Love

Love is the only way
we have to fight against death
and death is not winning.

We are alive.
We make love.
We make each other.
For every one who dies
two more are born.

Yes, you will die.
Yes, I will die.
Yes, the beautiful flower will wither.
Life goes on.

Even if we all go
we will return.
There are seasons
to the universe.

Lost

All these words
and nothing to say

It's lonely at the top
but it's also lonely
on the bottom

How many years can one spend
not getting anywhere?

Oh God.
I look up and
here I am
in this life again

Surrounded by
the same people
the same walls
the same food
the same words

But I don't want to find it yet.
I don't want to get there yet.
I want to stay lost.
I want to get more lost
so you will come find me.

To Charles Bukowski

I never liked
Charles Bukowski
but I'm starting to.
You've got to admire
the long years of
serious commitment
to drinking and rejection
it took to ferment
the anger that singed
a million minds
with only the true love
of a typewriter
to see him through.

He saw the gunky carpets
the cheap apartments
not with the eyes
of the trust fund poet,
that have never been shot
through with the blood
of ripple wine,
but through a face
of salted meat
and eyes hardboiled
and pickled in briny
late nights of
dinged up legs
and dinged up cars,
hungover days
when the dust
haunts the empty room
that the sun won’t
leave the fuck alone
and the empty bottles
chime in the trash
like the dying honks
of a seagull or
an old Ford.
The real days
we're living.

Sure, the clouds
are always there,
the sun, the stars,
but they’re so
high above.

When I see Hank
(If I may call
him that) sitting
in someone's hideous idea
of an armchair,
holding fast to a
cigarette, I see
my grandma coughing
like a muffler
her beautiful red blood
into the rusted snow
of Columbus, Ohio.
Hank is angry,
Hank is nasty,
but Hank is not
wrong

and he is
folding the cocktail
napkins of hotel
lounges into roses.

Charles Bukowski is still read
by the real people
in America
who no longer read.
The real people in America,
whose struggle
is not epic
but mundane, or rather,
whose unhappiness
is heroic
in how small
and ugly
it is.

Lines

We fall
and fall
and fall
in love
and falling
we grow wings.

The New Fear

The broken moon falls
through the window.
This new fear is not as sweet
as the old fear.

Rebuttal

A rose knows not it's name
though first taught
we are of ours.

Swan

She was a duck and not a swan and I was some kind of sparrow, maybe.
Maybe she was a swan but in the way swans have clumsy saxophone necks
in real life and aren't royalty like in fairy tales.
Still, she flew in the sky and, when the sky fell in the pond,
she swam in it, and there I was, unable to be anywhere but the dirt.