Roosevelt Island Haiku 

Please consider my taste
The captivating pivot 
leads to the inevitable collapse
The truth of a time-
stamped poem is like 
too many detectives 
in search of a grand piano

and in another life 
I’m building rooms
exploring connection and exclusion
but today 
let’s just say the speed skater 
has an ass like the most beautiful 
windmill in Holland 

Let’s just say 
I read your Roosevelt Island haiku 
and found it marvelous 
Let’s just say
I never knew 
that Dawson Leery lived in Massachusetts 
I wonder if he listened to The Modern Lovers 

     drunk on the tramway
     hospitals & asylums 
     Young Turks, graffiti 

Perfect Friendship

Because you never settle for a quickie without a condom
Or for slapping your tits with an erect penis
Now I want you to spread your legs
On the donkey of our love bed
Because I want to thank your vagina
In the name of the maternal vagina
For so many things you’ve given me in life
Because I want to tell you:
 -Thank you, Cunt!
Before we separate
And buy two beds so we don’t sleep together.
Thanks to you, and my seed, we formed a family
Creating a warm home.
You helped me get a job
So I could earn my daily bread
With the sweat of our two brows.
Sometimes, you let me rest between your two tits
To meditate on the sex we shared
Throwing myself from your moving cunt
To come against the bedroom wall.
I know you came to Earth
So that your carnivorous vagina
Could devour this little churro of mine
That rose erect before you
Like the tongue in our labial kisses
Your hands gripping it tightly
To lead it to the true and necessary hole.
Instead of singing, I bellowed
And you moaned, feeling your nymphs turn to mush.
Tired now of our labor
Of inveterate fuckers
Now we separate rooms
Because I can’t stand
That unpleasant skunk smell from your cunt
And you can’t stand
The farts I let out, telling you as I fart:
-Catch them with your hands
To let them enjoy your peace.
That’s why it’s better that we sleep separately
Each in a room
Giving ourselves
Perfect friendship.
I, in my dreams, will raise my penis
To the temple of your vagina.
You, in your own way
Will sing to the penis that was light in your vagina
And the heaven of its palate.

Shadow Cat, 2004

After Richard Hambleton (1952-2017)

Shadow cat
p   r   o   w   l
Low’r
East Village
silky
sidewalk
slink
lookin’ high
lookin’
low
‘round lampposts n’
alleyway
piss puddles
for
a tasty
trick
or treat.

Oil slick
tangles—
blacktarsexy
sheen—
brown sugar
smile
n’ puncture claw hunger
jonesin’
for the exhale
of a hypodermic
pounce. 

Fat rat’s
‘round the corner
throwing bones
sniffin’ bacon
playing
its fat rat
games
ripe
for the pickin’
to plop

on the doorstep—
eight lives
d
o
w
n—
on this ol’ city
street
for a thump
(n’ a thump
n’ a thump thump thump)
n’
its lil baggies
o’ cheese.

***

Previously published in The Daily Drunk

Sugar

We were going pretty
hot and heavy for a while,
the bedroom windows
were all fogged up.
I made sure to take my time,
hit all the erogenous zones
because I wasn’t sure
when I’d be here again.
We both finally finished
and while still breathing heavy
I went into the bathroom.
Standing naked
in front of the toilet,
it took a minute
to get it going.
Figure the piss had to
weave its way through
the previous emissions
until it finally rushed out
of me in a hot stream.
I stood there 2 or 3 minutes 
looking at my face in the mirror, judging,
while it just kept flowing out of me.
Backed up from the first beer
we shared until hours later
when she gripped the sheets
as I released inside her.

When I get back into bed she says
“You were in there awhile,
did you have to flush out
all that beer we drank?”
I thought to myself
yeah, along with the guilt
of fucking my neighbor’s wife.

Toast

Blame the Veuve Clicquot & get ready to not be able
to concentrate on anything, because your girlfriend
is super horny for you she just rubbed two out. 

Blame doctor Dom Perignon, tumbling naked
wishes you were here wrecking her hair and covering her with kisses.
Deep mouth open sucking messy gorgeous unstoppable kissing
jilling her off a third one Oh—

She’s straight… outta the shower, undressed,
and doesn’t identify as monogamous for fucking fuckery’s sake,
she identifies as lightning, as wanting. As a sexual longing machine—
desirable destined for your arms.

As fuckable and functioning and ready and awake, hungry in love.
As mad and wild and ravishing and human and feminine.
As much yours as anything could ever be.
Deep as a sword could be plunged into a heart.

Blame the perfume in the starry cascade.
The spark back in sparkling. The light back in nightlights.

Blame the Moet for hot pulses coursing like a train
toward high times in this low life. 
Cristal too for Laying lying lacking lunging for
lustful reasons for here she is, refulgent. 

Never mourn nor pine for what’s right in front of you—
Come in haste like bubbles poured out to waste
this beautiful goddamned golden day
in this magic bed with her.

Nature Is High, Man

Too high to climb the pine tree
with the skinned trunk,
my ears latch on to the buzzing 
     of the forest dark,
a million stabs and suicides—
murder has many voices
     and many choices
and we wear the plaid shirts
and Kodiak boots not
     just for kicks.
An ample bear commits
no wrong by slamming through
the brush pursuing a moose.
     The moose might differ,
but the forest exists for every
thing and now and then a bear
     must eat a moose 
to feel alive, to feel bear-like.
The moose would argue
that its life means more to it
than dinner for a brute.
     But Nature differs.
Nature is too high to give
a shit what kills or doesn’t kill.
Things have to eat. Things
have to die and sometimes 
     these things coincide. 
Meanwhile Nature chills.  

A Good Sleep

You and I sure can dream.
We dream with eyes closed
listening to the words of the waves
laying on a beach in Costa Rica.
Driving around dreaming
of small towns deep in Mexico
where gringos dare not go.
We dream of good sleep and long love.
We dream while staring at fat gray clouds
over green mountains
or sitting across from each other
at a breakfast date
of strong coffee 
and sweet cinnamon rolls
where, at least one of us,
dreams for a kiss
while the other
dreams of longer smiles
and an unburdened life.

Sometimes we dream together,
well, not together, as in the exact same dream
but where we are tangled up with one another
in sheets or silence.

These dreams keep us awake wondering,
looking at maps, reading books 
and researching other places and possibilities
with other people.
Maybe someday we will dream
in the same direction.
Then we can finally 
place our heads on one another
and sleep well.

Published on Pornhub

I told this girl at a bar that
I got a poem published 
in a journal
and she said
‘that’s nothing
‘I’m published on Pornhub’

and at first 
I thought
that’s not art
but I went home
and looked her 
up on 
Pornhub
and admitted 
to myself
damn
that’s talent

Eye of the devil, Fear of the dark

Laconia, NH. Bike Week.
Things go sideways 
or the dead 
make it to paradise.
You’re dating the horror girl from Salem 
who reads palms
She’s Tiresias
She’s Hecate in Macbeth
She has a tattoo that says
Eye of the devil, Fear of the dark.
The Viking asks if she has any sisters
the weirder, the better.
The Viking doesn’t have a bike
but in the spirit of Bike Week 
crashes his jet ski 
into the Back Bay Boathouse.
The moon is an 8 ball
and our eyes march like 
pink flamingos.
I hear the boys at Loudon bleed the engines. 
I hold the table until eternity strikes,
my heart weighed against 
a single feather. 
One by one
some guy in leather 
is nailed to a St. Andrew’s Cross. 

Agnostic Behavior

Cloven skulls of
bovine beasts
Megafauna heads
housed upon the shoulders of men
Bison brains and yak
Bullhorn embellishing their codpiece.

Mythic cleaver

Obsidian pommel—
an heirloom to temper
MY FEAR  
I take his skivvies
and wipe
MY ASS
Cleaning
MY BALLS
with his beard.

He spared me, the fool!
That hare-brained rectal pollop   
And meanwhile
I grew to nurture
MY MIGHT
Resentment fermenting to foam, 
hissing oaths to make
Lunchmeat
of his brawny pecs,
tremendous glutes—
jigsawed fragments of bone.

Squatting, shitting
beside his vacant husk,
I scribe in scrimshaw  
MY VALOR
across his ribs
Porno pictographs in his secret cave
Lusty and violent,
terrible to behold!

Maidens weep
when the best man falls—
when he and the other fellas are dead
Women throw oaths
hurling stones in
MY FACE
as I raise
MY HANDS
to block
MY EYES
guarding the fact that I grieve among them.