Those Pictures

An aging beauty queen’s frigid smile

Coy, stupid smirk

The superficial, terrorized look

Of an animal just before

The car careens into its impotent, lazy head.

That’s the face in those pictures.  

We will all be there someday

Make no mistake

With our heads bowed    

We’ll grasp, without acknowledgement,

Our reaper’s hand.

No sense in flirting

With the reaper,

He will cleave you in half

Before sending you to hell

Or wherever you’re going.  

The cat sits outside my bedroom door

Pawing to be let in

Not caring, like cats do,

Of the crisis tensing the molecules

Thickening the air in this room.  

I fucking hate

Surrender.  

But beauty withers

Always replaced…by something bigger

And better and more alive

Before it dies  

Again..and again.

You Want to Write A Poem

That’s brave…

To take my life

And eagerly, spitefully

Put in on a page

For others to ogle

To study the ugly corners

And the littered floors

The filmy walls

Brave and bold

Like removing someone’s

Underwear, turning it inside out

Reveling in paltry stains

That aren’t yours

Will never be yours

Will not be yours

You fearlessly stand

With a golden halo

In front of Heaven’s Gates

Waving a white flag

Freshly washed

In my urine

And for that

You will easily be

The heralded hero

Bold and true

You beat this shrew

And discovered the witless charms

Of martyrdom.  

Theologian

You circle the periphery of clouds,

A vagabond of the firmament.  

Perusing the sun’s corona,

A specter always pining

For meaning

But never needing

The touch of a woman

Or the feral scents of intimate urgencies.

I want you...I want

To be the pungent indecency

That binds your feet to the earth

Inhale the seedy pleasures in dirt

The artistry of sin

Lubricious offerings

And corporal sufferings

When desire consumes you whole. 

All this

Before you go drifting back

To your heavenly elopements.  

Knowing Your Past

Look at you

Buried deep beneath the covers

Your nocturnal aroma,

Musky, red blooded, the hard

Acidic smell of a man.

I’m standing at the edge of your bed

Performing a study

The hard lines where the sheets

Fall against your thighs

Your chest

Your face cringed painfully

As the violence of a dream

Clutches your backbone,

Diminishing you into the frail

Skeleton of a boy

Every night

I ache for you

I want to climb into bed beside you

And with my hand,

Smooth your ruffled skin

Break into your fractured thoughts

To piece the fragments back together…

Make you whole again.