Listen to me: I know
the winter gloom in
mid-summer…

I am still waiting for the lion

and apples, mackintosh mostly, but any kind left in The Pub
at the Assisted Living Place

You said it was okay to blame
what goes wrong on the planet

I suffer visions and many indignities
while looking for the Lobster

I want to roll in this moment until I become its vocabulary
until I smell like the bones
until I am its echo…

You are strange, my mother said, dwelling on the past.

I am not a guide
for every traveler
of loss.

Every so often, they add a tattoo
in honor of some long-forgotten love.

Long after midnight, we’re talking about our first time

I imagined a cascade of slow death for all / that mattered…

the man is stayed bent over the canvas
of my sofa. the man is me the man is him
self and I bring down the whip…

I tap at the alphabet while a single deer
taps at the dirt beyond the brush
on the far side of the tree line.

how does an afternoon turn
on its axis?

It is the 70s. 1970s? 2570s? Who knows?
Audre and I have a penthouse in New York.

Do not say anything anybody else has said ever. Things are not “bleached by sun.”

The storm passes without snow.
The car waits loyally in the back lot.

You let the yellow glow
from eye sockets. The building up the street
is burning faster and faster.

Winter sat like a wolf
on the horizon.