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Above Ground

Today, after sitting
alone at
the corner
coffee house with
a book of popular
fiction and
a burger with cheese,
I noticed without
really noticing
the photograph of
a girl floating
belly up
in a brilliantly
blue pool.
Her eyes lightly
closed and
around her
the iridescent
water rippling with
luster,
she floats
with such pinpoint
angularity
that she operates
as architecture
there.
A framework for summers gone.
Where mother is
no longer in
the kitchen
sculpting cold cuts,
the kind you and
your
best friend forever,
mummified in colored towels,
ate
with fingers
prunny from artificial years,
water dripping from bodies
in shapes like feet
onto the Formica.
No, because mother is
buried now in the
sprawling cemetery across from the
jersey turnpike
and the pool is dry and
scabbed with the bodies
of burnt and broken bugs;
and when I noticed
more than not noticed
the girl, her form
forming a
cross,
I felt tears
leap into
startled eyes
which blurred the
pool and made the
water into wave
and for a moment
I could see her
swimming off the
page and
away.

Presentism

In the dense Florida air one night

we mingled with the wallpaper.

Staring transfixed towards it's sickly browns

and seventies mod shapes as the smoke  

from barely lite joints curled slowly;  

bits of the sparked cherry  

blearily reflecting back to our brains.

And when we could no longer fill in the quiet,  

she covered me in the coat of her bottom lip  

as her pelvis wrote  

a bel canto  

for her tongue.

High off the sounds of Ginsberg  

and the Pagan ocean,

insane from it's incantation,  

we sewed the sheets with feet 

and legs till the knots of thread  

bled us down to one.

Fording the river of time and reality  

in bell bottoms and lonely bras,  

our breasts and breasts hung dangling,  

four suns tilted evenly around the earth.

And for a moment,  

orbiting,  

I hallucinated sounding groovy.

Evening

It's nearing eleven in
Brooklyn where behind the closed
doors of once apartments
now something obscured the
sighs of residents as they turn
in as they toil over half finished
works of art not yet perfect maybe
never perfect.
And behind one of these rooms
behind one of these faces
I lay and you lay over me,
a hand thrown in careless comfort--
fingers that hardly grip
at this warm body.
It's the way we
love now after quite sometime
without question and easily.
I shudder and you rub my
t-shirt where the small of my back meets
the cloth as if you could
stir away these hidden nightmares that
coat my memories in the dark.
But you are sincere and I
am suddenly moved by
the gesture
and I kiss your nose on
the freckle
that straddles it with almost
flawless symmetry
not yet perfect,
but maybe.