|
Letting myself flow into your sweet smile;
the words I remember brush over me,
drop silently,
and I'm lying awake in my bed
It all passes by so quickly outside me
but this space in my heart
lasts an eternity.
I ache for your company
I ache for your company
I speak with my eyes...
lingering over your form.
I watch your body move,
I watch every time you run your fingers through your hair.
Sometimes it feels like I'm dreaming
The train glides by outside,
groaning against tracks as cold,
as cold as the night
and I picture our embrace
in blind alleys and alcoves;
you ask me for a kiss...
In my room for the night, I'm lying awake
looking at the pattern the headlights make;
they're coming through the window
and they're dancing,
dancing on the ceiling.
I think about the patterns my fingers would make on
your skin,
dancing with my love again.
dancing with my love again.
I'd glide over your form,
drawing you up into me.
By my side to keep me warm,
filling this space that aches.
Sometimes it feels just like I'm dreaming.
Spider Messiah
I think I may,
I think I might
have vacuumed up the spider messiah last night.
He went quietly, didn’t put up much of a fight…
…succumbed to the forced air electric whine of my vacuum
cleaner.
I didn’t do it on purpose.
I generally try and leave the spiders alone.
It’s part of an unspoken agreement,
some sort of a shaky alliance, a cold war détente,
predicated upon my belief
that if they ever saw me sucking up one of their tiny
brothers,
they’d come and visit me in the night,
repay my cruelty with a thousand tiny bites.
Then I started thinking,
“If he was the spider messiah,
then I wasn’t acting according to my own will, anyway.
I was an instrument of the great father spider above.”
Like Pilate, I washed my hands of his web.
His time had come,
and his work had been done.
He had fed five thousand spiders with the body of one fly;
he had healed the sick, cast out demons;
he had raised up the rich spider’s daughter, for she was
only sleeping…
healed by his faith.
He had already delivered his sermon on the rafter:
“Blessed are the eight legged,
for they shall find peace.
Render unto the human
the things that are the humans,
for thine are the nooks and the crannies,
and therein lies the kingdom of God.”
He had stayed up all night--
praying, praying--
praying: “Father take this cup from me.”
His time had come,
And his work had been done.
When I go back down to my basement
lo, these many nights,
I foresee that my eye will be caught by a thousand tiny
lights:
reflections of a thousand tiny golden chains around the
necks of a thousand tiny believers;
a thousand tiny golden pendants of a thousand tiny vacuum
cleaners
Alone
Cigarettes
fall from my lips like wounded soldiers
as I survey the wreckage and destruction we have made of
each others' lives;
my love lies angry in my bed alone
I’m counting the sins of my past on
cold clay reminders
that reach out for the warmth of your soft flesh...
and find nothing.
How many times have I wronged you?
They rush together in a colorless swirl,
a collage of regrettable actions;
a veneer of ice that threatens to separate our lives,
to keep us cold and right and alone
and away from each other.
How can I find a way to make this night seem less alone?
I’m scared that when I die
there’s gonna be nobody there to cry for me.
How can I find a way to put this emptiness
back in the bottle where it belongs?
I’m looking in vain for a way
to erase my mortal mind
and the darkness threatens to take me
I need something to hold on to
I need somewhere soft to lay my head
I need your voice to wrap its arms around me
Summer Nights
Summer nights
run like blood through the flesh of my memories;
moments of precious, immeasurable value,
cradled gently in the seams and shadows of
time…slowing…down:
endless, coolbreeze, starlight,
somersault sounds of cicadas singing on nights
when the world is sleeping all around me.
Remember when the eight-year-old
woke up on June First to an endless series of summer
vacation days
stretching off into the future so long and so far away
that it seemed like time stood still
and your whole beautiful unlived life stretched out before
you like a thousand roads?
You weren’t jaded enough to see the possibility of failure
or unhappiness or mediocrity – just an eternity of summer
nights that wrapped you gently in
the eternal now of youth and promise.
I met my wife on a summer night
when the desert air literally shimmered
with all the water released as the ground cooled off,
streetlights slowly working their way down,
giving the impression of sunbeams drifting through dust
in the nave of a church.
I met my wife on a summer night
running through sprinklers in the city park
soaking up the beautiful black midnight with our skin, our
hair, our lips,
the smell of cut grass filling the air with summer
debauchery
sensuous, drenched and sexy,
and suddenly she’s right here.
Soft arms stealing around me,
questioning at first,
then tightening and
holding me,
needing me,
pressing urgency flying like heat between us;
electricity conducted by the water
as we make steam with our flesh.
It rises off our skin
and into the grateful desert sky.
We crawl deep inside each other
and lay there together away from the slings and arrows
of outrageous fortune.
This summer night exists for us:
in our blood, in our hair,
in our breath and our lips,
sliding on our skin
and breathing in
and out
with the deep rhythm that sits beneath our soul
and pushes us slowly up into each other.
There are flowers in the desert that only bloom at night.
Tonight, there are no differences,
no conflicts, no opinions…
tonight we bloom together
and tonight we are perfect.
Our cheeks whisper wordlessly against each other
and in the thick silence of our embrace there is no measure.
If you’re outside, you feel a sudden chill in the air
right before the dawn.
At its coldest point,
the whisper of newness
hangs delicately in the balance
and I wish I could make this summer night,
this one summer night, here with you,
last forever.
|
Smoke crowds the unwashed I
on nights when whiskey swirls
and all the colors run together
and all the beautiful girls
lit up by the neon, winking through the smoke
lipstick and cigarettes, laugh a little bit too loudly at the joke.
It smells like sweat and stale beer
and above the general din of confusion you hear
the high-pitched verbal assault of a couple of ladies
out for a 53rd birthday party.
They’ll be hitting the dance floor soon,
cuz it’s rookie’s night tonight.
We have a saying here:
we don’t have a town drunk,
we just all take turns…
And it's my turn tonight.
You got the whirr and ka-ching
of the pinball machine
the crash of the empty bottles in the trash
there’s a guy standing over at the bar
putting drinks on his credit card
cuz he just ran out of cash.
I think I’m gonna go stand over next to him.
Hey brother….slide me another one
It's a Fast talking easy drinkin
heavy breathing dry heaving
sink or swimmin lookin at women
slicked back down low
gotta go
if my mama could only see me now
you got another cigarette?
is it last call yet?
and every time I try to turn around there’s this guy
tap tap tappin on my shoulder like
“hey buddy, look at me while I bug the shit out of you...
it's allright, I don't need to talk to you to impress myself anyway. "
And I think Frank Sinatra put it the very best when he said
“I feel sorry for people who don’t drink,
because when they wake up in the morning,
that’s as good as they’re gonna feel
all….day….long.”
Ancient heroes gather on bar stools;
the shadows of their rusted weapons linger at their feet.
They wander in off the street
and I chase their tales
…catching golden shadows by the throat.
Stephen got stoned,
drinking after hours at the Dingo Bar
until four o’ clock in the morning.
Stephen gets stoned
and tells me he won the
telluride bluegrass festival flatpicking competition,
two years running.
Stephen got stoned, wandering home
through alleys and byways in the 5 am half-light
of what the rest of the world thought was a new day...
but not for Stephen, no, for Stephen it's still last night.
Suddenly, the beautiful thick drunken stillness
of Stephen's night
is shattered by his neighbor's dog
barking snapping
red tongue flashing
through white teeth crashing
gnashing upon him.
He sees a hammer
and decides he's gonna go after that dog.
When the neighbors finally called the cops,
Stephen took one last defiant, drunken stand
and their bullets ripped the hammer from his hand.
Stephen got stoned
like the first martyr of the Christian Church;
the light of God shone in his eyes,
blinding him with self-righteousness.
The rocks tore into his flesh.
There were no great men to carry Stephen to his burial,
no one to make lamentation over him.
Somewhere in the corner of a darkened room
sits an inherited guitar.
Somewhere in the shadows I hear
steel strings vibrating softly
with the sorrow of just another wasted dream.
One Night
Your eyes are
soft
You almost look scared
I want to reach out and fall
Into the tangles of your hair
How can I find another way
To tell you how my flesh would sing with the melody of your
touch
How the hair on the back of my neck rises up
With unanswered questions
How my empty limbs refuse to leave without you
How I’m longing to lose myself in you
I never thought it would be this sweet
Just to lie here
And hear myself breathing next to you
Your skin is pressed up against an empty shell
that has been trying to fill itself
With whiskey and forgotten nights
We have stolen like thieves
These precious hours measured out like jewels
Hidden in the morning light
Hinting at the day to come
Somewhere between lying awake and sleeping
Held in the promise of being something with you
Easy
Street
I’m kickin
back with the high class
got some ice in my glass
and I’m fast down the Madison Avenue bypass
I’m going the right way down this one way street
In the leather interior of my existence
there’s no resistance to the quick fix
the insistence of the thirty-second courtship
makes the names ubiquitous
That’s why I spent more on my new car
than most folks make in a year
I’m stickin behind the status quo
(its gotten me this far)
and I’m grinning from my ear to my ear
So I go out driving in my luxury sedan
I’m gliding along and I see you standing there
with your skateboard
Our eyes meet
and for one brief moment
there’s something between us that goes unspoken
its something I can’t quite put my finger on
something I had forgotten about a long time ago
back when I was young
and my life was new
Oh, I remember what it is...
You look like you may not even have five dollars in your
pocket
and I’ve got more diamonds on my right hand
than you’ll ever see in your lifetime
Yeah you’re right old man
I may not even have five dollars in my pocket.
And every time I get my hands on something nice,
I hock it.
I got a backside lipslide and I can rock it.
But wait a minute:
I look at you and I see
A man gliding along in his own land
In his luxury sedan, and you will never understand
just what it means, this life that I’m livin
Your empty space is my playground;
your municipal edification
is the site of my physical gratification
and every spot has a name
we’re grinding you down
grinding down your curbs and your ledges
your blocks and rails
your driveways and your loading docks
skating down into a concrete dream…
sometimes when the sun hits the sidewalk
at that perfect angle,
it reflects off all the pieces of glass and sand
and my path is strewn with more diamonds
than you will ever see in your lifetime.
|
