What am I to do
with all these women/these words

these windows
and all these holes
I keep jumping through

God and the question of forever
keeps coming at me
unforgiving and hard/like the flat of your palm

leaving red blotches
passionate on my ass/on my art
I write my arse off for love
for sex/the money is only incidental

but here I am
dreaming in color
when the dark parts of my History is all I have

to show for all these years
of living hard/fast

hurry/up/down/up/down

feels like I am always being fucked by these poems
not one of them fuckers rhyming
and yet

they seem predictable
move them hips girl
raise that leg

grant me access to the inner sanctum
is God there
or here

or is the fear of my own power
metaphor for what I refuse to do
where I refuse to go in pen/in portrait

the wait for myself
seems longer everyday

soirees
on Saturday

wild women watering in the wonder of each other
every week
they come

early/late
I open the gates of my home
plant the dogs on pillows

and pray
that something holy will happen
that night

or the week after

soon
a line will emerge
as prayer

as supplication to a simple smelling of the earth

women smell like the earth to me
after rain

after a few hours
days/weeks and weeks after she exits

you smell her/pheromones beating back your inky hand
in the high heat of your New York apartment/I become drunk

on the smell of her cunt
under the sheets

sometimes loving a woman makes you
inhale

sometimes it doesn't hurt too much
if it does not last forever

the practicum of forever
and poems make for boring renditions
sing/speak/saunter the tunes of an angst
a change

a range that echoes more than human strains

record the sweet ache
of a lover turned good friend

the ends of things
mean the beginning of others

others will come
other words/other deeds/other leads to stoke your heart
your art will keep record of the notes

tote them from lifetime to lifetime
rhyme or rationale
ignore the bacchanal of your own reluctance

do not muffle the minute twist of detail after detail

you are only vessel
poet
you are only a sheet of carbon

consider yourself
lucky to have been written on

morph that uncertainty into a verse
terse as it may be/at first-draft
craft the warmth into it

afterwards

sink down and swim
you need to reach
into the pit of your most sordid parts

remember why you wrote your first aria

sing this ragged effort with the same open heart
semaphore your art/woman peel back the doors

release the singing
say the impossible words

grasp your fickle courage
and retch the grotesque wonder of your own truth