Impulse Control

Impulse Control

We met under a neon sign

at the Coyote Moon;

a rundown bar across

the street from the Ramada.

She asked me for a cigarette

and smiled as I fumbled to light it.

She carried her years well

but her eyes looked a little sad

behind the smokey blue glow.

“Are you married” she asked

and I had to think hard about

if it even mattered anymore.

“Some days more than others”

I replied. She nodded and looked away.

Our Camels burned down

and the conversation stalled,

so we moved back inside for a drink.

She drank Smirnoff straight,

and swallowed like it was pride.

I noticed the wetness on her lips

and wondered how it would mix

with my scotch as we walked out
to share my last cigarette.

“I don’t like to sleep alone”

was followed by a well-dressed

exhale of smoke. “Who does?”
I shrugged, then I kissed her

on the cheek before going back

inside to close out my tab.

SMG

Voicemail

Voicemail

“Hi Marty, it’s me.

I woke up this morning

and I couldn’t remember why

I was here so I think it’s time to go.

I know I loved you once

but the wind has changed direction

and I need to follow it. I wish you well

but I’ll understand if you can’t return the favor”

SMG

In Dreams She Waits

In Dreams She waits

 

I dreamt of her

again last night,

the dark beauty

that visits me

in the hours

between horizons.

 

I do not know her,

but in that place--

that time, she

is as familiar as

a mother’s embrace.

 

She always departs

just before dawn,

places her hand

on my cheek, kisses me

and promises to return.

She is the smile

my wife asks me about

in the sobering light

of morning, the escape

I seek in the unbearable

wait of the day.

 

SMG

Tempest

 

Tempest

As I hung up the phone I could feel the storm building
up in Westchester north of the city. Her words dank like
the afternoon air of New York in August. Those days
when the city begs for the relief only found in an angry
summer tempest.

Remember that day in Colorado? You asked me if I still
loved you as we drove to Aspen in alternating rounds
of rumble and silence.  And the clouds poured down
from the mountain peaks like cotton balls spilled from
their bag. The soft edges melting into the green slopes
as they rolled down to the valley. In the distance sky,
the gods of air, fire and water clashed unseen, save for
the flash and report. Thunder rattled with a sound
best described as titans tossing trash cans in the
alleyways of heaven. And then came the rains, first
with fury, finally with a sporadic gentleness and a glimpse
of reassuring sun.

Do I still love you? I smiled and thought it a silly question.
Weather, unlike climate, is a transient condition. On my
way out the door, I grabbed an umbrella just in case
the distant squall turned southward and sun was again
overwhelmed by a passing storm.

SMG   



Poets and Other Liars

Poets and Other Liars

She told me that she wanted love

stricken from the poetic lexicon.

It is often a lie after all

but then again poets are liars.

Dreamers that distill language

down to its purest form

in a vain effort to sip 90 proof

metaphors of truth and passion.

I used to write love notes

on the fogged mirror of her bathroom

on my way out in the morning.

She would sing full throat in the shower,

sweet songs of joy and hope

that stuck in my head

as I walked out the door.

I suppose she stopped singing

when she finally realized I was gone.

She asked if any of it was true

and I looked past her

and nodded platitudes.

One more lie couldn’t hurt.

“I’m sorry I hurt you” fell

to the floor next to her tears

as I composed a new poem in my head.

SMG

One Night in Singapore

One Night in Singapore

The humidity of the summer evening

glazed my face with sweat and it glistened,

with the setting sun. Tears formed on my beer,

they traced tiny lines down the cold bottle

and pooled on the bar. It reminded me

of the night; I spent with her, below

the Tropic of Cancer.

I can still remember the embrace

of the warm night air, the smell

of zhuójǐn wàndàilán orchids

and I can still see the girl, the one

that haunts me on the long nights

of winter. She gave me a look across

the crowded bar, as much a dare

as a come hither stare. Those gilt edged

brown eyes that pierced the room

like needle and silk through wounded flesh.

She was beautiful and kissed me

without saying hello; her lips a sweet

and decadent champagne that I drank

until intoxicated. Her skin was a playground,

fragrant and salty on my tongue. We tussled

in the sand for hours until she pinned me down

with a smile. The night was quiet and still

save for the breeze playing with her hair.

I could feel her flesh part and for the first time

I understood her vulnerability. She was both

courtesan and concubine and she gave herself

completely. I took her by the throat and loved her

until she surrendered with a shutter and a sigh.

SMG

Love Drunk

Love Drunk

The epiphany:

Infatuation
brilliant flash,
confusion followed
by dazed emotional

intoxication. Self…    

…serving,
            …feeding,
            …absorbed,
            …deluded.

No regard, for reality

Fuck Reality!

Reality washes the dishes
every night, mows the lawn
and never remembers
to put the seat down.

Fantasy, bliss and bullshit
feed infatuation.

Idealized romantic dreams,
whispered words of seduction,
and kisses blown in the dark.
Doesn't have bills to pay,
never watches television
and is always in the mood.

Emotional intemperance /

love hangover:

Repeat as necessary.

SMG

Tides

Tides

We traced the shoreline
with deliberate footsteps
in the failing light.

A pointed conversation,
each solemn word lost
in the crash of the waves;

(The ebb of love
is usually measured
and unperceived;

a gradual retreat
with no regard
for the coming moon.)

and the rhythmic water
eroded all evidence
of what was, as we passed.

SMG

Everybody Knows

Leonard Cohen

Lycaon of the Lower East Side

Lycaon of the Lower East Side

Full moon Friday calls:
The promise of night
cloaks the travertine
and glass temples of man.
Silhouettes shape-shift
beyond streetlight glare
and gather in the shadows.
I am the seventh son;
dark ruler of alphabet city,
hungry in the lunar phase.

Satisfaction struts
in 4 inch heels
down Bleecker Street,
Chanel marinade
follows the footfall.
I watch with amber eye
and hold my tongue
behind eager teeth.

Tonight she will be my love,
and I will finally sleep--

safe from Aconitum dawn.

SMG

Across the Night

Across the Night

I surrendered to my desires

and fell into a fitful sleep.

Lucid dirty blonde dreams

and tattoo fantasies ensued.

A night of cold sweat lust;

thoughts of the base and dark

spaces between you and I.

Could you feel my tongue

part your thighs as you slept?

Did my desire penetrate the night,

find you longing on the other side

and hold you on the brink

of torture, need and ecstasy?

I thought I heard you sigh

as I devoured the skin of your neck

and took you from behind

those hungry tanned eyes,

and handfuls of flaxen hair.

As the morning sun invaded

did you wake with a start;

spent, chest still heaving,

the chill of the dawn air

dancing on your skin

as wanton hands had done

in the unrepentant night?

SMG

I watched the sun come up from the departures lounge at Schiphol

I watched the sun come up
from the departures lounge at Schiphol

Beer tastes different at sunrise;
maybe it's the bitterness
something like regret.

I left you crying in California
and you said you understood
as I walked through the gate.
I suppose the avalanche of clichés
finally buried your resolve.
But we both know
it wasn’t me or you; it was us.
Me in my cuckold horns
and you in your orphan rags,
both of us reading from a script
that was ill conceived and poorly written.
You held me like I was your father
the night he walked out the door
and I fucked you as if my ex
was watching from the next room.

It is 6:20 AM and I still have
some distance to travel.
I imagine you have cried yourself to sleep by now
and I am here, attempting to write a poem
about the absurdity of Humpty
trying to fix a broken tin soldier.

SMG

Tryst

Tryst

"I was hoping I would see you again…"
the words danced on my ear,
her breath and breasts warm against me,
"so I didn't wear panties".

Outwardly unaffected,
I leaned in to catch the fragrance
of her hair as it floated past my nose.
My lips pressed against her ear,
I made it known, I was pleased as well.

Her hand fell to my knee

and slid deliberately north.
“So it would seem”, she said
with a firm and knowing grasp.

The bar was crowded when I entered,

but as she slid her lithe frame
between the bar and my stool,
everything peripheral faded from focus.

“You ran away last time before I finished with you”

My explanations quickly rebuffed, she kissed me.
and my Bond like countenance began to crack.
“Now that wasn’t so hard was it?”
she giggled,  and came back for seconds.
She pulled me closer
positioning my hands on her waist.

I know there was loud music playing

but all I could hear was the sound of her voice as she said
“do you know how wet you’re making me?”
With a deft fluid motion, she slid my hand down
and back up under the hem of her skirt,
removing any thought
that she was prone to exaggeration.

I caught my breath, regained my composure,

looked past her coolly, and made it known
I was ready to close out my tab.

SMG

Picture Drawer

Picture Drawer

There are times,

when I walk through

the broken glass

of you, me, here and now,

that I think back

to the before.

To that long haired

Mexican girl

and the nights

we spent entangled;

untangling our need

and desire.

Of course I know

I fought with her too

but those battlefields

are green and over grown;

Appomattox, Utah beach,

Hue City.

I will love you

in the morning

and we will clean up

the mess we have made.

We will share a cup of coffee

and I will smile at you

through the tiny particles

that glow in the sun streams.

But for now

my mind needs to flip

through old photographs

and wonder about things

that never really existed.

SMG

Posted for CombatWords; come join the fray

Accidental Urbanite

Accidental Urbanite

How to withdraw a gaze

from a landscape carved in neon,

where the moon shines in the gutter and love.

How to withdraw the smile of  words; that

birthplace of something buried, yet shed

but for graveyard conversation

of day breaking bread men and garbage collectors.

How to reverse any kind of sky

into light So flight might linger time

into an outpost of slow

where patience is an elegance

to those in the know.

How to, when electronic words

only tell him their surface

lean his lead into the crystal listening

of her immeasurable water and mind

to spend the week looking downward

as skin traders whisper by fingertips,

Would that she waken to a brothel of the blind,

so the biggest mistakes make of themselves

a high-rise beyond understanding.

How to Injure Friday Immeasurably…

when paranoia and inadequacy intervene.

The title clung to the lap

like a consolation prize; an oblique enumeration

of chiasmus, his disguise.

Not a poet, not an intellectual, but of tar

brick and steel, the heart really thinks its stinks

at subtlety…

An accidental urbanite of a countryside

tackled of its voice; he could not swallow

the breath of its brushed incredible beauty,

only his fear mounted  panic of the

cut-out to leave her intact.  Woken,

he could not return her to where she was before: to

rewind time for her and shore to the good

of cockiness snuffed the note pinned to

her deep and of his leaving: “I am as advertised – shattered.”

Now he could not stay in the room with her mouth

and hear in every phoneme that he wronged her so,

that he should have trusted her. How, that he waters

his never, the shade of scatter in the Sundays of her

that mattered, for if her Bouche were a zip

by the night sky’s  unraveling.

Her well being is God in the waiting.

So my hectic week continues and today my friend @m_blanc_ is guest posting. If you are unfamiliar with her or her poetry blog The Baobab Papers you should check it out soon. She also has some fabulous audio recordings here and an excellent essay here.

Sirius

Sirius

As strange attractors

we danced together

in the southern sky,

like a stellar parallax;
singular or differentiated

dependent on point of view.

Across the summer night

radial velocity increased
as we approached critical mass;
the unavoidable orbital decay
of love on the event horizon.

From this elliptical apex

I can see how your luminosity

has eclipsed me, your gravity

overwhelms; pulls me in.
Even as my weakened mass
is drawn once again

to your side.

“What is seen as the brightest star in the night sky is in truth two bodies moving together; a bright main star termed Sirius A, and her companion, a faint white dwarf”.

SMG

Koko the Gorilla

Koko the Gorilla

“Darn darn floor bad bite; trouble trouble”

Is it a sign of things to come,
or has the time come for me to sign?

I stopped grunting long enough
to hear the door close.

What was it you said to me
on your way out?

You spoke to me in English,
French and Spanish at least that’s what
it looked like when I read your lips.

I was mute for far too long
and you only ever learned one sign.

I guess I’ll just have to ride
out this little quake alone
and hope my vocabulary
improves over time.

SMG

(For more info on Koko go here)