I’m headed out the door for NYC! Come see me tonight at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, 6:30!

I’ve been working on this for a while; was playing with it last night as the drugs took hold. Woke up this AM determined to finish it so I could have it to possibly read tonight. Finally fell into place. The new hotness reigns!

See ya…

No

Somewhere between the time
I walked with you to my car
and the time I climbed through your window
to open the door because (you said)
you’d locked your keys inside, I lost
my uncle’s hollow-ground, double-edged
Russell boot knife with the word
“Othello” engraved on the blade.

More precisely: I lost it, I suspect, sheath and all, somewhere
in the pile of laundry you’d heaped under the window,
knocking it off my belt when I scraped through the frame.
And once I realized that, even though
I was terrified that I’d be subjected to
another bad recitation of what you called
“Noir Erotique” to me while I hunted for it,
I had to come back.

You were, of course, nude when I returned.

If you’re wondering why I asked you to put a robe on
and then turned and left after
the briefest search, here’s why:
I would rather you have the knife
and not know the story
than for me to have the knife
after telling you the story
while lying in bed together
after fucking you just that one time
(even though I didn’t like you)
only because we were both lonely.

I wish I could explain this better to you.
I know you’ve got the damn knife, whatever you say.
It surely cost a hundred dollars over the counter
and that’s just a small part of the price of the loss.
My father gave it to me,
his dead brother’s blade, when I was thirteen
and told me no man in our family was ever without a knife,
and to never forget that my uncle
never turned down a fight or a woman
in his whole damn life.

I left you with the knife because
I am not my father, not my uncle.
I may not know what I am just yet,
but I am not a man who clings to things
that could smother him
just because they leave
an empty space
when they are gone.

That’s the final line from my poem “Geodes” about Sept. 11, or rather about one man’s reaction to losing a woman he loved that day.

I hate that poem, was glad I wrote it, hate it anyway. Hate that it exists. Love that it exists. Hate that I felt the need to write it. Hate that I needed to write it. Glad — glad? — that I did.

Everything is a metaphor, and nothing really hurts, or feels good, or is beautiful until it is interpreted. All the works of words and energy devoted to our perceptions exist only to damage our experience of things.

If poets put down their pens in order to live, would poetry not exist anyway?

That line I wrote is true, but are we better off if we speak the names? Or will we be better off if we let them exist and listen to a god that whispers without demanding that we shout and exalt any of the names?