Poems from "Hauntings of Welcome Addiction"

 

 

Hour of the Wolf

 

We used to wake up and walk around

for an hour or so at midnight.

When life was pulled by your horse

out in the sunshine drinking brandy

you had something worth saying in the middle of the night.

 

Carnal oil lamps weigh nothing, a warm vestige

of the hour of the wolf.

Now smoked glass hides the four in the morning

sunshine. You’re lost and uneasy but march hypnotic outside.

 

I don’t know how to fall asleep.

I’ve been doing it for years

and it’s still a mystery.

But the four thirty feeling is realized,

ancestral, and I cry for all the spilt seconds.

 

Digital magnets unfurl the ocean

like goose feathers across the bed.

Stars in the city are mere shapes

sold in plastic.

Sometimes we need to be disturbed.

Sometimes we want to be shaken.

Sometimes we must glimpse the shadows in the dark.

 

 

Black Eye with a White Bow
 

A candy coated outside

ambling past me

dressed all in white,

chewing her gum

and her oily black tresses

when she suddenly spits

it out at my feet

and asks me for a cigarette.

 

Grinding her teeth,

withholding her willing tongue,

she shyly scrapes at

the violet rash pickled down

both powdered arms

and sluggishly steps up to my toes.

 

The wind retreats to leafless heights

and I am left alone

to protect the neighborhood

from this retired pickpocket.

Her eyebrows twitch

as I stare:

I see the mute, blue skin

beneath her eyes as it confesses

lies of splintered sunglass rims

and makeup smeared on

in the commuter train

on the way to dinner rehearsal. Or soon

on my bathroom sink, if

I were to let her in.

 

Her skin smells of exhaled aspirin

as she leans into the lamplight and breathes:

I could really use a drink.

What treachery is this?

What ploy to invade my home

and spoil my drapes and carpeting

with her tangled messes

of soon-to-be graying hair, doubtless

leaving my home furnishings lacking

and once again juvenile?

 

This porcelain figurine, with the severed straps

of her dress held up by dirt and sweat,

is brittle, and soaking up what fortune

she still has the audacity to collect.

Can I take pity on this crippled mare,

this unicorn turned black by self-mockery;

kidnapped for her smile but always ushered out of town

after the silence turns stale and sour?

 

No, I’d just badger her

with sweets until she spoilt

enough to throw away. Now

I can see the fist marks on her face

are mine.

 

I’ve seen her once before.

Just this morning,

at the altar

when I said

I do.

 

 

In Older Days

 

I went to a park today,

a park with signs

restricting my freedom to be

beyond their invisible moral fence.

 

The nature trails all withered

and stomped into cobblestone,

with their stop signs protecting

the world

from us

instead of the other way around.

They’ve cramped the great outdoors

into a zoo, so of course

we spit in the eyes of their morals

and sneak on to the animals’

private property,

just to see what it was like

in older days

being a man.

 

Only the children

are alive enough

not to give a damn,

to climb on top of their precious stone gods

openly.

But then the parents shriek

and redden, crying

over the devastated rock,

dragging their kids away from their imagination,

never to be touched again.

 

I am the first flightless bird

in a land littered with boulders.

 

 

Permission to Leave

 

I was sitting on a broken bench

at a bus stop in the sun

smoking warm cigarettes

waiting for death to drive up.

 

I smoked all the cigarettes

and still he did not come

so I tucked away one pack

in case I was ever the last man

and began to drink

to see if I could coax out

a squirrel or a rat to tell me

what was really going on.

 

The Amber liquid burns

for twenty years

and then calm

and then nothing

not even a quality headache.

The mice are conspiring

to eat my shoelaces,

my hair,

to make me bald and red and new

like another baby, a squirm

a set of bright eyes

reflecting the poison in the crystal

jars and trinkets and fancy wrapping.

 

I can't wait for the end

of the world

so that I can smoke

again.