Delineations, small bits and digits
to give us comfort.

I’m East.

I’m West.

I’m I. Comfort.

Here, I say, take this finger. It’s a digit, too.

No thanks, you say, it’s shriveled and smells funny.

That’s true, I say. But that means its precious. One day we’ll be shriveled and smell funny, too and they’ll put us in fancy boxes or jars. They’ll throw flowers on us and bury us like squirrels.

Arriving to my East - my beloved East Side.
Vertical Ghettos bleed into the horizon.

We drank and wept that night.

You wept for your missing Father. Last seen with Cancer.
Strong Bull of a Patriarch humbled and hobbled.
Your hobbled and humbled state meer hours from its appearance. It began instantly.
No water needed just time and drudgery. Regrets and realizations.
Prisons.

I wept for Perfect Moments. First kisses. Doomed Loves.
Weights still heavy on my mind.
The Lost Swede, coy and insanely passionate on the floor of her flat.
The Bird on Sauber’s lawn, young and insatiate.
Lady K, explosive and unexpected. Neon and electro.
Where are you all now? With lovers more correct or better hung or less broding, doting, attentive?
Less troubled, humbled and conscious of the whats? What whats?
Exactly.

But you had sympahy for me. My ragged drunkeness and pain
of lack-love laid bare before you.
We sang out loud. Father and Son together singing out our pain and longing - Singing Willie Nelson, prince of the blues
Genius of longing. …

Broken, mumbling, solitary Honesty
smiling with broken teeth, arrestingly beautiful and stinking

I pray to my God - bent low, prostrate before It, pleading, laughing
Crying for audience - Please God! Stab my Loves to death! Smite them with terrible holy hands!
And I stab them too - with damned logic, damned reason, damned alcohol and damned bitterness.

But somehow my Loves survive
Malignant gorgeous mushrooms, passions turned in on themselves - the perfect inverse!
Hate! Anger! Rancor! The Worms of Hurt and Heartache!

You - Born on the 4th of July but no patriot
No allegiance to anything or anyone - not even truth! Not even Truth! Not even Honesty - earnest and misguided!

But no matter - now I pause with my knives and turn to memories
Memories denied, forbidden, concealed beneath our wreckage.

There is pleasant-ness in that flotsam, small and timid
Lurking like a beaten child denied toys - without the imagination or will for new games

Holy Fuck! The Dust and Ash!
The Dust and Ash of dead friendship, camaraderie wasted on lust, compulsion, instinct, bald-headed ignorance needing a bath!

Horse fetus kicked and killed and buried, these are your words, only to be exhumed and kicked some more. Furiously.

Verbose rantings into the void, eloquent destruction until only the dust itself is beaten and clouds of it billow about choking us both, covering feet weary from running, clogging nostrils, poisoning lungs until they can no longer draw breath to speak!

And now we don’t speak and we haven’t and I suppose we never will again, my dusty friend.

Brush yourself off. You need a bath.

Mission? Find.
Query Unknown

Meeting dawn
Speeding East

London town
First impressions

Wandering Thames
Riding Tube

Pub pints
English fare

Cured trout
Irish breakfast

Double espresso
Short muscato

Hyde Park
Perfect Moment

…

Musing on the evening’s events
I rub my tired aching head
My hands hold the odor of end-of-summer sweat,
five cigarette’s smoke and whiskey I shouldn’t have drank

The street’s occupants
craven, bizarre, some beautiful
Studying one another from blurry searching eyes
Advertising grotesque anonymous sex

The smell of rotten fruit and fish and beer
waft with the intensity of tornadoes…

Hate! we decreed, sleep and disparate longings tugging at our eyes,
Hate is the feeling of full Love and understanding
that leaves you in a state of repulsion…

New York
Your repugnant streets of filth and spasm
make me Love you and understand you
all too completely

New York
Your Bodegas
no-star five-star low-end high-end slung together
in a Bazaar of glut and orgasm

New York
The place where I fell out of Love with the Old
and fell in Love with the New

New York
The place where I found a thin slice of enlightenment
reading in parks
wandering, searching, vomiting in streets and
worshiping to self-made gods
with glorious dance dance dance

New York
Where I met myself, forgot myself
and then remembered everything with too much clarity
that I once again forced myself to forget

New York
Where I learned truth isn’t for anyone
but the mad, the lovesick, the awkward and the lonely

New York
Home of the Ginsbergian Moloch(!), the Orwellian Future, My Great Longing
and the dreams of Millions
all frustrated, broken yet endlessly hopeful

New York
Home to the heart, mind and body that I Love
for the shortest interval imaginable
ending before its begun
What have I done!

New York
Home
I Love You
I Hate You
I Love You still, in spite of this

New York
Home
I must leave you
and learn to Love you less

I want to lie down with you
speak to you through action
engage in deep silent discussion
sing in unison
say everything through passionate silence

I want to laugh with you
revel in the way your cheeks dimple
jest devious inappropriate things
crack-wise
delight in the humor of the world’s folly

these lists and things of and with you
please god take them all
all these unrequited, overtly strong, frivolous things
the root of my impulsive recklessness
compelling a desire to feel numb

Need two lips you cannot kiss?
Negotiate want in singular dark

The timid find the lonesome truth
The bold will win and they will lose