1.
Awkward baker crumbles donuts early Friday,
groaning hours incandescent, jumpy knees.
Loneliness makes no one perfect:
quietly re-sorting sweets to unrequited voices,
while crisscrossing your zenith.

2.
Absolute bird chaos
delighted erotic frolicking
gangly hanging inverted
jostling keeping aloft.
Maybe ninehundred old pigeons
quite ridiculously soaring
telepathically
under vivienne’s window
excited youthful zeal

On the upside of a disaster tonight
In the company of smoke and fire
Burning my way up to the sky

On the downside of a dilemma tonight
Interrogating desire
Holding on too tight

On the outside of the end of the world tonight
Truth is I feel fine
With that weight on my mind

On the inside of invincible tonight
Looking for someone to fight
I got the means I got the time

On the other side of the door tonight
Having stepped into the light
Realize I’ve been flying

Though the scenery disintegrates
Dandelions don’t forget
To coordinate color
With the sun.

Rivers linger along avenues.
Skyscrapers avalanche.
Pockets of clover cover manholes,
Staining the boulders green.

Flashlights look like
Stars in a dog fight.
The great liquid earth lunges
Without empathy over everything.

Sometimes you are a coat
too tight in the back.
I’m trying you on for certain weather;
hanging you up and wearing you out,
I take you on.

You are a cloak somedays
and I am mysterious,
hiding under your collar.
Or you are leather and I gleam.

Usually, you’re a warm wool itchiness:
shoulders stuffed, bent lapel.
Matchbooks slip through the holes in your pockets
and wander around the hem.

Your sleeves are too short
and show off my wrists.
Your buttons fell off.

My chest is cold holding you together,
and I can’t sew. Just take you on
and gleam mysterious in certain weather.

Tonight around four a.m., after yelling,
stumbling and crashing had ended,
I went downstairs to inspect the damage.

A table had been overturned again;
broken glass and flowers, food and wine,
plates and napkins all over the floor.

While I stood there, a neighbor came to the door.
“What the hell is going on in this house?
How many people live here and why

are they in the street ramming dumpsters with cars?
I know the owners of this house,
and you cannot continue to live here like this.”

My brother came to the door,
spoke to the man outside
and came back in. I almost bashed him.

Tomorrow, I meet with a lawyer and a banker,
then clean this woman’s house
while he sleeps.

The house has been tired for years.
Grandpa painted it just before the cast came off.
Way above the shutters with one plaster arm
hooked in a rung, he yelled, “Grandmother’s gone mad
and your aunts won’t do nothing.
Your uncle don’t even matter. But it’s okay.
See, the rollers are better these days.
It’s easier than it must look from down there.
Now that I’m almost done, I’m still not sure about the color.”

The next summer was all he could take.
Heat tolled on his body. Nodding off lonely,
the scorch set in; his heart wouldn’t hold him up.

Descendants had edged in on his piece of the porch.
The hum of the buzz of the stuff in his house
ran him out long before the floor ‘d given out,
and he built it back up to hold in the noise.

The toys in the carpet interrupted his slippers,
and the letters stopped coming from kin.
“It’s the end of my time, he yelled to his doctors,
no more renovations. Raze the place.
Someone else’ll take ove

It’s time to think of years
like a child thinks of days:

instead of stairs,
there are flights,
instead of shots,
bottles. Like whole things,

one is for nothing,
another is for love.
Tomorrow we’re building,
but today is for play.
Now it’s a field, not a blade.

Surrounded by too many days
that keep getting too small.
I’m getting too big,
stuffing days into boxes
and burying them in basements
that don’t belong to me.

John Lee Hooker died
the day I went into the city.
I found my girl and left her
even faster than I met her.
Now there’s something
I’m forgetting.

Not her name,
but the year I’ll scribble on the box.
It’s not a word, it’s a book.
And the title is a number,
a different kind of history.

The things we take get smaller.
The things we keep get bigger,
but time won’t be taken at all;

lonely as god, teasing with moments,
anchoring with albums, and tracing
in our heads the things we forget.

Maybe the finest thing Fredy ever
did was show me how the cruise ship
turns around in front of the city
like a dancer in front of her daddy.

Between two bridges on the lips of Miami,
the January sun glares off of port
as the ship dials east on a dime.

It’s named Imagination, but,
more like an elephant, it spins
with a sleepwalker’s caution for corners
and quiet as a miracle.

Then it stops
with it’s bow in it’s own afternoon shadow.

Tiny flapping hands flap even harder
to urge Imagination’s stroll out to sea.

We don’t even get out of the truck.

The shadetree fisherman
Study how the ripples lap the bridge pilings
and ignore the ship as well as the Dodge
as we drive up from under the bridge.

“That one leaves every Thursday at four thirty,” Fredy said.
“You watch it often,” I asked.
“Second time.”

Part 1
At the beginning of the rainy season, my old boss called to tell me about the Captain. He was a sweet old drunk that lived in his van in the bookstore’s parking lot. The day before, his van was towed away, and that rainy night the Captain slept in the dumpster behind the store. I offered him my basement. He cleaned it up and made himself comfortable. He drank a lot, passed out early, and spent his days on the back deck staring at the canopy.

Part 2
As the rainy season ended, I explained it was time to move on. A week later, I returned from a trip to learn that my housemate found the Captain dead. The coroner called me every day for a week trying to identify him, but for 40 years, since going AWOL during the draft, he was the Captain. Last night, my old boss stopped by with a picture of the Captain standing on the bow of a ship, 30 years younger than I’d ever known him. David Stanhope was scribbled on the back, but I never called the coroner. We sprinkled his ashes on the bay and quietly wondered how many of his stories were true.

After I stopped crying
and realized how quiet
it was in the lunch room,
and how tight
I was holding my broom,

I stuffed the kid’s poem
in my pocket and went
to get my bucket to mop.