I bring you nothing like a featherless bird
that's fallen from a nest, a sailor that knows
how he's failed the wind all by himself
like a black sail off the coast of his hopeless gates.
...
City rose, you don't bloom like the other flowers
the sun coaxes into unclenching their fists, you unfold
like an ocean at night lingering in your dark depths
behind a veil of fish hooks swaying
...
The loneliest, most protean modes of madness
rage in my cells like nightmares in isolation
watching the fireflies dance through the bars
as a secret gesture from unknown, sympathetic stars
...
Crazy, sunny day outside, blue sky,
and my shadow's got me in a choke-hold
so I can barely breathe. I'm wrestling
with the black angel in the way, my own vacuity,
...
When I was a child
I was uprooted like a weed of lightning
and cast like a dead snake
on a festering heap of garbage.
...
It's not enough to hinge a new door to your heart
when the house is built on flowerless quicksand
and the chimneys have acquired a taste for books;
poems are the birthmarks of stairwells climbing themselves,
...
No ray of the star in the lead,
none following, no one vector of light,
the compass needle for all the rest.
Eye to eye, side by side,
...
Trying to express a more immediate intimacy
with the life of the mind
without attributing a form to madness
might just be another way
...
Why do children of the poor die so readily?
By the age of five
they're already disarmed for life.
Is money a gene they're missing?
...
for Sally
God, I hurt sometimes for reasons I can only guess.
Don't know what it is, too much love, too little,
but it feels like I'm giving birth to fog,
...