Her face
was the lost season
of "Firefly," and
I am forever searching for her
online.

Her voice was
Iron and Wine in my ears,
and I weep at hearing it now,
in the dark,
through comfortable buds.

Our love
was a "Simpsons" episode
with a "Family Guy" ending
in that it made no sense in the context
of everything that came before…

Our love was an iPod
we loaded together
and synched
on Friday nights, holding hands
to our favorite bands

and saying things like, "whenever I hear
Snow Patrol, I think of you."
And that was stupid, because
we were more like a Cramps tribute
toward the end, and I fell down before her

thinking of chains and ripped leather without a scrap of irony.
Don’t judge me for this.  The folks I watch and listen to
have deeper pockets than I do, and I dig for myself there. I figure
it’s like that poem about the Grecian urn — borrow
the art that does the job for you.  I’m a born consumer

and I speak from what I have consumed.
I wrote a consumer poem
because she has consumed me
and there’s nothing original to say about it.
Someone has said it better before,

and it’s all right here
on the Web,
so I hope you know what I mean
when I say that if you want to know
how it was between us,

between me and my still unravished bride
(although that isn’t strictly true, because
trust me, we watched a lot of porn),
all you have to do
is look it up.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Edited after reading it out tonight at the JJJ. 

"I’m going to sing
while drawing and dancing,

and

I’m gonna kiss anyone I like,

and I’m gonna kick anyone I don’t,

and
then I’m gonna sing and dance and draw
some more, all
at the same time."

Said the four year old,
so we folded her up
and made her small so she
never did a thing she said she would,

ever.  There’s
a good little girl,

we said.

Lifted
without warning
from the place where I had been
for such a long time
that I had learned to disbelieve,

had forgotten that the sky
could be anything more
than a backdrop for the mold
of the dark floors and dusty ceilings
where I was living,

I looked up
at the direction I was heading
and saw clouds
moving, shaping themselves
as they raced across my trajectory.

I found soon enough
that once I entered one
I’d be wrapped in gray
and cold
and wet,

but also discovered
that even inside that brief misery
there was light, and because I kept rising
I could never lose my way
completely and fall back to where I had been.

Lifted this way, head and eyes
keeping watch, heart not far behind,
my hands calm at last, I rose
(and continue to rise) toward the day
when breathing will be unimportant

except as it stops, perhaps only for a short time,
when I first see the stars. I am unwilling now
to assume that moment will be my last,
for I have learned so much that I never believed
could be true since I first was raised up;

this is the school of levitation, and I am a student
of the breaking of gravity’s hold upon anything,
even upon one who had once been
intimate with filth and the scent of the grave.
I will rise, not fall, to be one with what I see.

The dog
is something: fur
like black moss hanging,
tongue ruddy as a wrist slashed,
bark like a gunshot,
breath foul as the inside
of a bottle of pills.

And,
he talks.

Says the same thing
every time I check the bank account,
stare at the inside frost on the window,
look into the rooms that sit empty
except for the clutter of half-hearted attempts
at creating order.

Says,

I really don’t need to bite you
to prove that I’m still here,
do I?

I like plain talk.
I’m not into
fancy vocabulary, or putting
more syllables into the air
than are strictly necessary,

so when I say
I do not care about
the deaths
of famous people I do not know,
I’m being dead honest.

I don’t care about them
in the sense that there’s nothing gained for me
in thinking of their ends.
I don’t believe any death
is untimely for the dead;

I think they’re fine with how they go,
at least after the fact, and after lives lived
in the light of everyone’s incessant concern,
I suspect there’s a measure of relief
in having something to call their own:

a private second, perhaps gone at once,
that allowed them to be completely themselves.
We can’t take that from them with our false grief.
It’s thief-proof.  It’s all some of them
have ever held all to themselves.

Even when a friend dies I know I weep for me,
not for them, no matter how they chose
to go. Whether by letting the end come at will,
or by reaching for a welcome gun or friendly pill,
it’s a thing worth having: the peace

of knowing you’re at last beyond
the speculation, the insane thought
that others have that you might be the one
who helps them live forever.  It’s perfect at last, this life,
now that it will soon be forgotten

and is no longer exposed to the prying fingers
of those who’d get inside it
hoping to find themselves there.
You were barely in it, yourself.
You were glad to see it go.

Hush,

it’s early.  Not too early to
be up and about for the working world,
but early enough.  There are no traces of night left
in any corner of the yard or home.  Sunlight’s
stripped away anything that would preserve
my desire to sleep longer. 

If a dolphin in labor were to leap through the window
right now, dripping salt water, spraying her damp breath
over everything and leaving the electronics
wasted and finally quiet, I’d be not the slightest bit surprised
because there’s an ocean moving out there. 

I’d wait for her to settle and give birth,
then watch, breathless
as they breathed together for the first time.

Something stirs.
Hush…
I am trying to hear it, trying to bring it forth.

get a load of lefty:

    pencil slim old athlete
    once well regarded love-barker
                        forever calling dates to his carnival
    no sense of love in his eyes with glint
        of his shark-grin heart showing through

but the chicks used to bite back anyway

now
alone   
    at balls’ sport bar
lefty shark-pants
    all alone

        with all these young things
        with the belly button rings
        trampstamped spines calling out
                "yes lefty" (or so he translates inside)

they don’t seem to hear
        his same old rusty call
        "hey
            baby
                comeoverhere…
lemmetellyaboutthetimeIpitchedfortheMets"

shit
no one cares about the Mets here
lefty

girls laugh at the skinny man
wearing the sharp antiques

la fleur’s been the bartender here
since lefty got home from new york
ages ago

he says to a newbie

            "lefty keeps trying
                you gotta give him credit
            but he puts the cart before the horse
                and still don’t got the change-up

never did"

lefty
    goes home alone
always

to a room over the little gym he started
        ten years ago
            with scraped together dollars
his trophies stabled in
        a dusty case

old men come here
punp and pull old muscles
and talk to lefty
        they remember
and care

but every saturday night
he sleeps alone
                drunk
                dreaming quizzically

When I was in school
we looked at maps of the US

and learned that north was up
and south was down.

Driving from Delaware to Worcester
I think of this again and again

as I see the exit for Mount Holly, NJ, where I lived
the entire first year of my life;

as I pass the exit for Fort Dix
where I was born;

as I toot the traditional horn
at the sign for Freehold,
home town of the Boss,
who kept me always breathing
and frequently ecstatic
through teenage years
that weighed on me like lead;

as I go over the George Washington Bridge
and through the Bronx
where my heart sings and snaps with recognition
at the signs and lights and profane noise
of the City that first broke me open;

as I cross the line into Connecticut
where I shift in my seat and tell myself
"not so far now"
as I ready myself for the tuners racing past me
even as I hit 90 miles an hour
on the empty width of Interstate 91
north of New Haven;

as I lean (never touching the brakes) into the long curve
that takes me from there
into the even greater voids
along Interstate 84 north of Hartford
where I shake myself again as I realize
I’m doing this all faster now than I ever did before;

as I shiver through the chill of the open window of the tollbooths
while getting on and off of the Mass Turnpike;

as I turn off the key
in the driveway
and rush into the house,
leaving my luggage in the car for now
because I know she’s waiting inside.

Those maps we memorized
tried to tell me
that going home would always be
about pushing uphill,

but I know now
that the place where I’m currently sleeping
is just one part of home:
the place where I stand
and look back on my travels from a height;
a warm place where I can easily see
that every place I have ever been
is home.

Ten years ago
when my colleague Barbara didn’t understand
a personal ad in which a prospective suitor
described himself as
"a splendid wreck of a man"

I had no problem explaining it to her,

all the while denying why
I understood the phrase,
that I had taken from it a presage of

my own salt gray ribs
battered by implacable seas
inherent within and invited in
from without,

how from a distance,
it would be attractive
in black and white tourist shot
fashion,

beautiful until
one got close and saw
the mortised joints had fallen apart,
the integrity of something that had once
sailed through storms
had become a sculpture of rot,

saw how function had failed
and form had become
a random ruin, good for nothing
except as a commentary
on the cost of reckless adventure.

Barbara, it should be noted,
passed on replying, proving that a prophet
is not always without honor
on his own shore.

I love my brain
more than I do my heart.
My heart is messed up.
It lives in a cage full of slop.
It keeps moving around
while my brain
just sits there and does its work
inside the rock on my neck.

I’m not interested in hearing
about how the stuff mythology
assigns to the heart
is really done in the brain. 
I’m not talking about that.
I’m talking about pumping blood
versus switching circuits on and off
and on again.  I’m saying
I dig electricity over hydraulics.

Don’t tell me it’s crazy
to have a preference for some organs
or that I couldn’t have one without the other.
I’m not saying I’d kick my heart out of bed.

I’m saying
that given a choice
between fluid and fire,
I choose the fire. 

I sold jeans for you,
sat around and drank wine
with you,
watched TV with you,
drove your car,
slept under your roof.

Why was it so surprising, then,
when I reached out one day
and took
the one thing
I lacked?