BONUS poems 10.15.08

...and if you won’t save me
please don’t waste my time

deja vu streets
in the city no one misses
but everyone lives in
gray morning
gray faces
chinese charles bronson
going back and forth to his car
like an obsessive compulsive
aneurysm head
atypical cells
heart attack gamble
gas pains
chest pains
chess nights
sodium spells
cholesterol nightmares
talking pipes
falling leaves
browning city blocks
whisky breath
and winedrunk soul
2008
you whore
you harlot
you work calendar
with not enough days off
kids crying in storefronts
chicken wings lining the sidewalk
as a man plays
the accordion and smiles
toward glass cities
made out of beer bottles
as women pull babies
along glass cracked sidewalks
as fortunes rise and fall
and the next thirty years
paint themselves
across my mind
in muted color
while the sun rises and falls
over all
that i’ve ever known.

still has fire

well
here it is
the morning
and i can’t get
it down.
the dj won’t help
he’s hell bent
on strauss’
sunrise.
i try and wait
it out
but my stomach
starts getting to
me from hunger and nerves.
this has gone
on too long.
too many mornings
without the word.
i look at the
publications
lately
and i’m doing all right.
but that was last month
that was the summer.
christ, have i become
one of those writers
who are already resting
on the past?
writing about writer’s block?
or is this it?
nearly twenty years up
on rimbaud
and it might be time
for me to put down
the pen
shut off the machine
pack up the notebooks
and head off to africa
for cancer, ethiopian women
and an eternity locked up
in the family vault
or to simply fester
in brooklyn
until i rot and wither.
i hope not.
i hope this passes
whatever it is
an aversion to the morning
an aversion to strauss
and that i can put it down
again
like always
because this kid
still has fire
i know it
and i hate safaris
verlaine
and the taste of absinthe
in a cafe
by the seine river.