Matins (New York)
in an anxious motion of obdurate pacing
a prayer might have found you
or on another night on a bridge
or outside on staccato streets
rows of buildings magic in some other place
I tucked myself into your room
your life barren the milk and honey
branches I had always hoped to find
in the forest of your night
we could do better than this
collaborate and achieve
at the apex of our abilities riding
the subway over the canal
all the wasted opportunities
lives of the young poets overwhelmed
by the criminal justice system
all the young artists all the
young mathematicians in a
carceral apocalypse no
wonder there is anger in
our rooms
no wonder anger rises
before the waters flood down
you say my flow is a simplicity
we bake bread together
light pouring over our hands
in a country of malice
Sleepwalk
In somatic back-and-forth, no monotone
monologist, instead think
of tracheal laneways, messengers
of grand largesse speaking longingly as
supermarket shelving workers ponder,
What is dignity?
In the abeyance of comforting trends, the abyss
bleeds pure rapture, whispers
frame your spinal curvature.
A bell is tolling, heard
through the traffic in lower Manhattan,
Bowery nights. Listen,
to all the slashed, whiplashed windpipes,
and false eyelashes, glued in a self-determinative performance.
Bone-thin, dice semioticians and electric neon dancers,
quivering under denuded plane trees.
Where once swayed circadian rhythms, a forest of Melvillian trees,
now, curtains opening proscenium scene changes.
As difficult as you and I, these histories
crossing oceans, diasporic masts
burst forth as latitudinal showers drench
Central Park. See: uptown, falling stars.
We are
tracing noise in a spiritual love trance,
screaming out from 1am subways, up from spiritual hollows
Slipping Toward Dawn (Manhattan)
Out of chaos, amazing that anything
at all is accomplished.
We are rolling along through
a performance of suffering.
Sufficient in itself, ancient as longing.
In each and every doorway, restaurant, stairwell,
in the rooms of wondering,
and in the dark, and
through its hands of light, the curling
ocean, waves curling into breadth.
Curving across the arc of
all the places we came from,
we arrive, holding a final red flower,
perfuse petals spurting,
blood of a blossoming
season, out of dry thorns
and briars. Grab your guitars,
microphones and words arch
in the perfumed predawn quiet.
Predella of a clock face moon. Silence
of the 3am F train. Gliding underground wheels.
Epiphany is its own ecstasy, the still-
lit City. Places where we first met,
draped in new lattice visions.
To manufacture and lace by hand, our failures,
in the aspiring Ineffable.
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