to be the rain.
for Robert Gregory
melancholy border collie
never play fetch
melancholy border collie
constantly kvetch
melancholy border collie
lay down in the yard
melancholy border collie
not a dog that’s a guard
melancholy border collie
never been bred
melancholy border collie
not a thought in her head
melancholy border collie
piss around the tree
melancholy border collie
never loved me
For a while after I left
I wondered if there were a way I could
Live on airplanes and in airports
Just walking around, mostly.
No shock. No engulfment.
No incomprehensible ocean.
No wedding band. No promises.
Just night black windows
Up there above the city.
Sleep’s a long way off
But I feel on the edge
Of a terrible dream
That this plane never lands
All of us up here permanently
An idea I’m too comfortable with
If everything could be temporary
I’d be able to feel more.
When I read Michael Hartnett
the first time, I found
a poet who rhymed
the way I do,
and felt a kinship immediately.
Immediately,
with that poem, I knew
the way I rhymed
was hoarfrost, rising above ground.
That he was Irish and he
wrote from a hunger
the way I write,
was all the proof I needed.
I needed
his energy to write
our hungers
as poetry.
In truth, I’m Lisboan
but two decades of poetry
have bled into the ground
beneath my feet. A Triangle—
a park as an anchor—
An energetic groundwater
breathing amber roots.
Here, I am twenty again,
a blanket and a book,
a man-purse of pens
and paper,
sharing space with the homeless,
a bike, tipped on its side
nearby, the sound of water
rushing over steps
tumbling to daybreak.
Now I’m thirty-something (again),
Pokemon, crimson hair, a love story—
a sunset waiting to melt
summer into memory.
I’m only younger
by a few years, ice cracking
inaudibly, fingers clacking
poetry for the winter.
I’m nearly forty, now,
again, so many lines intersecting
the heart of a city
and it’s minutes til midnight.
in the triangle. Dawn and sleep
still hours away—minutes
and memory
til midnight.
the man who looks like a boy who grew up on cigarettes and whisky gets in his car and runs his hands like fingers across a map from his neck to his cheeks over his eyes and up his forehead, pushing under the baseball cap on his head, a tectonic plate and a rift now the hat on the passenger’s seat and his forehead on the steering wheel and he finally breathes out
meanwhile we are sitting in my car in the new dark, 10 pm in a lot behind a downtown law office and I am parked in two parking spaces next to your car because I do not usually do that but I thought I was dropping you off but now we’ve been here sweating with the ac turned up for thirty minutes
we have to talk loud to talk over the ac and I love you because we talk theoretical about a forty-five year-old man and his twenty-one year-old daughter and his twenty-six year-old mistress and because we laugh for way too long and because you look over at the man who looks like a boy who grew up on cigarettes that were half-burnt by the time they were handed to him and you say you hope he is doing alright and you love me because I say I think maybe we are talking so loudly he can hear us and if he can then he must be alright because our conversation is ridiculous and ridiculous is the kind of split-second cure for serious sadness in men who have quietly shattered into warring tectonic plates, and the ac says something back to us, and then we just sit there for a little while longer until the man has driven away and we have stopped sweating
How can I forgive myself
I have been the one
Who has caused so much hell
They say
To love someone
You must first love yourself
I don’t think that’s true
Cause I’ve tasted the love of another
I’ve gave them all I’ve had to offer
The sacrifices I made
Tower above
All the things
I’ve ever done
For myself
