For April 6;Another oldie for Jeff

This blue blue day stretched out before me swings its hips like Spring. Coquettish, ebullient,tarty- a succulent,cyrulean eyed twenty year old of a day. Waiting to be corrupted,embraced, wasted. She waits, this day-like most twenty year olds, not for one great love but for one great afternoon... Of sweltering, naked, carnal enhancement. I am waiting like a clock, the inching drip of the obsolete faucet. I wait. For the blink blink flicker of the planet, that churning turning grind of lust. Of lust made real. Curtain lolling in an open window breeze sound of traffic mixed with sweat mixed with dust from the open window becomes a way to map this moment becomes ink to me. You become ink to me, the quill of your spine... I catch my breath on a stone. With my teeth I would build you a temple made of eyelashes, some monument of sighs. With my want I will build you this blue blue day. This effervescent witty need- some feathered desert- in which I wait, pulpy, unapologetic fruit of a plum. My skin stretched taught, I wait. Wanting.

for April 5: For Jeff, then and now.

Wake up in the dark. Listen to the rain mimic the song in the dream you were just having. Watch the new Winter light hatch the day, a coral polyp, purple in the bottom of the ocean- bursting. Remember what cold is. Remember the sound cold makes, the disgruntled sound of the faucet, feel that sound. Lonely and alone, the accentuated alliteration of feeling- the way the "L"'s role careless off your fingertips and collect in puddles on the floor. Forget about the puddles. Don't care about the puddles. Spread out like a starfish in the middle of the bed. Make the bed feel like home. Stand in the kitchen, naked. Drink wine. Make coffee. Drink wine. Occupy both hands, all the time. Make your hands feel like home. Imagine, just for a moment as you claim the hill to the side of the house, while carrying four bags of groceries and the Sunday paper that the man who pops onto his front porch in nothing but his dressing gown and and invites you in for a glass of water, or a cup of tea or- "anything you fancy,really" is just being neighborly. Entertain the thought of going in, just for a moment. Sing all the songs no one knows you love. Play air piano as if you know what you're doing, no one can see you. Find yourself humming bad disco or 70's porno soundtrack you've only just invented. Make yourself at home. Ignore the ache. Ignore the way you've learned to recognize the sound of each individual eyelash. Have lapses in judgment. Take them dancing. Take them to a bar. Wonder how many of the smug shiny people are building themselves a home, deep, somewhere hidden behind the spleen, working at being oblivious to the lithe limbs of lonely. Consent to being set up on yet another bad date. Stop carrying the conversation, take up the conversation you had with yourself, earlier alone in bed, making sounds you'd forgotten you knew how to make- good thing you live alone. Wonder if you make him nervous because you just can't make yourself care about the silence emanating from his perch next to yours or the fact that his hand keeps lightly brushing your thigh and all you really want to say is "you've really got to commit to that or stop." The incessant buzzing of a thousand gossamer mosquitoes. Wish you were home already. Start flirting with the waiter. Wonder what it will be like to wander home just slightly less then sober, stumble a little on your front porch, fish for your keys in the gaping hole of your pocket, take off one item of clothing for each progressive space between the front door and your bed, a bread crumb path for nobody, tonight- find your bed, the sound of your head on the pillow, the muffled crunch of one leaf under foot, one body carving itself a way to be whole, a way to be home.

For April 4: of old lovers and otherwise

I fix the fissures everyday. Put on a happy face a good show an excellent pair of shoes, my best come hither but not too close, smile. I read the papers, bob my head, know all the notes pretend I know exactly where I’m going and which sultry glass of wine I’ll drink when I get there. I’m telling small fibs and larger ones; let’s not call them lies, too obvious. I can’t even make a haiku, can’t follow form, these days, and can’t follow. These days don’t follow. I allow myself these small indulgences. Memories. Across ten thousand miles and years and years of history, bad food on strange continents, too much sun too many secrets, so many times we got lost, willing ourselves to never be found .Now I understand, you never needed the rescue party. I did then, I do now. I want someone to hold me down. So little left of me, I am afraid of blowing away- Damn you. For not being here. For treating me like something you found in your shoe. Small, dark, hard, dirty… Something invisible and wrong. Smudge. Crumb. Grain of rice- Damn you. So many years ago… Across ten thousand miles, from the grey end of the spectrum You call me. 3 in the morning. You call me. Half asleep, how could I not be? But your voice, cold and damp as predawn, wanting. I always wanted to fix you. Tell you stories. Hold you down, quite the dust in your limbs. Still the urgency, the ocean never stops. Your ocean always sounds the same. 3 am, noon, a year ago, forever in my head on an endless loop. “You’re so much better then this. I’m not worth loving…” Untrue. Untrue. Untrue. And I did already. Love you. Still do. Your absence like a presence I can’t wash away. Should have known better, that everything breaks. Is broken already…some of us carry shards in our palms, hoping. Or just living. Stigmata? Warning? Ignore it. Cross against traffic, climb the fence, say the words…live. I’m playing the game. I am out running night terrors. Pretending I haven’t woken myself crying four days in a row, 5 am, screaming “I don’t want it”, repeatedly. As if you can hear me. And I mean it. I would give you away for nothing. Keep the memories, you not being here and being here, I don’t want that. I can’t breathe through it. But I can’t give you away. You catch me, a fish in a saltwater prison- I can touch everything. My touch turns everyone to coal. I am soot black, ash cold, making it up on the fly. So I am scouting café’s, eavesdropping, drinking with both hands, hunting for a pulse- my own or someone else’s, no matter. Tonight it is butter coloured leather and the velvet underground. Spanish red and The New York Times. I want nothing. I have nothing. Next to me, two late thirties white guys in beat up fedoras, too short trousers and wedding rings talk about their next big advertising coup. I could not care less; I welcome the sound, the emptiness. As they leave, mr right side casts me a sidelong glance. I remember that humans are supposed to be social…”hello”, just that. “You destroy me with your eyes”, he says. And before I can tell him, before I know its true- that I feel incapable, a cipher, a seizure, a muted siren in fading shades of dusty covered sepia, before I can tell him, “I know.” He’s out the door- a fading shape in worn out tweed.

For April 3: After Wilco, 'Impossible Germany'

My tongue works in solitude Seals the cracks Unearths desire Right here Quieted by nothing Fearless and terrified Timeless My tongue works Wonders Recalls a memory Sweet as pastry Sharp as need Sweet as time slowed down Endless chains of minor chords Bow me like a fiddle Pluck me a string instrument An orchestra Find the hollows My tongue trips stealing words Hidden behind mortar boards Whispered, cast off, treasured Spit out the taste of regret forget the word “if” Improvise With a single breath Surrender Find tandem Find flesh Find me a scaffold Two words I surrender Find tandem Flesh Tongues Words Find their double Double over in the dark Tongues Work wonders Here

For April 2

soot/basalt the moon in her orbit spins on a spit soot/basalt endless ocean of snow glass/ice glints on concrete fire hold what you hold tight even when your hands go numb memorize the contours memorize your breath frozen fog held suspended every footprint echoes traceable even in darkness soot/basalt a trial of bones glass/ice the moon in her orbit spins on a spit give me the desert deconstructed a pile of sand under snow blowing a trail of words aspirated inundated warped and waving in full moon light hold what you hold soot/basalt sifted glowing

April 1st/middle of the night

I miss you like a metronome. And can't stop and won't stop. The weight of a thousand clothes pins- perhaps if I...? Well? I want to feel something don't I? Seismic intervention. Concavity of the soul-deep, such yawning of loss, the dry eyed blink. Weight of 515 empty calendar squares, too many days-this day. Some days I recycle, count days, retread thoughts. Wonder what if, as if, if only- miasmic, misanthropic time, some Moliere farce gone very very wrong. The king has sold all his clothes or donated them for some worthy cause in Buelahland, where everything and nothing happens, not heaven, not hell- no in between, purgatorial nothing, just nothing- where I imagine you might be. What if, as if, if any of that mattered. Except this; that I should wear you like a tee shirt. This night, recycled- turns to nights made indulgent by self pity and wondering. Sometimes I wonder if you can find me here. The day you die, three things happen. I see butterflies, everywhere-orange, in gutters and street lights and police station waiting areas. I see butterflies in the coroner's office while I wait to identify your brackish water, swollen body- butterflies, 3 pm, between the coffee machine and the pay phones. Proving that everything is virtual and everything virtual, actual- in the file where I have kept every message you ever wrote, for twenty years; two brand new messages appear- one after the other at 4am, 23 hours after you jumped. I cannot bring myself to open them. They glare at me daily, in bold. I talk to your parents 29 times on the telephone. 58 times, I say- "cremation, Kumasi, I'll take him." I'll take him... 4 days later, you end up with your parents idea of a Christmas and Easter, Catholic open casket fiasco where a jaded ex lover, who was not, claims to be your wife.

An unpublished work to get us started

Harpo Marx, after a grueling 16 hour day of shooting could be heard by his neighbors, pacing the hard, gleaming floors of his sea-front penthouse, glaring, metallic out the plate glass picture window, hexing the ocean and, screaming- for hours. Urban myth? Bald-faced Lie? Cruel joke? A microscopic grain of sand in that ocean. Unfathomably, irrefutably of no consequence. All truth is fiction, all fiction someone’s need for truth made real. Vocation. Avocation. Don’t imagine you can stop me. Don’t imagine you know. What haunts you? A dark dank seed planted before you were born. Caves and caverns haunt me, a storm in the bottom of the ocean I will never see coming, I didn’t see it coming… I write ‘til my fingers bleed, ‘til I am Bukowski’s piano, drunk bloody known, splayed out on the kitchen floor- dissolving. Harpo? Did he ever dream of piercing that wall, that window- a hand, a blunt kick, a scratch or two -the ocean… the ocean the ocean, is it better to be swallowed up whole or swallow yourself slowly? Olga Broumas wrote by candlelight and stealth, a prisoner of organs and time. Louis Armstrong played ‘til his lips bled, nightly- to roaring crowds who danced and danced. Splayed out on the dressing room floor which was really a broom closet- Little Louis, just hiding in the closest, scared out of his mind- a storm behind that door he never saw coming, and a bloody lip and a swollen face and a roaring and a roaring in his head. We are not done. We are not dead. We are not that lucky. We are stuck. Staring out windows. Screaming. The ocean the ocean the ocean, we want it, we have not reached it, yet.