//Poetry

The Color of Possibility

The color of dawn is hopeful.
Its bright clarity comes ringing its bell.
With whole universes nested inside,
it sings with promise.  It says, “Anything.”

Then afternoon shambles in, its sun shading into night.
Its heavy golden egg yolk over-medium,
clings to building faces.  The color of days gone by,
days leaving us now as we speak, mourned before their demise,
pre-emptively missed, a longed-for bittersweet taste in our mouths.

The color of afternoon makes me want to call the day back,
relive my whole life, try again for Gatsby’s green light.
Possibility dwindles, unrealized universes close up shop saying,
“We did not happen today.  Choices were made around us.  We remain unlived.
Get home safely.”

Possibility grows one day older and one day older after that.
Changed by the day before and the day before that.
Choices are built up on the shale of prior choices.
A foundation of disposition, genes, history, and the
hopes and fears patinaed with the grime of our passing days.

The color of night rings the closing bell,
a muted dusty sound as though muffled by gauze or fog or great distance.
A cocoon spinning itself out of fresh history,
swaddled in the paths that were preferred over other paths.
The sound and color of doors closing behind you
for the last time turn the lights off.
Every dawn brings new houses with new doors and new lightswitches.

When morning comes, I pause with my hand on that shiny new doorknob,
I fermata on the threshold, eyeing those universes waiting to become.
Expectant, nervous in the wings.  I ring out with possibility, I say
I say, “Anything.”

[ Topic Fiction & Snobbery, Poetry | No Comments ]

Prufrock Meets the Strenuous Briefness

“You’ve written your muscular love poem to a muscular painter.”

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Yes T S

With your peaches and newspapers, briny
Smoke and dust, billow and roll down city blocks.
You are a sensual one, pertaining to the senses.
Almost every word has its own smell.

Raising dingy shades on a vast continent,
Horses, old women, hypocrisy, anguish
Cigarettes and vacant lots. Smoke and dust
Fill our mouths and

hurry up please

I have learned to care and not to care.
I have learned to sit still.

*

O e e

You’ve written your muscular love poem to a muscular painter
Of angles and eyes.
Of anger and creamy thighs.

I have woken up inside your hair-thin tints of yellow dawn,
I have also drowned in buttery sun poured through
a kitchen window
I have strolled through your women-coloured twilights.
I have also stumbled blindly through pregnant air

You have your flash, your bag of trick y tricks
But when I conjure you, I think not of busy monsters, nor
Of large together coloured instances.
Or even of

tic snow toc.

Instead I think of a little church At peace with nature, a brittle swoon, Then (of solongs and,ashes)

*

You both liked roses and female smells in shuttered rooms.
You both loved Spring best and she loved you back.

hurry up please

Fierce and fragile, angular curves,
You both wrote of churches and rain,
Prayers. Dust alighting like

it’s time

[ Topic Fiction & Snobbery, Poetry | No Comments ]

Love Sung

“I love going above ground, taking an amusement park ride in space, surrounding the city. I want to see your face.”

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This subway is crossing the Williamsburg bridge. I love going above ground, an amusement park ride in space, around the city and the not city. I want to see your face.

Thick sunlight is a hollow gold nostalgia color all over glass steel stone.

I savor you, broken windows, decrepit warehouses, icy blue bursts in rectangular windows bisected over and over.
a fluorescent spew that makes my heart pound with its singular beauty.

Your lights crystallized in a night sky, framed by soft, black air.

I love you light. I love you building. I love you broken down ness. I love you age. I love you dust. I love you life.

I love you electric Brooklyn sky.

[ Topic Fiction & Snobbery, Poetry | No Comments ]

NOM De Plume

Darling,

Now that you’re Dead they
have their way
with y/our name! so earnestly cor(rupt/rect)
with Words are they

(unfaithful revisionist historians 

peek inside
“(y)our” books that are out now.)

All of that fool
ishness? Tolerable while you live(d),
now heaven knows Its Time

up
grow
& be proper. They say they
love y/our work

(but men do lie about love)

andthemonster is so tired of
your Stupid Names and now p
ity them we should, so busy and
unkind.

(just conform and we 

won’t speak of it again.
it never happened.)

Some
might say you were made of

(what never happened?
exactly!)

Some
pseudonym you are
no longer (all)owed:

(and as if you haven’t already guessed)

my e.e.everything

[ Topic Fiction & Snobbery, Poetry | No Comments ]

Fried Pork Chops

I try to picture him in Prague,
Though I’ve never been there
And am not 100 percent sure he has either.

I piece together a composite Prague for him
To wander in, from random sooty black and white
Snapshots, and film stock laced with jumpy lines.

I see no future here, only  heartache and loss,
And I can neither avert my eyes nor alter my path.
Or to be truthful, I don’t want to.

It seems to me that this overripe friendship
Grows juicier, like the mango he ate this morning,
With kissing and fucking and too much ache.

He’s a Scorpio, 29.
He’s reading aloud to me from his journal
After coming. He has that awkward
Honesty, a rawness, that
Arouses and scares me. He has that
Casual coiled pounce tucked into
His shirt pocket. The cliché is
“A Quiet Intensity”.

Here in New York City
He wolfs down his food,
Belches loudly, and neatly folds
Dirty clothes onto a chair.

[ Topic Fiction & Snobbery, Poetry | No Comments ]

The Unhappy Dog Poem

There is a dog who is
walked near my work.
Rotund, like a neck roll,
with tiny stubs for legs.
Surely the existence of
such an animal goes
against all laws of nature.
Surely this is an abomination
in the eyes of god.
Surely, I hear Darwin spinning
in his grave, some genetic roulette
wheel, that’s been rigged. cheaters.
I am utterly repulsed by this
anomaly, until I look up,
and see its owner.
Who is much worse.

[ Topic Fiction & Snobbery, Poetry | No Comments ]

The Sparrow

When Edith sings
my mind conjures up
grainy, sepia-toned
black and white photographs
of Paris in the forties.

Her voice embodies that
tinkling piano that everyone hears
in a neighbouring apartment, but
never our own.

When Edith sings I hear her say (in French),
“At first there was no applause, and
then the house came down.”

When Edith sings
I smell bread baking. And cappucino,
seated at a sidewalk cafe,
watching skirts swish by as the
cloud infested skies open up.

You can have her smoky eyes,
but I want her red, red mouth.

[ Topic Fiction & Snobbery, Poetry | No Comments ]

Roof

From my roof I watch planes land
Before I lived here I
Believed that all planes
Landed in New York.

That all things were settled here.
When I landed everything
Came undone and I am
Up in the air. I am
Starting again.

From my roof I can see Manhattan
Sprawling over there.
Some untended garden
Grown out of control.
There are lights climbing up
The faces of buildings,
Swinging wildly on the wires
Of the Triborough Bridge.

From my roof I can smell
Barbeques I was not invited to,
Thrown by people I have
Never met. I have not met
Many people here in the crazy garden.

From my roof I watch the sun slide down
The walls of the sky to the floor where
The light goes now, down the drain.
The days are leaner now, with
Less sunlight in them.

I have witnessed
This once before, and it does
Not seem like it should happen again so soon, the
Emptying of the days, I mean.

It does not seem so
Long ago that someone else might have sat, and
From their roof, watched my plane land.

[ Topic Fiction & Snobbery, Poetry | No Comments ]

Ernest Hemingway

Was a hunter.
And although he was never a soldier,
he served on the Italian front.
His stories are filled with manly men.
With fears and messy insides housed
uncomplicated in some
clean, well-lighted place.
Unravelling.
You shoot the big game.
You shoot the enemy.
You shot yourself.

I believe in a simple violence.

this is
some of it.

- Charles Bukowski
“junk”

[ Topic Fiction & Snobbery, Poetry | No Comments ]

Gijon

It’s been years since Gijon
and you say I was really happy.
––Since the clubs all night, and breakfast
in those meat shops that could suck the life
right out of your brain through your nose.
The dangling pigs, dried and tired,
singing last nights’ cantos with an odor unmatched.
It was the mornings, after endless
glasses of wine in the evening, when  we craved
only a bottle of warm Coca-Cola.
It was the cobbled, archaic streets
that convinced me I was home.
Watching soccer games on battered
televisions, and cheering for teams
we didn’t even know, next to the wharf
with strangers who smiled as if they
held the key to life and might give it.
It was Gijon five years ago with its
tanned beaches and loudspeakers
when I couldn’t hear what you were
saying on the payphone, and didn’t care.
It was there I got lost in back streets
near knife shops, and was content
to simply drop into the nearest bar
and remain lost forever.
It was five years ago that I left my
coat on the bench just off
La Calle de Culebra, and I couldn’t
seem to find the street ever again.

[ Topic Fiction & Snobbery, Poetry | No Comments ]