Aut-um-ism Evening

Slowly,
a collection of toys
forms at the bottom of the stairs
like almonds, uneaten
in the same bowl on the table

Red pies made redder
by his coveralls and white half-on
socks sticking out

She never asked why he was
but only why
he didn't turn on the light.

Le Matin II

Claustrophobic box of brain bursts showing

Zeus' sperm in fireworks of arrows - a perpetual disorder:

charge!

Picassian creativity en masse, 

serotonin 

siphons exponential rain bucket

of potential horses

l'idee n'est pas au contraire, mais il y a trop des idées d'organiser.

the starting gate opens, 

and then,

"Bang!"
A poem is written.

Le Matin

Claustrophobic box of brain bursts showing like
Zeus' sperm in fireworks of arrows - a perpetual disorder
Picassian creativity en masse, serotonin building up potential
energy like horses chomping at the starting gate
l'idee n'est pas au contras mais trop des idées d'organiser.

How We Die and Other Stories

Three breakfast burgers, savory with spinach, sit just heated on a plate
listening to the sounds of cats leaping and curling between window-screens
and lace kitchen curtains, excited by morning activities,
tease the huge steel stove dominating the
center of the kitchen of this 19th century cambridge apartment,
bellowing, “All those who see me must bow down in my presence.”
The man bustles around the beast and its captors, sink and refrigerator,
and pulling up his socks and picking up the nearest cat,
coo-ing “goodbye my love” into its white fur, presses kisses into their necks.

His mouth talks into his iphone, an extension of his soft-hands,  lingual, linguist telling it
in slow, over-anunciated English, “Gandmother died. I will be going to New York. Call me - if - you - want - to - take - the bus down - with me.”

Last night he told me about how things die. Grandmothers die when they stop drinking water, the way poets die with they stop drinking daydreams.

I smell the pungency of humidity and rush-morning cats, the sound of trucks waking and buses breaking, signaling it’s time for work- they, too, speak languages I never knew I wanted to know.

He raises his hand to his mouth and in his heart-rush pauses to think of what he’s forgotten - here he evokes the young Euryalus just fallen in battle, the blush of rose just passing from his cheeks- long lashes curled over his lids half closed in thought, black hair freshly showered and slicked back, beating body elegantly draped in mourning polo and dress pants.

I grab hold of his torso to remind him of his forget-thought, and he presses me closer. J’ai dit: “Vous avez une accent tres beau.” We converse in French, and I reveal to myself I’ve forgotten how we found ourselves here, in this kitchen asking about death and masala burgers, skirted men and how men become women, and things I didn’t know I learned. Today I told my mother how to come out of her skin and self-actualize.

“Tu me trouvez tres beau, plus fascinating et je te bewildered,” he said last week. Only later did I realize I should have been embarrassed 

The way a man discovers that his penis is the same size as his father’s; before then, one’s own feels like an orchid in a forest, carefully studied, mysteriously nourished.

A funeral awaits, Jewish grandmothers and rebellious cousins, too, but the only thing I remember is this: I found him in a forest. He smells of soap, pink lips and buddha brows. He’s inquisitive, open, honest and expressive, compassionate, deeply perceptive, and with raised hands tells me I can stay a few minutes after he leaves if I want to.

Pomegranate II

I sit on the floor of the eye, the lid wafting over my body,

forming a triangle with my toes, nails raised to my face,

stained, wet, posed before the cracked flesh of the fly-eye.

A single bulb illuminates the amber varnished pine panels, the eye-lid blinking.

And from where I sit on the floor, the fruit opens its mouth,

a mute chick's, brilliantly red, obsequious, begging naively for life. 

Outside, the eye lazily opens to reveal the fluorescent street lamp, so bright I can taste its photons, 

the metal head an ascerbic insect, narrow, lunging in its mechanical way for the catch, 

for cars that clog the freeway during January's rush hour, just a million salmon during mating season

swimming upstream hundreds of thousands of miles, the reasons for their costly migration still unknown by scientists. What the salmon don't know is that most of them will never make it home, and perhaps to the advantage of their species, so that their offspring can continue up the freeway to roar and thrash at the air,

buzzing with white yellow packets like a flower pollen distributed by bees,

or the spores of a puff fungi, kicked into the air in great flumes,

bearing light, sounds of bus brakes, funelled air, cigarette smoke,

and the narrative voices of hipsters.

It is here that I split the mottled red sack into pythagorean pieces, counting each one like months in a year, and allow the blood to pour into the blackened spaces of the floorboards and map out market patterns in a crooked line down my leg as my teeth eagerly

scrape, scoop reveal fish eggs and dreams, red eyes clinging to their sharp chiclets. It reminds me of the time I spoke too quickly for my boss. Her voice radiated tangency, filth, corruption and not-so-veiled guilt. 

Above me, the eyeball roll to reveal only white,

and by body revels in its apathy.

House Visit

Translucent purple plastic:
the lens of toddlers and the bucket
for daffodils, patiently waiting to be coddled
by a the green thumb
nursed by the uv lighting and minerals
washed abay by tooting and tottering
delivery trucks, smugly blowing smog through
19th century window-panes and mauve turrets
in raspberry sorbet and chocolate fresco:

a tiramisu of colonial brick and neo-gothic dwellings
suitable for hobbits- or humans
libraries and as large and alive as some
brains, seen through the yellow lamp-lit
windows- partially obscured in in ivy and shrubs
and always instilling a kind of longing for the sweet comforts of
home and hearth.

A Newton Fair in 2008 Featuring An Popular Klezmer Band

liquid violins and wooden chocolate
trellises hang from smoked oak apples-
the black, pouting eyes of children
caked in smirking satisfaction, their
smirks washed in charred ash and
remnants of alabaster fluff as
crickets and crocodiles zag and jig,
sway and rock to to the sounds

of the klezmer bands knees
knocking clapboard laughs from
striped cats' teeth and merry-go-round's squeals,
crying, "crit-creee, crit-creeee, crit-creeee,"
to the rhythm of  the kelzmer band's knees,
slap-slapitying the shiny sueded soles of their
worn dancing shoes to old women's flit-me-free curls
and cider jug belly laughs all the way
down to split-pee crick and egglestown spires,

bending two whole
rakes in half and two whole snakes into coils
along which the carpenter ant shimmies
to the tune of two-and-ten ton jimmies
right past the garden of scientists in the courtyard washing
"O's" and 15-foot spheres in a cemetery of sculpture
long since discarded by university students
for playing cards, posterity, reality, and milk teeth

traded for bigger game: giraffes, lunging
antelopes, wiggling banana slugs and
yawning carnivorous bog plants,
teeth gently closing over themselves
to the clash bang sounds of the great brass
klezmer musicians on Fair Day

Upon Sitting Down to Write and Observing a Lemon

lemon pilatory skin
a solitary torpedo of organic flesh against
inorganic composite burnished maple table top
an elemental, prized possession
of breathing carbon primary conglomerate
reminds me of my essential, self-confirming
membership to the carbon tree

touching its undulating, grandmotherly flesh
to my nose produced memories of the
produce isle of the grocery store,
the metal handles of grocery carts
and in the gleaming, over-waxed white floors

a false sense of security in fluorescent lighting
the same that instills anxiety in new hospital patients
and order to chemical laboratories
while illuminating the post-modernist corridors
of subways and the miniature text of my
law school casebooks- still ponderously shaping
the bookshelves into magnifying glass
curves for future inspection

a reminder
of self-engendered identity and
subconscious and conscious reminders
of what is left undone- a sink full of dishes
under a full moon- the reason they don't go out
with Wednesdays trash,
and the white light splayed, evenly
over all