Is it failing eyes or conscience
since we seem not to see how
Rodney stands alone exposed

to torrential rain in wind
teeming masses hurry past
umbrellas clash like swords

In life, I bugged my brother relentlessly
about Escher’s impossible staircases,
his floors and doors, his figures with no faces.

It looks like a prison.
It’s not.

Panhandle my marble heart

Put my lips,
in a lonesome tomb
spread gossip of me on the shorelines of ecstasy
as I fall down the ladders
of your purgatory.

The sun is our center
bringing light and life.
Painted on the walls
of Lascaux caves,
the sun illuminates
the bulls
and the Magdalenian
artists.

in the beginning
there were no delineations markers or boundaries shaping his from
hers
quotation marks he said she said
rivers mapping theirs from ours

pluck a single card from a shuffled deck
and there’s a one-in-fifty-two chance
that you now hold the two of hearts.

all our potential futures that we think exist somewhere
in maybe or one day

Post-mortem,
After having lived a life
In and out of mental hospitals
For what could only have been simplified…
Of attacks acute sweetness or withdrawal thereof
An autopsy was performed on me,
And a honeycomb for a heart

On concrete, brick and asphalt, filth sits atop. It doesn’t sift into the ground. It runs into the sewers but first it spends days, weeks, months lingering in puddles that don’t evaporate. Too much building shade and east coast oceanside atmospheric overcast

The brisk steps of heeled boots beat rhythmically against the hum of engines and horns. Skyscrapers tower overhead, leaving little room for light other than the billboard screens of advertisements and PSAs. Her gaze remains fixed forward as she moves within with the mass of people who surround her. The street ends at Central Park. She turns right along the waist-high stone wall that borders the valley below. Glancing over, she sees winter finches flit about cement walkways and barren trees.

My former mother-in-law complained of insomnia. Incessantly. She had a small army of pill bottles lined up on the kitchen counter: Tylenol PM. Tramadol. Valium. Klonopin. Sleep aids. Little helpers.

“There are no words…” with tragedy
Or times absurd or ends unknown
Is tragic in its own accord
For words may be all that we own

As another moonlight saunters
on inlets,
let’s agree Saturn can set:
the moons will use its rings as a table,
and as euphoric as their blurry mind
can be like
MDMA intoxication.

“We’ve been thinking,” the angels say
 (they work for Krishna now—God knows
he’s got too much to do, what with all
that attention the rich demand these days)
“and we’re going to send you back as a cat.”

I listen to
swells
and
falls of the lark
in Williams’ grand tribute to
Albion

The blanket tucks my head away from the world.
My eyelids shut.
My knees fold into my stomach, and then
the plane you boarded to Orlando
crashes in Georgia before you can make your way to me.

The random caws of crows
I hear as I unload the dishwasher.
I look out to see three birds gathered
round the war memorial
and the flag.

When I wake up in the morning, the snow has stopped falling, but outside my window I see a big mound of the stuff in the driveway. I rub my eyes and sigh, realizing that the mound of snow is actually a car and that I’m going to have to dig it out fast if I don’t want to be late to work. I throw on my khakis and dark green shirt, Harold’s Grocery sewn on the left breast pocket in yellow, loopy script, and then stare back at the car just for an instant to contemplate the freezing temperature of creamed corn.

for those that are tempted to drink from the fountain of hate
beware of that bittersweet nectar
even as it feels like honey running down your chin
you will realize its acidic burning nature
as it bores a trail into your soul

It sounded like a creaky door. Or a lazily deflating balloon. Or a territorial humpback moaning out its claim to the waters of the North Pacific.
What it didn’t sound like was lungs. At least not healthy, normal lungs.
Mai Fitzgerald closed her eyes and adjusted her grip on the stethoscope. It was all there—the prolonged expiratory phase, the diffuse high-pitched wheezing, the hoarse… junkiness classic for chronic bronchitis. She imagined the patient’s breath, hot and frantic, scrambling to make it through her tight, scarred airways.

There are empty spaces in my photo album, gaps in time that float like apparitions in their possibility. Just out of reach, hazy and transparent, like smoke from a Cuban cigar that was there and then, suddenly, gone. I turn the pages, searching for the missing years, but find no trace.

I used to watch her walk the Coast Path every morning through my grandad’s old spyglass. Sometimes, she’d stand rooted to one place, looking out past Pordenack Point at one of the small fishing boats, or a merchant ship, and I could picture her in my imagination as a young Penelope searching for her Ulysses. It struck me at times that perhaps she was looking for a piece of herself out there—that maybe she’d given away a piece of her heart, or perhaps misplaced it.

Red-rock shelves that looked like they were sliced away and neatly tiered by an enormous X-Acto knife in an ambitious, yet unsteady hand stood before me. The wall of rusty-red stretched between me and a creek I thought I could hear rushing by on the other side.

All the cars are gone except for two. Fearing he’s been left behind or got the day wrong, the leggy Catholic-school boy with blue eyes and string-cheese hair limps up to the dirt lot in tattered Chuck Taylors and a sweaty panic. It’s Wednesday, August 13, 1975, and a hundred degrees.

The next day, Gilly and I were sitting in The Gold Rail Tavern when the front door swung open admitting the figure of a slender man blown in like a leaf by a bolt of cold air. He stepped into the dimness of the tavern limping in pain, clothes hanging on his bones like a coat rack.