if the shelves of hell are lined
with all the books
that should have been written
please know
there’s a big gaudy ass pink satiny lace volume
of poetry i didn’t write about you
sitting quietly in the
damn, but didn’t we have fun
section
if the shelves of hell are lined
with all the books
that should have been written
please know
there’s a big gaudy ass pink satiny lace volume
of poetry i didn’t write about you
sitting quietly in the
damn, but didn’t we have fun
section
just a man
drag off a cigarette smirk
a walking shell game
snake in a can
so backwards in life
one questions
reports of his death
yet
he would crookedly smile
calling it
legend
what we call eternity lasts
approximately 3 seconds
it is the state of a happy heart
at the moment of your death
as your brain powers down
the last thing it processes are images of
everything you ever loved
mercifully
that is our shared heaven
I’ve adopted
a son at work
who still lives at home
in my cubicle.
He has a shock of dark hair
that follows him like a storm cloud.
He teaches music.
He plays in a coupla bands.
He’s a good dad.
He borrows my nail polish
& asks me to braid
the nimbus of his hair.
He’s a badass rocker.
He has that ancient magic,
voodoo child guitarist,
maestro.
But the day he said
you’ve been a better mom to me
than my own,
because I offered to mail an envelope…
he became mine.
the moment you turned & walked into the room
my world went Peckinpah
explosions of laughter
and parking garage lore
you are the unlikeliest surprise
a penultimate friendship
my war horse riding brother
charging beside me off
to our generation’s wars
in armor made from James Joyce t-shirts
imagine my uncorked shock
to meet a lion experimental
unmormon poseidon
over-the-rhine renaissance
gypsy king
this day is your birthday
you sit back all Kerouac
this day is for breaking someone else’s heart
so stick around
i’m gonna read this poem out loud to you from a stage
my next gig in town
& there’s a band I wanna go see with you
every tomorrow night
writers take in
& tend to each other
giving
a warm place to sleep
in the heart
a saucer of milk
lines dedicated
meat nibbled bones of relief
the way loving souls dote
on stray cats
they cannot keep
me walking in my late thirties overcoat
on the sidewalk behind her
downwind
she smelled like Love’s Baby Soft
cigarettes
Doc Martins lockstep with teenage sin
and i thought how freeing it would be
to be that oblivious again