This place is a dull pool; a lonely mir with my name scratched on the dry stones, splendorous as a blood clot. Here might I recline, chapped by old songs and quiet in desolation; solitary as hell. I have only this dim mechanic ear with which to exchange sorrows.

Here's to you, my electric familiar.

You! hypocrite lecteur!--mon sembable,--mon frere!

Goddamn.


LOVE SONGS

I often wonder what it means
when they play a song over and over
and expect you to love it just as much every time.
Doesn’t it lose some flair and flavor
the more you suck from it
with a voice that’s never as good
as those firstly uttered syllables?

SILVER SYLVIA

Had we met
In some darkish club
We could have danced mightily,
Between musky gins,

Our eyes
plying.

Your breath is on the carlights
when I trickle through the streets on urchin heels—
The smoke flapping to one careless side,
umbrage:
a door.

Had youth teemed in my chest I would have asked
And we would have lingered
In the damp footprint of the spin light.

But then—
these other two
in the other room,
and the furious gas—
and I recall these things too
that I have felt.

POPE

when the pope died,
he looked small
after they dressed him up
and powdered his
wrinkles.

dead: he looked baggy
and stern,
and I felt bad for the pope,
though I’m not catholic;
he seemed like a right
old guy.

so I opened a tin
of mackerel,
was it friday?
I think it was friday.

when they buried
that old guy—

—he nosed across
the ‘hold like a dreadnaught,
bristling with papal turrets,
crimson wake.

I didn’t cross myself or anything—
I’m not catholic—still,
he seemed
like a right old guy.

Who recalls my Black History Month poem from senior year?
Here is what is left of it.



BLACK NIGHT

Pa dead—a bullet in his head—
in the garden.
White bodies press
against the doorjamb.
Ma scream—
the house burn down.

No one told me that my poetry is horrendous--has been, for a dreadfully long time. Why else would I have to overhaul it so much? Actually, I don't mind. It teaches me that the first draft is simply that--a first draft. The final draft comes of dredging and chopping, sweating and fretting.

So here, again, one from relatively recent memory, edited.

But surely not final.


PASSAGE

I hung back in the brume
and watched thunderbirds with broken headlights
huddle off into flat cities of mist.
Ritchie's dead but I hear from his charred throat
that we belong together. I don't blame him,
what the hell does a dead man know. Can't fault
a stiff for being wrong.

there are streaks in the air,
leaves to the brittle grass,
fire colors
for dead guys who love to pluck—
We belong together.
The hell we do.

I am heir to an autumn empire,
stiff against the
hot mouth of winter;
My needle's gone bad, so Ritchie
died in a fumble of static.
I slumped in a plastic chair staring,

thinking why in hell
did my last good record
shimmy off and die.

P.S. Bonnie: Congratulations, mon lecteur!

I doubt if anyone saw the original for this poem; it was written during senior year. Regardless, here is the heavily revised vision, which, despite being one-third of the original's length, I believe to be far more effective.

BALLAD OF THE MELANCHOLY KNIGHT



The fading leaves of Avalon,
The autumn leaves of Avalon.
Lancelot, Lancelot,
Such crowns are broken.

The cloy of sin,
The keens of silken women
Wrecked on the wind,
Oh Lancelot.

The hall scattered in shadows—
Where are the fires,
Where are the golden lords
With all their words?

Gone, with a smattering of hoofbeats,
a rustling
of wolfskins.
Such now is the joy of Camelot—

The throne draped in age,
the sighs within.

I have returned.

Events look promising.