wracking up

I list a long line of failed friends,

racked up like blow

to be taken at dark parties

with white-collar jackals and their

laugh-a-dime dandies.

I talk to America,

One’s left –

Huh?

and it seems it’s me this time

who takes the opportunity to live

beyond Sanskrit chants and back-read

poetics

I would have guessed my

last guess that he’d be more

thief than liar

A lover’s paradise rolls quietly by

windows stained with chalk-glyphs

- mathematical alphabets as whirling

and unknowable as the stars

I watch beetle-broad men duke and tourney

in the bespoke comfort of a new bear-pit –

slinging Shakespeare and maudlin elegies

around as rougher men fists and dust

Be less afraid –

Now? – he laughs

Time’s ripe for funeral summers run for profit

in times less ordinary when a single scroll

can’t hold the generation to ransom, as if creating

was enough momentum anymore

America, it’s time to go home –

Hosanna in excelsis! he growls

We’ll shout down evangelical bell-hops

and skip-jump up to Lorca’s Harlem dreams,

left dusty in the grey snow banks

He taught me to row there in that park,

like meeting Sondheim and hearing him compose

for you, a different meeting

I ask one more question

of my dark buzz-cut compatriot

Where in this dark sea are you my friend?

He looks at me all side-long, anxious to find his light,

a nod to his square-jaw – through cigar smoke and

that pale grin he finishes his syrup

and throws me a bundle of rags -

Here, enjoy.

They smell of deer - stiff fretful death

and a skinning too real to forget.

They’ll cut off your arm next time –

that angry fix is yours alone

I talked to myself once, asking more and more

for no refrain

sing my Gloria Gloria and laugh no further

at white-collar fiends and their oil-slick eyes

or Boroughs will find you and we’ll slip-slide

into coke-numb elegies and you

Good night -

Take off