JOE UP LATE IN A SEAPORT 

Downtown seaport.
one in the morning,
bar closes,
Joe hears the shouts
of the drinkers
as they stumble out into the street.

New moon makes nothing clear,
gray clouds haunt the night sky,
boats rock, docks creak,
and, for human sounds,
it’s Joe’s cold breath
against the alcoholic choir.

The men
slowly struggle up the hill
to their homes,
their sleeping families.

Joe stands by the memorial statue
for all fishermen who died at sea.
The drinkers look elsewhere.
They don’t like to be reminded 
what a storm on the waters can do.

Joe imagines it’s just like this,
with men, once the street lights
lose track of them,
vanishing in darkness.
Until it’s just him.
And a marble sailor gripping the wheel.
And that whiff of liquor,
tinged with salt,
intoxicating. 




A DRUNK IN HELL

Stars are Basin Street
at midnight.
hung like rosary beads,
like the glow of cigarettes
in the mouth of the snickering moon.
I prefer it when the clouds roll in,
white and puffy
as used condoms,
heavy as mud on a coffin lid,
the dark dogs of weather
snarling through the grill
of a sudden rain shower.
Clouds gather like mourners
at the nuptials of death and booze,
of the sax solo
boiling away from a nearby club
and the passing taxi pissing water
down my pants' legs.
I'm heading home
in the wrong direction,
crashing through Saturday night's demented party,
a parade of one,
liquored up, beaten down,
a float that stinks of a hooker's breath -
you'd think life would know better
than to let me inhabit it.
Maybe I'll just crash now.
Maybe I'll drop
where I am and if no one finds me,
so much the better for them.
But there's always a cop,
always the cry of "Move on, buddy."
So I move on like the clouds, 
so the stars can reappear. 
They're not light, they're fire. 
It's their job to burn a hole in me.


FLOOD VICTIMS

Anna's rolling in the mud.
Husband Dave scoops up large lumps of sludge
in his hands,
watches it slowly drip through the cracks
between fingers.

This is what you do
when the flood retreats
and the land's a sea of slush.

No dimples in a baby's chin.
No soft pink squeeze of flesh.
Nothing clean as a fresh white towel
or a pressed Sunday suit
or a bread roll and a pad of bright yellow butter.

Some people armed with shovels
try to dig the town out from under
this deep brown muck.
Why fight it, says Anna.
I battled the disillusionment of marriage,
the burden of children, the grind of two jobs,
and the river still overflowed its banks,
washed away all homes and cars and life before it.

Others pick through the dark caked graves
of furniture, food and family heirlooms.
Dave had nothing worth having,
now he owns a house of silt.
The arguments are buried.
The disappointments can't breathe.

So what if the town smells
like rot, mildew, decaying corpses.
Anna can live with the stench.
Dave can live with Anna.



READING A BOOK GETS ME HOT
 
kind of reading,
love-in-book form,
feel urged to utterance,
plunge my waterbody
into your fish-tank –

sex, notwithstanding deaths,
the critical mass of human endeavor,
on the countertop, in the aisles,
a lovely dove inside a man’s hands
as his face imitates the one who killed it –

sex, this American sex,
I’d step way out of line to have it,
devour everything in its path,
thrash like a drowning man
if it was air –

in human terms,
the liquid violence,
as a young boy, 
stranger than Chinatown,
even in diminishment,
the loudest noise a guy can make -. 

nerve and pulse
reach into the dark places,
a body far from home,
a blunt butcher 
carving his way
into the interior 
of a pink palace –

and it’s this book that 
does it,
sears my hands,
steams my head –

who wrote it?
I did –

when was it written?
after I’m done -




DANCE NIGHT

Having started in thought,
I ended with dancing.
Not as embodiment
but because thinking 
wasn’t getting me anywhere.
I hadn’t the patience 
for old lovers.
Nor the mind for wondering
what went wrong.
And my limbs were crying out,
“Why not us!”
The results of the mental process
were as meager as hummingbird feathers.
And nowhere near as fetching
as the woman I was with.
Music was playing.
We stepped out on the floor.
My legs mule-kicked,
My arms flailed.
I shook my body
like interrogating a suspect.
And, all this time,
my head was bobbing.
But just for identification purposes.