30 Poems in 30 Days (Redux)

2:19 Birds of Prey

Crouching, walking away quickly,
a glance: Did it see me?

Its wings catch the wind,
round and round. It never goes
anywhere, but it casts shadows
making a flock, mocking me
or hunting me. Scared!

Dash in the next room,
the food place, the water place
my place in the window.

Snooze.
 
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2-5 Nose against a window

Caught
between a principle and a desire,
between a man and his tribe,
between trust and lack thereof.

Again the pang of being left
outside looking in, a little match girl with a bowl.
You don’t want to disappoint
and I don’t want to wait for your letter to arrive
just to find out that no, we are no longer friends.
Too old for this.

Where do we go from here?
How patient should I be?
Where do I take my bowl to get some soul grub
before I starve?
 
1-6

Give Me Your Your Tired, Your Poor

They pray for their ancestors after dark
with photographs, beans, and dead chickens
and p'tit gens hanging on mother's
nipples that taste like nutmeg in joumou
Mambo Leah cooks on her stove
whose third eye sews the voodoo doll
for boubous who play in the mud of Haiti.

Leah will summon all saints tonight,
African, Creole, and European,
as black as night and white as the sailboats
in Biscayne Bay by Lemon City.

She will dance an added trance for husbands
whose junk cars cost the same as Simone,
known as My Sin point of purchase
when "Boogie Nights" rings on her phone.

Perhaps the call is coming from Harvey
I'm Sorry But I Just Want to Talk,
or maybe it's Jake I Want Your Panties,
except that it's Brad at the Fountainbleu,
who, after refusing her overtime,
had to pay Xavier, how you zay?
tru dhee noze, his white powdered South Beach nose.



 
2015-1-20

De-Hymenation

The first time I ever
was momentous,
in ways movement
thrusts a mannequin's
hips forward, in ways
the twerk girls shake;
but throw them together
and you have the dance
of in-coordination, twitched
and slid across sleek
thighs, as I rode that silky
beyond where I really
should have stopped.
 
1-20

Miserable Fib

Ah
choo
ahchoo
not the flu
but something has me
in its feverish sneezy grip--
understand I'm sick
of kleenex
hot tea
and
sleep.
 
1-7

Bejeweled

She buys a nice piece at retail
and sells it back to me wholesale.

I make money and she lets on
she's Upper East Side Manhattan,
having four o'clock Devonshire tea
at the Tavern on the Green

with faux friends who ooh and ah finger
up to their white gloved elbows
her forty-eight hour diamond ring

while Heather thinks she'll never get caught
with her pantsuit down to her knees
exposing her knee high stockings
she says are the very best nylon

in the sandal foot style from Saks
she scissored last night after K-Mart
to show off her faux French feet.
 
2015-1-21

Dissection Of A Sex Poem

Begin by spreading it wide open
visible right in to the pale pink
that tells of freshness and youth.

Throw away virtue and sensitivity
of all but the neural nodes, quivered
to life via an inadvertent manipulation

of sub-navel pouts, extended out
to lingual adventures toward cotton
candy seduction and cardiac pulse.

Wrap it in occasional wanton cliche
and purple prosody before slicing
through the frills straight into the meat

folded back to expose the lurid glans
of a plump clitoris, nestled between
the draperies of swathed pudendum.

Measure the meter, demarcate the iambs
that still tap each foot in impatient
readiness, waiting for your interpretation.
 
2:21

Iced caramel macchiato
tan and creamy
I like how you get hard
enough to chip you off;
crunchy, chewy sweet
get stuck in my front teeth.
 
1-8

x y zzz

When u said x
I thought u said
u wanted sex
but u meant ex.

I don't know y
I'm now an ex
but what the f,
alone in bed

a little sex
about the time
it takes to p
before I zzz.
 
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2015-1-22

Reading Schematics (or plotting a map)

My drawings always curve
where they should be true,
twist, where they need to be
straight lines, directly through
the maze of switched on, wide
open, closed shut, tight seals
that merely direct and do not
show exactly where electron
flow and fluid dynamics takes
the essence of what I have left.
 
1-22

Moe Gale Dreams Big

It's a New York story
where an immigrant
son, a natural
salesman shakes green
from Papa's American
dream, shakes
to make a scene
in risky frolics
uptown

on Lenox Avenue
the heartbeat of Harlem
in a city block of shoes
shouts and wheels
a busy honk and squeal,
a sanctuary cut loose
from pale downtown.

[to be continued...]
 
2:22 Spicy Tuna

Her sissy strut on size 12
high heel platforms served
enough fish that I forget
she's a man underneath it all.
It conveniently slips my mind
drag queens don't do it for me
and I order sushi, dining in.
 
1-9

The Shawl

was woven as black as the famine
that hadn't died in Ireland
when her family left from the quay
to dream streets of gold in Manhattan.

To her surprise, it didn't sparkle.
The river, buildings, and sky were all gray
as she stood on the deck wrapped in her shawl,
recounting four burials at sea:

A Clancy from Sligo, stranger to her,
the Murphy's, stubborn, too old to travel,
and one of the unchristened twins,
"May God rest its soul," she said.

Later "'twas but the mixture of dirt
and mist of the Hudson on granite"
her Hell's Kitchen father shouted
when she wanted money for milk and honey

but left to buy kale instead
from a peddlar whose smile was as cold
as his pushcart in a dark alley
when he offered it for free

whereupon she draped her shawl
over her breasts like Mr. Magee
taught only girls at the hedge school to do
because of his proclivities

and from whom she studied letters and numbers
and the Mary's Virgin and Magdelene
she prayed to when Brother Joe died,
and they laid him out on the table,

she the eldest chosen to vigil
because her mother went insane
her father's stinky whiskey breath said
whose drool on her shawl dripped from the bars
still open for business at 1:00 a.m.
when Sean Kilpatrick staggered in.

All night she stayed, no longer clean,
fighting sleep and rosaries,
and then Mary Clancy threw her shawl down
and started to wail and scream,
but only the knock-down drag-about ghosts
and Joe know that Mary didn't keen.
 
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1-23 (limping toward the finish line)

Visionary Fib

I
have
visions:
centuries
unfold within me;
imagination awakens
my senses, vivid
and noisy
as if
I'm
there.
 
2:23 Beat Off a Different Circadian Drummer

I saw him again like I knew I would
but still it was a surprise
having him follow my footsteps,
catching glimpses in mirrors,
precious air, re-breathing not quite
enough oxygen. I get sleepy.

I know he is coming when
the coffee gets darker even though
the milk is the same. It's colder
with the furnace set where it
always sits and the negativity
rises the faster I speak affirmations.

Go away. I can't cope with you
in my skin. Bennie prescriptions
go unfilled, spent too many days
detoxing them and I cannot do that
again. So the coffee gets stronger
and it feels like a terrarium in here

with all the heat and hot showers,
I can't seem to get warm or clean.
I cannot stave him off forever,
my skin and guts can't take it.
There is a light, just enough distraction,
I reach out to hold a ray of tangible

sunshine that lifts me into the brightest
part of my life that I will ever have,
leaving behind the winter shade
who clings to my toes. I cannot
rid myself of him entirely anymore
than I could a most brilliant daughter.
 
2015-1-23

Insured Foresight

Is it wrong to feel joyous,
and relieved at the comfort
your going has served
my future? I wept today
knowing that now I can
fulfil all of our wishes
and still have room to make
my own circumstances
better, richer, and concrete.
 
1-10

Vivaldi on the Decameron

No Dante's they, Bocaccio's bawdy tales;
videlicet: Filippa dares guffaw
Rinaldo, cuckold, seventh tale, who wails
ottava rima epithets, no joie
de vivre, his dirge composed in minor scales
of woe. The Plague, I know, was rife, but awe
inspires; why belabor man's disgrace?
Oh strings, pray take me to your state of grace!
 
1-24

Route 2
long stabs
of empty
williwags
and cold?

Deah, your parts'll shrink
back on your bones
if you an't careful
tuh layer up,
keep moving keep

motorvating even when you stop
for coffee milk with a sneaky shot
of Allen's that's your Milford Martini--
lil sandpaper, lil silk.

How the hell yuh think
those flannel boys cut
that ice or plow them
lots for 18
hours
straight?
 
2015-1-24

Walk

glide
one
footstep
hip slip bump
when heels click on streets
with paces premeditated
to get right where men
stop thinking
and just
plain
do.
 
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