Cup o' Poe

2009-10-08T17:18:00.000-07:00

2009-10-08T17:13:00.001-07:00

'Something about her'

2008-09-15T07:57:00.000-07:00

‘Something about her’

Something about her

legs
slung over the same armrest,

palms
smoothing pages across her lap,

toes
curling at the good parts,

fingers
tucking bangs behind her ear,

teeth
at work on a pen cap,

eyes
noticing me notice,
up from under,
like she knew,
like she knows,
like she likes it,

something about her
smiling its way through me
without the tiniest curl of her
lips.

Skulduggery

2008-09-11T21:59:00.000-07:00

Skulduggery

The dream was sepia,
everything covered with the clumpy runoff
of wax;
everything was a mahogany groan -
time-rutted floorboards, deep, ancient gouges
in the coffered walls,
soot and smoke scars
running up the insides of cold, dead sconces,
and the shadows they cast
were the excrement of cuttlefish.

Professor Calabash Pipe
stood, violin, magnifying glass, and chemistry
equipment in his eye
like the quintessential gleam
of Victorian romanticism.
"She makes me keep them down here, the Missus does."
And then he laughed. My God,
his laugh - like snapping ice
on a lake of frozen brandy.

‘Relationship replacement’

2008-02-15T11:14:00.000-08:00

‘Relationship replacement’

Relationship replacement
new,
to fill the void
of what I
was once,
once had,
had good –
like an old “talkie.”
Every time a new scene
begins,
you can hear the needle
drop
on Vitaphone.
Meanwhile,
somewhere in my imagination’s
memory,
the violins of 1000 out-of-work
musicians
weep in E flat.

Blue Velvet Night

2008-02-15T11:13:00.001-08:00

Blue Velvet Night

Not in the mood to be,
the discomfort of a bad diet for years
and a worst case unending sense of dread;
adrenal glands like a leaky faucet,
no medicine to cure what’s wrong,
no savior from without,
no worse enemy within.
Don’t know what I would have done
as a soldier, a priest, a firefighter, a paramedic –
defibrillation, inferno, last rites, war –
times generally deemed inconvenient for defecation.
I broke my nervous system
a decade ago, a stupid youth,
a dumber agenda.
I always feel like I’m about to die,
or speak in public,
stress too great not to surface in one of nine ways
(more often, two), at any time – twitch – and still,
and still, and always, a sense of impending doom,
the Santa Claus promise to a six-year old
of some unknowable horror when next I’m conscious;
foreboding as a war ship with four smoking galleys,
docking with a Cyclops, severed at the neck,
impaled through his eye
on the masthead, dead mermaid
hanging from his mouth.

Three Hours Between the 34th and 35th

2008-02-15T11:11:00.000-08:00

Three Hours Between the 34th and 35th

A face like moths’ wings, beautiful to somebody, I’m sure,
hands a frantic mess of repetition, pushing buttons deeper
than they were willing, by far screaming more loudly
into the intercom than I was into the dry well of hope
at the bottom of what passes for my soul – me,
I’m an inside screamer. And she was old, seasoned,
but only because the situation had momentarily made her so,
a Communion wafer deeper, young, naïve,
in that “first day in hell” kind of, “Okay, I’ve ‘Abandoned
All Hope,’ but will you hold my hand while we walk
through the gate?” Of course, she didn’t say that,
and I didn’t think it at the time, only how I would be late
to sit in traffic, I wonder what the monthly electric
on a heap like this costs, and if someone liked to kill people,
this is a pretty good place to do it, but I really
didn’t say that last part – she looked like the suggestible type.
Her weapon of choice: a lethal crush of expectation
that I would pop the buttons on my shirt, reveal the consonant
on my chest, take her in one arm, and, with my other,
punch our way into the shaft above, soaring past the floors
our destinations should have been, higher, through the roofline
we knew eventually would come, into the life of nothingness
and blue that the sky loves both so well, and somewhere
beyond that… I crashed back into sobriety and that
“still here” feeling that is the hang-over after a daydream.
I looked at her, a smile fluttered across my face,
to the elated horror of my sensibilities, caught without a net.
She looked at me, wings oscillating like slow inebriation,
releasing more pheromones into the air than I was comfortable
breathing.

Ring fingers crossed

2008-02-14T21:31:00.000-08:00

Ring fingers crossed

Ring fingers crossed,
crass, obvious looks exchanged under
a veil
of crossed stars.
They make a wish for every twinkle,
while beneath and all around,
the cool, soft linen turns icy hot,
breathes in the moment,
and tells its story over breakfast in bed the next morning.
Toast.
Eggs.
Tryst.
Smiles over coffee cups.
And the birds of morning that
pepper and chirp in
the sag tree across the lawn.

Bar room

2008-02-14T21:27:00.000-08:00

Bar room

Bar room
covered in offensive pheromones,
loser stink,
perspiration.
A showcase of Zodiac posers,
shameless, driven
brazen with desperation.
The one place
they can fault another
for their behavior –
Jim Beam –
the perfect fall guy.
Females flee in huddled,
link-armed masses
to the living thing dance floor,
moving in a current of rhythm,
on a sea of erotica,as the Nehru sharks swim circles around.