ecstasy devine (revisionist romance)

she travels light,

with only her wry smile

and wicked crinkle.

softly with a jagged edge,

she walks on past, pissed

slicing me cleanly, boldly,

wielding only her momentum,

her good intentions,

and her nancy botwin eyes.

when the pixie dust clears

the dampening dissipates,

and i'm left lying in her wake

bleeding ecstasy devine.

33 revolutions ('round a middle aged son)

The night stands before me, sick.

Dawn has seemed absent for eons in this moment;

forgotten, abandoned, broken.

The day lies behind me, blessed.

An abscess to its optimism, the dusk drains me off along with the light;

put down, thrown up, sticky.

My dad reached bottom thirty-three years ago this week,

touching down into the morgue in the basement at Everett General.

Gastly, ghostly, jaundiced.

Everett General, the hospital of my birth, a stone's throw from our home.

His bottle from that point forever empty (just one more for the road, formaldehyde straight up).

Rotting, rigor, relief.

The worst hangover is, in the end, no hangover at all (in fact, is nothing whatsoever).

Not when you're staring up fish-eyed from a gurney at a "standard 'Y' incision"

slicing down to your belly revealing booze as your religion.

(the M.E. crosses herself: "we have a high priest among us today, my young interns.")

Not when you're cooking into ashes in the crematorium oven.

Not when your memories serve to brutalize the psyche of your children.

No. Soup. For. You. The bar is closed.

Night Sweats

Darkness falls and shatters,

the shards cutting into the stars.

They bleed the blackness

of infinite gravity

over shimmering light,

with a beauty so futile

that it parodies sanity,

and me watching blindly

ignorant of it all.

I stand stupidly naked

staring into the oblivious sky,

dressed only in my doubts

and questionable denim,

longing for the energy

to dance on the graves

of my failures left undead.

Instead, I sigh past the emptiness

and collapse into a laughter

of tears until the dawn,

when the stars' endless death throes

play on to another audience

behind the curtain from me

'round a planet gone mad.