First Set of Poetry

Listening to Billie Holiday on a Friday Night

I am not one of the
moonlit girls in Billie's songs--
never blue,
heart full of passion,
the cat's meow
in simpler times.

I fell
on that perfect summer night
when you kissed my eyelids
and dipped me
as we danced by the ocean.
You sang to me from behind those green eyes
and plucked at your guitar
with gentle hands.
But you're in love
with someone,
something else.

So now here I am,
with the lingering stench
of stale cigarettes,
with someone else
at 6:49am, sleepless,
staring at the ugly faded tattoo on his back,
from the other side
of the bed.







The Borel Hill Winos

Who else would drink red wine
at seven-thirty in the morning
enjoying the hot tangerine eye of sunrise
in the rolling prarie grasses,
but the Borel Hill Winos,
as they called themselves.

Two bodies,
filled with burgundy
and a view of the world.

They grin and watch one another
flashing their covered limbs,
cotton curves and angles,
licking bare skin
that dimples in the chill of want.
They worry and laugh,
an addictive supression
of feelings and faith.
They wear their denial
like a heavy winter coat,
hiding in its deep pockets,
their secrets,
loitering in music
and quivering between
their hips.







the Professor

she can almost feel
his hands on her
in the black
of an empty
classroom
and she can almost feel
his older muscles,
the older angles
of his bones,
the youth fading
from them slowly
and she can see herself
reflected in the lens
of his camera,
and he says,
I'd love for you
to meet my girlfriend,
and he smiles
at her in a way
a man smiles
at a girl.







Pomegranate

I am eating a pomegranate
and thinking of you.

I am delicately, patiently
separating the seeds from the
paperthin honeycomb palms of peel,
and with my tongue
I suck the juices from the kernels,
and spit out the seeds.

It gives me plently of time
to think of how you would look
eating a pomegranate.

Everyone eats pomegranates differently.

When I finish,
all I am left with is a mound
of pulpy scraps of flesh,
bloody napkins,
and sticky fingers.

If you were here,
you'd lick them for me.








Siren

You open up to me
at night, like a midnight moonflower
revealing its inside
to the black night,
hiding in this darkness,
wearing it about you
like a
mask.

I am a siren in the morning,
singing my songs to you, the weary sailor,
but you sail into the empty horizon
with cotton in your ears.

The siren sings on
after him,
sad, wailing elegies, crying in the salt spray,
salt ocean water mixing with salt tears,
humming in the winds
to
no


one.





Ashes

You said you loved me--
it sounded more like a plea.

I panicked when I thought maybe
it was supposed to be you
instead of the other man,
a bittersweet storm of thought
in the plastic flower funeral parlor.

You'll be thinking
of your grandmother's ashes
floating like a heavy fog through the mountains
while you fuck your girlfriend to sleep tonight
on some old mattress
with dirty sheets.







Untitled

I am standing on the retaining wall
looking aimlessly into the street
and through the thick towering torsos
of hundred-year-old redwoods.
I hear Larry taking out the trash.
It's Wednesday morning,
and Larry's electric wheelchair
drags the trashcans over his sad, gravely excuse
of a driveway towards the street corner.
His Vietnam Vet legs rest limply in the supports of cold metal.
He came back to his wife of nearly 50 years
after jail time and a murdered hooker
somewhere in Arizona.
I see Dennis
glance up from his fold-out plastic lawn chair
he sits in on mornings like this,
detachedly looking out his open garage
over the empty cans of Budweiser
littering the space
around his bare feet.

Then I remember a different kind of vet,
the animal hospital where put put our dog to sleep
on the tailgate of the family's '89 Suburban.
It died there, eyes slowly growing still and opaque,
the panic slipping out of the whites of her eyes
in a kind of sad release.
We left her while we did errands for the rest of the day,
her black fur baking in the hot noon sun,
the dead-dog-in-the-back stench
just sort of filling up
the silent spaces
between the passengers.