The Seedy Bar

Just another seedy bar
of pool cues and chalky eyes --
I know this yearning for that air
where puffs of smoke are thicker
than a moon of ash.
His shirts on wire skeletons
hang like flags for holidays,
but all the stars and stripes are gone
and memories are things to shred.

You're hot to light another wick.
Hot to shed that loneliness.
You file through men like greeting cards.
Open flies like envelopes
with answers in their little lids,
a sonnet in their pulsing thighs.
Nights are shackles tied to chains.
A prison staring at its bars.

I blame this gesture on the ache --
echoes of his absent arms
once diaphragms
damming rivers of the damned.
At evening meals,
the table starts to rock its boat
and anchors lose their tetherings.
Your dinner plate,
a face-down prayer.

Our Thistled Land

I trim my claws for Sunday brunch:
drag out vodka, orange juice,
nice champagne, tonic water, bottled beer.
Then I flip some sixty crepes
as if we're French and not a batch
of alley bodies dressing in expensive cars.
Counters look like sleazy pubs
and 10:00 a.m. does not dispute
the calling of the blizzard's foam.

I hand you scraps of weathered love
in verses meant to break this chill
like ice picks pierce a cube and spray.
You brush off climates of my soul
as if they are a mound of aphids
eating centers of a rose.
I dry the dishes carefully,
stack them neatly in a lie.

You place a beer cap in my palm,
gather gifts like wilted daisies
brightening a dying room.
I fiddle with its satellite
that circles livid ashen moon:
this epitaph, this impotence,
this tiny fist, a tight bouquet.

Between the lines of angry vowels,
my thin cocoons of artistry,
their butterflies in vertigo
questioning the mucus wrap,
years of running, rummy running
adding up like ticker tape.
You say to me in silences,
blunt and cold as
snowflakes falling on a rock:
"I drank away a stony heart."
As if a whiff of Chardonnay
could ever clear our thistled land.

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