A Bargain with Winter

A fog of night air wreathed in fireflies
laced with the nameless wings of song
    only a parent's lips recall

your mother sings of the space in her arms,
    that only ever fit you so
your father tells you stories to lift you in the air,
    twirling your laughter into the sunlight

hummed where words fell on the floor,
    small, hot tattering breaths
    before sleep
where silence rolls in,
a thick tide of brutal moments

Missing

eyes crazed with dreaming
far lights on the river water

found emptiness below bridges
and weeds growing to be bare

arms embracing bodily cold
digging into their shoulders

pens scratching till empty
paper crumpled into monuments

smoke and dim pool hall lights
lonely in sound of a break

carven stone archways gape wide
echoing a pair of boots

breathing slowed to dreaming
the long stem rose at your door

- 1996

Despair

Hide.

Afflicted spine to curdled toes,
  every strand of flesh
  each twig of bone
sought the pity, of burial.

His eyes pricked, broken yolks
  in apoplectic hollows.
His epileptic slaps, pitiably
  ripping unseen leeches from his arms.

His hands, lacerated maps
  of labor, shame and delusion,
  scrambled from his pockets.

Elbows locked to his body's sides
  a hungry seagull's wings,
  diving into the shallows of my ocean.


- written so long ago, I only know it was the previous century (sounds waaay cooler when put that way).

Why don't I recognize you?

New York's faces and
most New Yorkers, redlined
on lease agreements