SONNET
Across the room you sit, a bone-bled youth.
Your sunken, tired purple eyes that with
Their sexless tease declare the bitter truth:
That yours is not so young or fresh a myth.
A dozen years ago you felt perhaps
That peacock eyes would see a way to live.
Your russet hair like rusted flames collapsed
Around your face, not ready to misgive.
A decade can consume the flames and plumes
And you were fucked up in your time like me.
Perhaps like books there was impending doom
Already etched in your concavities.
My guilty glance across the room implies
That I am just as empty as your eyes.
FINGERPOST
Doddering old fools, you have to kill them off eventually,
And no time's like the present.
Push them off the backs of treadmills and wave Sayonara
As they sink, a pile of aluminum and tennis balls, into the
Asphalt, beseeching the world to make sense.
There are two of them in a picture print, well done by Bill Bone and company:
One grabs onto a clutch of stems, as if
She's on an eight percent grade out of
Bristol, trying hard to downshift. I wonder
Why the flowers haven't popped like whiteheads on a mirror?
The groom, who's life my uncle threatened,
Is noticeably absent from the album,
Though, she's still all cotton blossoms and moonshine. And later photos will show
The dead flowerheads on the floor.
Her face is waxing, gibbous, one hopes, nose like sleigh runners,
And the skin on her hand is smooth and white and out of the shadow her breasts create.
The second, with about the smallest pearl stud money can buy
Tweaked in his cravat like the center of a pinwheel,
Looks at her with God-knows what kindness in his eyes.
He's been grey-haired and horn-rimmed and hogtied
On green linoleum since his first heart attack…
Did the boy running three miles on dirt to play baseball
With a tree trunk and a whole cowhide for a mitt
Imagine he'd ever wear oyster grey gloves?
For the love of a pretty daughter don't the suns and moons
And all the hazy planets change their evolutions?
This was the growing up and death, all in one.
So today, when she jokes about her black blood,
How chalk full of it she is, just to grind my gears,
I dip back, I dip back into sleep on that .
Fetid pond of a green couch, in the depths of which
I can still hear wood on wood closing .
And the pneumatic hiss .
Following close on the heels of the flowers,
And I ladle abuse on her like goulash.
Today I asked my mother (who does not understand art)
Why she doesn't like pictures of people.
And she said,
If money could have bought a smaller headstone, he'd
Have had it.