Lucky Ducking
(2006)

The shadows are long, the moon’s
not yet set, and the cactus
flowers are puckered open
still like lips or lips,
which beckon and expect
to taste and feel
or feel.

The bigger birds
are singing. Summer’s
trying to roll me and my island:
it’s doing the leer, the weave-and-wobble,
we’re doing the flat-footed-drunk ducking
punches,
and the aggressor-crowded dance floor
is all the seas that would swallow us.

Until the rest of these days go by,
there’s fear. That’s fine. This
day has the usual objects
traversing the usual sky and so–
we can almost count on it–
will the next.


The Safety
(2006)

I pick the broken
egg-fruit up from the street
and eat it.
Coffee-burned tongue
and I and today’s dreams
are one. Do men
love all these
deaths brought on
by wars, or what?
The long one’s escalating
again and every belligerent body
can be blamed. What the fuck
is easy to gasp from the safety
of this lucky accidental country.


Violets
(2007)

Usually I’m here alone and you alone
hear me place the calls to be seen
as another make-or-break moment in my rehabilitation.
Tonight, however, my girlfriend is here with me
together with our daughter, buried deep within her iris,
so say hello, my darling reader, and give her all the credit
for some of the man I am. She’s like the air

I swim through, the water I breathe, and now she’s gone
again: this happens in the domestic arrangements
whereby, since dream-laden embraces of middle
-of-the-night interactions are tools required
of the ongoing construction, the battle
to know oneself and why, we live,
nevermind your focus on more pressing tasks.

Violets bloom in the spring-time, foreign season,
and in the summer it so often is. They’re lovely
little flowers, found in a range of colors beside
violet, containing a ketone compound
called ionone which prevents the viewer
from smelling what she could smell
a moment ago, like a metaphor you’d never
make or see coming at you. Someday, this
lifetime of easy fame and meager fortunes
will be but more scentless water from the well
of Poncé de Leon, a tourist attraction of centuries-old
popularity, but until then the battle,
my hobby, if not my profession, rages on.