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bathtub dinner setting
a drink, a book, a pen
and the places I’ve scratched raw
burning up and down my legs

but the heat doesn’t last
no, never lasts
long enough for me
boiling turns lukewarm in
a single nod
heat it up and
sinking for a deeper dip
the deeper, the colder still
much like you

bourbon spills from the glass lip
and like caramel blood
swirls through the bubbles and sink
rests like a raw ribbon
at the heart’s ceramic floor

all this paper
this paper gets wet
pen and drink cross paths
hair rivulets and the fingers
and droplets run down
the slope of a nose
hangs
holds
holding
waiting for nothing at all

I reach for a book and
the phone
rings

--- published in Void Magazine, March 2006

peppered sun
why this notion?
blue sky calling out loud;
my dreams are empty shoes

in taco stand shadows;
the shoe is lacing
the sun is setting, idly along
a lifeline of trailing clouds

can a cat feel the weeknight
failings, lazing along
the blues from the bottom
of the moon?

heartbroken driftwood and
crisp karma notions in the wind;
we fall and bud
with the seasons ever ripe

--- published in Poetry Salzburg Review, 2009

let’s hop trains, you say
run away to the west like children
as I stand over the deep end
on the diving board holding champagne at 9 a.m.
the sky is the water below and the shimmering
above me is flush with simple transient movement
as a single brown
lifeless
leaf
dry like a Buddhist parchment
skitters toward the edge and holds
the concrete like my toes hanging over
the diving board

born of the east and knowing
all I know of karma
I would dive into the deep head first
but
the leaf holds in the wind, so
I cannot fail my life
with so much beauty left to fight for

--- published in Ballast and Plainsongs, 2008

what harm can a night drive do?
can’t do any more harm than a wedding
all teary-eyed through downtown Schenectady
rain skimming down the windows like snake veins
clear blurry blood of a night just giving up
on every one of us, turning to the dark
recesses of a waterlogged soul

under the train trellis and into the square
a red flickering theater sign
reads “Casablanca: 9:30”
but the cars keep moving through the intersection
and with a little rush, the yellow light holds on just long enough
—just another plane leaving the tarmac

wine-numb fingers turn up Tom Waits
nothing left worth hearing, or hardly left to see
nothing on Central Ave but the occasional neon
oasis of perfunctory imbibement easing
the residential slide to death, grand cemeteries
scattered about as reminders that all roads
lead six feet under

that’s what upstate will get you, a front seat view
of the mortality machine all prettied up with
green hedgerows and elm tree shadows
off-street parking and churches every block
it’s not like other places that openly admit defeat
it has the sweet smell of lilacs
to numb the breaking hearts

but the arm of the wiper doesn’t reach the
entire windshield, and there will always be that
slice of life that no machine can touch
the layer of rain and dirt that nobody bothers
to look through, but someday someone might
they might lean down far enough in their seat, wipe their eyes
and maybe notice just how clear the world appears
after a nighttime drive in the autumn rain

--- published in 3:AM Magazine, 2008

stunned without hope
as the finch lay flapping from
a boot wound
on the corner of the street;
the small body pulsing,
fading at last

the remaining air in the last
balloon sighs like this…

and the light turns green
and we all go

--- published in Up The Staircase, 2008

this style of running is madness, across boulevards to bars
unhinged from time and reality, from the liquor
and many beers, from the thrumping trumpets of
jazz nightclubs and rotten gin joints named after long dead
poets and writers who never would have set foot in such places
for reasons they may disagree with if exclaimed by modern
hopeful usurpers of the night, written word, spoken outlaw, now plain
and childish in too aggressive a manner, and limp, and forgetful
of life and electricity, hollow footsteps in high class mausoleums
where is the cemetery? the bones of our elders? fed to dogs in a deep
sleep and dreaming of elderberry bushes across open fields, far
from sidewalks and human hands and fingers and triggers and metal
machines no animal understands or wants or cares for
this style of running is madness, the way the whistle blows
the way the truncheons fly and flies fly and screams fly choked
in the bellicose shift from dusk to dawn, the end of rotten gin joints
the birth of churchgoers and children, and maybe a bird will sing
from a low enough branch for us to hear in time, in time to finish
in time to crawl to the grated window and witness one more
gust of life giving sunlight, and then we will know it is okay to die

--- published in Rural Messengers Press (Side of Grits) as well as my upcoming chapbook, "Maybe a bird will sing."