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

Foot note

Memory moored in cargo net cradles
green eves, wood eyes
were all spectacles mine

My back, heavy with the perches of ghosts
all ways, dog-eared
in a pucker of time

My eyes widened by the marches of motes
touch worn. inhale
had we nothing to hide?

This stone, my chest, is a purchase of goats
for what else would you
before a god of eyes

A Twittanova of Metroplexing, West to East

The Magic Castle, plantation, heroin hostel, and now a rehabilitated house of illusions. Doogie Howser is the trapezy chairman of the board.

The spirit of beans cut a wide circle in the water, as we merrily toast farewell. A precipitous fall, cut bright by purple webs in the wake.

A lounge, terraced in the sky, great ivy trellises and flowing blue dresses. The hammock was easily the best part; the $20 beers, the worst.

The vintage, posh, and smokey floor - a platinum card caught briefly on snippets of conversation floated on great poise, unrelenting rhythm.

Fled the gracefully skirted fray by earliest train, a citrus rose crown on New London, and a stray carousel resident in blue South Station.

L’esprit de l’Escalier

Stairs - 
eventual instruments 
of our declivity
for conveyance

drawing out 
validation
from body 
and will 

at each 
plane,
until 

the dangerous collapse 
  of one
 on to the other


L’esprit de l’Escalier - "stairway wit," a phrase describing the witticisms which arise after their window for delivery have expired (i.e. as you're going down a set of stairs).

May I call you, John?

Strange comfort in the idea of whores
 attendants at the great feast of needs
half naked lunch ladies, 
   breast or thigh?
their endless shifting, 
    pooled to the edges of a brushed metal tray

a whore armed with her ladle
neatly apportioning desire, ennui
distant sirens catch on her hairnet

blues shift, endless in your night
sirens punctuating the hollow clicking of thin heels.

may i?

Crossing

'Inevitable?' said the flutist,
   lips pursuing the apical G;
   a placid finish blowing swirls across the table.
We require, not pipers but a choir,
not Hamelin but Paumanok, -
Distracted, but for a moment.

I buoyantly idle
white caps,
grey gulls,
  forgetful lines
  crossing beneath the centuries idle
the ferry’s chin digging into the shoulders
of costumed crowds
            shuttled through murk, brine,
Where was your future a hundred years hence?

Mr Whitman, I’ve lost your generations of men, women, and oscillating gulls.
I’ve been to Paumanok, your mother’s home, your mall.

A round, another
round, of alms
around whom, with tasseled conscience,
formed a book, forgetful read
never to work
not a crinkle of spine
not the last crisp chapter

A rough noose
a ring, then a coat of arms
a living crowd, I was one of a crowd
in the breathless distance beneath his bridge.

--------------

Written 2011.

New poetry! How. . . odd. This is one of the first to live almost exclusively in the blogger post. I have a draft in an offline file, but it is several revisions behind. This cloud business is a little disconcerting, but highly utilitarian.