What’s is remembered, lives.

When you die

people will talk you up

fatten your totem pole into fierce faces

of defiance

because you were strong, because your blood carried

the weight of your legacy and your ancestors

when you die

I will wear your ring on my finger if I am still around

and every sunset will pull the moon down

her mauve redolence

aching in my chest

to hold you against me

for when you die

memory will become a marriage

between us, and the ether

I will live in the past ever more so

recalling the days we spent

living our life in each other’s gastropods 

it is my belief we carry within us

the seeds of ancestors and loved ones

blood and violets, oshibana in focus

and each step we make on this earth

we walk alongside the invisible ones

who hold us up when the going gets tough

recently, the going has been very tough and I have

beseeched the stoicism of those who are not here

to see me through

I don’t have their solidity, you know

nor their earnest lust for life

at times I think a brawny wind could

carry me off

I have at best, one foot on the ground

the other is hurtling in a rêver

a dream of less grief, less pain

where we can unfurrow our sails

and drift on burnished water

I was asked not long ago

what I most wanted out of life

and it seemed such a banal question

when struggling to survive

but really that’s the point isn’t it?

To keep putting one foot in front of the other

staring at the setting sun as it blooms

fattened orb of life

just as capable of destroying

a metaphor surely …

for our riddled

minds

(homage to Nomadland)

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Preparation for our dissolution (3)

Down the drain

Watch. Watch carefully. See. See clearly

The comforting sound of water retreating in circles

I used to say that water turned to milk

I used to think when cream mixed with transparency

Pearls swirled and ebbed like fire flies in dark.

Kept warm beneath tiny radiators stuck on walls like beige moths

Glowing against a 40 watt bulb

Don’t open the window it’s stuck, it’s stuck on being underground

We breathe in soot, we turn ebony in our effort to

Rise.

She couldn’t lift the baby carriage, in those days it weighed

More than she did and the stairs, sticky with linoleum were

Narrow like her little arms attempting to heft us toward

Light.

We mired in dark. We stayed still as stalagmite in caves

Children’s books. Detective novels. Smite the key in the lock

Green plants fitfully reaching. Reaching. Reaching

Your arm is never long enough.

Recall the smell of boar hair brush. Of Clinique blue bottles

Is it magic? How does it glow? Mouthwatering

How they had a misted outside, I ran my finger down and traced outlines

Someone in NYC designed this shape. The shape of places far and lettered.

She had wool, it got wet washing her hair, the edges frayed

It smelt like grandma’s farm with damp goat fur at 5am

Nobody had anything then. We opened our hands to emptiness

Paper lotus. Needle. Oh Lord. Darn a way out.

Everything is so different now. I did not learn how

To cooperate

How to join. How to thrive. What if you are

Born only of coal?

The heavy weight of circular plates laid over paving stones

A funeral of sorts, bury the mother, bury any off-spring

Only blood. Only letters after names. Knights and paupers

The history of war. Victors write. The rest rot beneath daisies.

She grew insufficiently, facing away from sun

Her skin parchment, knees knocked

The pain in her. Oh the pain in her! No words.

She closes her eyes. Turquoise like the stones found in New Mexico

When she was told that, she said; Yes I will buy a ticket

Board the plane, swallow the dream, take the red pill or

The blue.

It was so savage. The quiet. The silence.

When she left there was nothing but the brush and the bottles

Gathering dust, follicles left spinning in air

Are some of those skin cells, still her?

Reconstruct

Is it any wonder she knows best, people of vacillation

And change? She knows the feeling exactly when told one thing

Tomorrow another truth hangs primly in

Your narrow closet.

Her ear lobes are detached, she read once in a woman’s magazine

Attached ear lobes are a sign of beauty

She has larger knee caps than her shins

The skin barely covers her climb

Trees of white, pearl, honey, comb, hair brush, blue

Bottles.

They didn’t fix the streets they remain

On fire

And they ate coal in preparation

For their dissolution

“Il y a dans le coeur humain une génération perpétuelle de passions, en sorte que la ruine de l’une est presque toujours l’établissement d’une autre.” Rochefoucauld.

 

Pleasure dome

I’m 24

Funny shaped tap drips without end,
birds no longer sing in this city

I tell myself, I cannot survive much longer

If my view is a saffron robed Pakistani man, hawking up phlegm at 8am, into his dying rhododendron

Despair like me, at these four walls and dirty pipes protruding from beneath singleton sink

Who ever made sinks this size? Sometimes you throw up in them. Other nights you heft your hiney and pee long and shameful

The golden shower of malcontent. I don’t like to share bathrooms with strangers or friends

Poverty and her gifts, laying each day another absence, a reminder, you are in the meat grinder of the city, she waxes her legs on your sharp disappointment

As a kid you thought you’d wrangle diamonds from street corners, the fizz and pop of bright lights luring you to the center, like a Christmas nectarine

Is always spoilt.

In the petting evening, wet lipped men come to the spindly girl upstairs

She has thin shoulders and jagged hips, her eyes are always transparent and high on pyramid crystals

These men grind their dirt into her pretend cries of ecstasy and she gets crisp and filthy notes left on her childhood dresser afterward

I fantasize about asking her, if it has to be men she admits into her sanctum

But I’ve never paid for it and I don’t want to step in their cooling semen

If she knocked on my door and offered a damson breast I may

Break that rule and risk, even in the AIDS era, even as a feminist, even if I can’t afford the powder, her hungry nostrils crave

Just to feel the rub of her emaciated hips and hard thighs against my parched skin

I’d fucking inject it if I could, to take away the feeling of savage loneliness in the big city

That sick feeling, you’re stuck, among landlords and low paying jobs, even at 24

Massaging an ancient electric meter with dirty coins, for a little light showing more dirt

The temptation to let it fade out and lie, door open, legs open, coins in your mouth until blood freezes in your veins.

Come in and pay for me then, what am I worth? What can you fill me with, I haven’t already drunk?

Strange people’s scarfs on universal banisters, the smudge of sex in screwed up foil and old bus tickets

Lift up my hips, ram it in, pay your due, switch poison for love and love for death, welcome to the pleasure dome.

The man in 4b puts his hands down his granddaughters dress but the abuse hotline just rings and rings and rings

There’s a gypsy in 5a, cries for his lost lover til dawn. There’s a 13 year old boy who turns tricks in the street, who asks for bus money and new socks

The flashing lights of the strip club opposite are flamenco pink and penetrate through my squalid curtains, wailing their synthetic dreams

How far will you travel to see the sky again? To touch sand and sea and gulp with fevered breath, the pollen of forgotten worlds, lost in your lust for noise

I think of the Pakistani man and his phlegm, growing flowers from spit

As the Eastern eyed girl sells her small fruit for a ransom and a cry

Breasts like pinches, thin ribs beneath wool, taut ride of her skirt showing little pursed mouths of bruises

Her feet are always bare andlacquered, mine are unwashed and leave imprints of desire outside her door in ring-a-rosies

She wears her tips without a bra, nipples hurting in their push, smoking cheap cigarettes before light, smell of burnt coffee and sex on her chewed neon fingernails

They pay her to keep them hard, I beg her to stay soft

The city is a searching arbor of need and want and ingratitude

At 3am people wander the street for drugs and pain and death in little sealed packets

She leans in the doorway, exhaustion a shroud, touching her bottom lip with a haloed question

I open my mouth and let her in.

To her, and all the men she brings, to 24 years and not a minute more, to the nialism and thready vibrant flowers growing from scorn

Her body is a violated temple, a bingo hall, an arcade game, with multiple slots for change

Her mouth tastes like ashtrays and night clubs and old men, skinny throat a pin cushion of bite marks

I make her sing

As light wakes the rest of the world, all the lost birds hear her call

The Pakistani man admires his flowers and thinks

How beautiful this little piece of color is, here in this metropolis where all are brushed beneath concrete

I brush my hands across her small deflated breasts

Seeing sunlight find its way in between crowded houses filled with sore tenants

Touch her violet tinged skin in patterns, warming her before she awakes.

I’m 24 and she’s 22 and an entire life time, of fag butts and misery, washed down on lines of coke and old men groping for their last fuck

Later on I’ll take her to the coffee shop with the little bell above the door, and we’ll clasp hands beneath the sticky table cloth

Blue rinse ladies in the adjacent seat will remark, on our bright eyes and shining hair

As if we too were born

From the cracks of despair

Tapestry

When did we cease being

Wide eyed and curious

Of this velvety world

Not ever

Shouts blue rinsed grandmother

And sings her baudy war songs

To the chip chop chop of her brothers clumsy accompaniment

On stairwell piano with missing ivory

It was said

Parlor tricks began with family visits

Light a cone of newspaper on your head

A second from setting fire to your hair

There were jugglers in the house

Catching Xmas clementines by the handful

And ladies whose pure voices lifted up sagging furniture

Such the gratitude of survival

Friends of shared blood and homemade eye patches

When did we cease lighting candles to cast a glow

Making magic of things otherwise ignored

Not ever

Today, everyone is dressed in threadbare finery

Auditioning for heaven, the old ones say

And all I thought of was the last licorice stick

Staining the inside of my mouth like forbidden wish

We remain alive by sheer will, it is the rush of nature

To keep us tethered by thinnest string, weaving our own

Tapestry

Superficial

Skim the stone on the surface

watch it butt against reflecting light

until falling through surface

out of sight it drops

to a darkness

or a peace

depending upon your vantage point

I for one would welcome

a life spent below, than above

listening to the mocking calls of unseasonal green parrots

filling trees with their envy

they make everything brighter it is true

yet something about the jarring

competitive nature of their plumage

strikes me as less sincere than

the drab and disliked pigeon with

old face and white circles around

his rumey blinking eyes

who can always be relied upon

to lose a toe in Winter

I think of how often I have watched

something curl to the side of a street

and wait to die

how a part of me felt helpless

inhabiting stages where stories

rent through armor and pierced

my conscience

after the third pigeon in a box

tucked beneath my office shoes

my boss told me

look, this is enough

he preferred I collected his shirts from the dry cleaner

bagfuls of shopping for his wife

my perk was

one day I could grow up to be like him

ignore dying birds in the street

driving silver BMW to my Thursday mistress

whilst another slave worked after-hours

filing life upward like blind builb

it came to me then, ungluing my eyelids

leaving behind one word

WRONG

written in magic marker on his desk

I took the cooing box I’d hidden

and the pigeon and I went home

to a cold flat with no furniture

where he proceeded to try not to die

and I watched understanding very well

the hue of his life

for I am a stone who sank before

she saw the sun and only the moon knows

the way to lift me up

Take the high road

I was a child once

perhaps we played together

were you the friend I helped climb the pear tree?

were you the friend who said jump over the puddle and we both missed and came home all muddy in time for trouble?

were you the one who got to the top of the hay bale first and said ‘I can see all the world’ from here and in that moment we really thought we could

or did you grow up in a nice apartment on the Upper East Side, sent to the best schools and expected to do well

which you did in that idle and coveted way of those who have purchase of a velvet lining

did you ever wonder what it was like for the rest?

did you ever wonder why so many famous people are the children of?

did you ever stop and question if ‘life is what you make it’ still stands true?

did you drink dirty water like the kids in Flint?

did you get poisoned by copper like the babies of El Paso?

if you went to a demonstration did you go so you could make change or to show off your $400 Free People outfit?

when you got your first job was it from hard-graft or the friends of your parents?

I went to university with you, I was the one who had a bicycle whilst you drove a Jeep

I wasn’t jealous except when I was hungry and that suited me because I couldn’t afford to grow

when you sat like King on your throne and your acolytes bowed, you crowned yourself head of our year and published the first zine

did it reflect truth or the diamond shanty of your ideals?

good for you that you had a pretty life and long vacations

many of us worked for a living and got up at 5am to empty kitchen tables

parents who stared through the rain at yet another long day

ground down by platitudes that didn’t apply

I’m not bitter it’s just that when we sit in the same room and you tell me

‘I’m sure you can understand Candy, as an owner of a small printing press I have to make ends meet’

I can’t help thinking how fake things that are meant to be real are becoming

we lost art to the debutante, we gave away our souls for front covers with dazzling lies

we have an election that denies the people and computers who act like surrogates

jobs if you’re in China and expensive degrees that promise nothing but loan re-payments

it is said there is no better time than now, and the past was harder when ancestors danced in death in ditches and were blown up

it is said there is no better time than now, we are the proverbial fatted calf, glutted on luxury, we don’t know how bad it used to be

for our grandparents who broke their backs and discolored their lungs in coal pits and the basements of rich homes

back in time we didn’t have flat screen TV and cell phones and fancy jeans but it’s swings-and-roundabouts

now we’re in time where not being online 24/7 can lose your job to someone who didn’t mind being beholden

we had vacations whilst now everyone’s too afraid to be out of the office and checks their cell phones at the dinner table on Sunday’s

where is our sense of self? Did we buy into the belief we are free and rich because we were told that by a meme or nodding head?

did we forget what George Orwell or Rachel Carson said?

Because when we’re young we think we have it all if we have sex and firm thighs and the right to protest

but what good is protest if nothing ever changes? ask the pipe lines who cut through our country if they have heard us yet?

or the profits garnered to keep the 99 percent out of the front lawn

but oh wasn’t it always that way?

sure I read Dickens too and the Little Matchstick Girl

poverty isn’t a modern-dilemma

however maybe apathy and delusion is

wasn’t Marx talking about that when he mentioned Opiates?

we don’t need to take our Big Pharma pills to know

cancer comes with a price tag and you’d better not be poor

the cost of ‘getting well’ is only one part, the other is the creation of the disease

ask the petrochemical industries, do they let their kids inhale or eat that?

does anyone think of the future? Or should we change what Marie Antoinette said to

let them eat lead

what does it say when you’re glad you don’t have kids to inherit these times?

I wanted to write poems and get published and you owned the rights like you always had

glutted and fat on your marble pyramid

you look at people like me, like the street cleaner regards bird shit

something it takes some elbow grease to clean and even then

the outline will mark the pretty pavement where you wanted to hold

your procession proclaiming the world is good and just

I suppose I didn’t fit in with that then and I don’t now

this world is made of dust and sweat, we toil even when we think we are not

against haters, against cruelty, against disregard, apathy and the unexpected

sometimes I think we got it very wrong when we called these Modern Times

Charlie Chaplin may have had a point there

as many who are gone now did, we’re in another incarnation of delusion

hurry up children take your medicine, sip, sip !

so …  I won’t win a trophy or even get my name recalled when I’m gone

and that’s okay with me God

I just want enough to live on and to be unmolested by those who seek to tear down

an honest heart or a man who prizes integrity above fitting in

lest we follow a prophet who says he’s the one, and all fall off the cliff

did we ever figure out if the Pied Piper was evil?

down we go

you cannot find truth looking into empty crystal

you find it by noticing the hypocrisy and stepping out of the casting coach

it will be a harder road they always said

but a high road is preferable to one paved in gold

The waves

All the trees looked away

on raw knees

shingle and sand castles

wet newspaper of old stories

yellow fag butts, half empty cider cans

containing sweet succor

one last piece of chocolate give the child

before she loses herself

her best toy clean from wash

smelling of home and tulips

sea makes ghosts of us

running brine like hot semen

searching fruitless loins

kicking against tin cans

bricks do not prize apart

one wet wall from another

we clamor against ageing need

spill the first glass

pour the benediction

here we leave our umbilical chords for advent

what came to be in deserted fair grounds

gold paint flaking against scarlet mouths

wooden horses rolling their eyes

softly dancing on platforms with scratched song

walk out as far as the pier takes you

he watches from his metal bed

strung with his spot lit horror

thin muscles tight with longing

hips like razors privately digging into

your flailing conception

it’s the price

bed sheets left to rinse out your scream

don’t cut your hair don’t spare your wrists

his was a sharp entry into your sleep

run on water-logged deadened feet

past the chip shop hording its quiet fat

where veiled women stare at first light

breaking over cracked lips the train

crying past in low throated whistle

down damp cobbled steps emptied of market

into space without endings or slow buttons

the sea is white with fury

her mouth mounts your need

swallowing the bitter salt of ragged release

beneath stains we see the outline

here lay the girl who caught a bus

carrying her clean underwear like a flag

climbed into her part as a glove

here she is pinched by her starvation

horror painting her eyes purple

ebbing on tide with scissored legs fighting

their eventual knot a violin played in fire

she opened her flute to high ceilings

reedy sound echoing off salvaged walls

fast fury unzipping protest

be a good child bow your head

stay still when flame chews

stroke the boy who demands

fist around your throat starving

paper ghosts fall into obedient rows

feel the rush of angels in her touch

he said I hope you give decent head

I’ve been waiting to break your alabaster

like new buildings devour old

never knew what stood before

leaving thin pockets full of stones

better swim with indigo weeds

hair imprinting shadows on hot breath

goodbye is hello

you learned hard on scalding youth

taking a straw from a tall glass

sucking it dry

my child is the color of clouds

meeting at the point of horizon

where storms gather to make glass

he indented himself like a tattoo

when she climbed out she could not feel

where he pricked her empty sadness

leaving a colander of spilt torch-light

pent-up boys with dusty souls

touching warm radiators, hanging

apologies on skinny shoulders

sounding against sagging mattresses

one two-three is all it took

a sharp knife cutting the choir

freedom twists at a price

he rose like the swell, filling her

the first time you never forget

they whispered behind sticky fingers

girl pull down your hems

cover your spindle chest

close your legs to the roar

hear the waves

hear the waves overtake you