On Sundays

Your fingertips move up my spine
Whispers slip through parted lips
And finally our hips align.

Supine Sundays limbs entwined
Hours mix with moving hips
Your hands take trips along my spine.

I’ll drink yours and you’ll taste mine
Our tongues eclipse
our lips align.

In wrinkled sheets we’ve built our shrine
A trace of salt upon our lips
A swell of heat ellipsing spines.

With twilight comes a sip of wine
Sunday slips
Our hips align.

Tightened grips
And waltzing hips
A shock of heat moves up my spine
And once again our lips align.

Jesus

I won’t be coming back
Until the last bomb falls
and the last bullet flies,
Until the last bruise on the face
of the last victim heals
and the last splash of acid
soaks the last child bride.

I will not return
Until the last sword is sheathed
and the last slave unshackled,
Until the last drops of vitriol
leave the lips
of the last false prophet.

When the sun turns black
and the sea foams red,
It will be with the soot and blood
you’ve created.

When my oncologist saw me smoking

Every other time she’d seen me, my feet were in the stirrups. She’d felt the plush of my midsection and she’d groped my tits in search of lumps before finally retreating down to my nether regions to crank me open and swab and biopsy and inspect the inside of me. She knew about my sexual history, my menstrual cycle, and the cantaloupe-sized tumor that her colleague had plucked out of me along with my ovary. She knew what hormones ran through my veins. But only when I saw her in public through the plume of carcinogens that had just left my lungs – only then did my face grow hot, my stomach churn, my heart double-dutch around my intestines. Only then did I feel naked.

September

They see us in multitudes, you know.

The flies that mimic our dance

and visit through the porthole that brings us September -

Eighty million times the same image,

divorced from the brutish coherence

that turns the tango into an accident

on a parquet floor.

We’re a shaky weeklong waltz tapped out on cobblestone.

Bless Again the Water

I hope you weren’t insulted
by the five dollar bill that appeared
in your suitcase while you bathed in the sink.

When you came back and asked who did it,
I couldn’t confess.

The way your skin was draped over your bones -
I wanted to iron it out.
I wanted to wash your stained glass eyes
And prune the years off of your gnarled fingers.

I wanted to restore the frescoes of your faith,
And bless again the water
that you were baptized in.

On Becoming a Heathen

You’ll pry open the cupboard
timidly, so that no one else can hear.
You’ll find a thought once untouched
and then another
ad infinitum.

You’ll find everything you need
to reinvent the Universe
from scratch.

You’ll want to wake the others up
for a midnight snack -
and perhaps one last supper -
but they’ll be asleep
in the garden
shrouded by the mist
of the Lotus flowers.

So you’ll take it in solitude,
hunched over the breakfast table
flicking casually through
human history,
no longer making excuses for the ink
that will collect on your finger like a mountain
snowcapped with every speck of Hell’s ashes.

La Petite Mort

You’ll never let me again, will you?
Last time
(it will not be the last)
you dangled me over the edge of Hell
of wild Hell
a Hell that bloomed
and withered
sine and cosine,
Where my words were mangled
and my pleas muffled into senseless echoes
by your searching hands
and interrupted by your lesson.

Next time it will be your Hell –
the floor of Geneva
the second circle.
Between convulsions you’ll once more tell me to
“say when”
But this time I won’t do it i will not
I will not whimper permission for you to let me go
to let me go to let me fall
to let me
die.

When the cosmos begin to erupt
and the seas begin to boil
and the storms of the apocalypse light up
behind our closed eyelids –
I’ll ignore your incantations.
I will not fall
but instead will hover above
and puppeteer you
on the floor of Geneva
“When?”
Never.

Benno’s mania

Wildly effusive!
Neal Cassady of Israel!
One million revelations per minute
and never a synapse complete!
A hundred thousand apocalypses!
One thousand distant tales!
A hundred flourishes of explosive unconscious poetry!
Ten years left of rambles and gambles and guests!
But not a single honest word.

Agent Sam

The way the gunpowder
mingles with the light pollution -
It’s like agent orange
Beneath the harvest moon

Oracle Bones

You found me on Geary Street.
Your glimmering eyes made sepia your memories
Of oracle bones
And adventures to sprawling hilltop palaces
In crimson Vietnam.

We were strangers over cigarettes.

Invoking Oscar Wilde and Pygmalion,
Both of us descended from the Emerald Isles,
Half a century between us.
What blinding and infinite lust for life
I found in you
On a San Francisco street corner.

You took metronomic pulls
On your coffee and Pall Malls.
Your tales mingled
With the blues
Seeping from a lonely speaker.

You’ll soon be lost to history,
Silenced by soil upon your grave,
A relic.
But I will remember you
In cracked leather
In stale coffee
In the breeze from the Bay
Blowing south
Your ghost in cigarette smoke.