The crescent moon begins her question
with a hollow cheek pressed to the iodine sky:
she is an intoned boomerang, going up
and coming down again.

One brick-laid balcony on someone’s 18th floor,
amid this rooftop vista built up
from beige stone and wood:
two chaises longues, perched upon it,
their plastic the color of neon fruits.

Tea steam catches the late afternoon sun:
I walk through it, catch it in cold fingers, sew its
hundred thousand beads to my sleeves.

The Friend of My Friend is My Enemy

Change places: now I’ll be the angel, perched
delicately on your right with long rubberband whispers
to cast like grapples into your empty ear

and he’ll put on horns, plant his pitchfork
deep to fire nerves and muscles, marionette your hands
to some self-destructive mischief. I like to say

I’m an enabler, full of beautiful vertigo and
suspended disbelief: but this is me changing nooses
for bungee cords, this is one secretive touch

always ready to pull you back from the brink,
tandem when we fall. And when he calls you up,
says paint your face and meet me downtown,

then I’m green with envy and green with worried
sick with glassy-eyed photographs the only evidence
of a wild night, or bruises and blood canyons

from this party or that. Where was he with
bandages and a well-placed hand? Picking meat
out of his teeth; pissing in a corner somewhere;

ready to do it again. A pitchfork always gets
too heavy in my hands, after a while: I wish my wings
stayed strong enough to carry us both.

I don’t mean to seem like I care about
material things, like a social status:
I just want four walls and adobe slabs
for my girls.
– Animal Collective, My Girls

The things that I’ve loved, the things that I’ve lost
The things I’ve held sacred that I’ve dropped
I won’t lie no more than you can bet
I don’t want to learn what I’ll need to forget.
– Audioslave, Doesn’t Remind Me

Goldenrod, and the 4-H Stone:
the things I brought you when I found out you had
cancer of the bone.
– Sufjan Stevens, Casimir Pulaski Day

Warning on the last one, should you choose to look them up: it is one of the most depressing and beautiful songs anyone has ever written.

Anyway, there’s a lot of music about this stuff, and I could probably go on. I’ll stop at three. This poem is a true story about the First Real Boyfriend. I never went to prom in high school: it was a Catholic school, and I came out of the closet instead. (My girlfriend was remarkably understanding.) So the next summer, there was an LGBT prom at the community center in the city, and the Boyfriend came and picked me up in his white convertible; we dressed to the nines and had (unplanned) gotten each other flowers; which we then gave away to the group of sassy black ladies mentioned in the poem. It was an enchanted evening that will forever sum up the totality of that relationship for me: I was 18, and in love, and I still hold on to that several years later. I kept the detritus of that bouquet until there was nothing left to keep except that one piece, which he took with him to move across the country.

We still talk. He has a boyfriend now, and I’m recently without one, and so it goes.

I was reading Molly Bloom’s soliloquy from Ulysses last night. That informed the structure of this.

Bouquet

We gave away the roses to old sisters
sunning themselves in the June heat that night because
they said you got any of them for us honey
and we thought as good them as any other and
they belled with pleasures to receive
wilting fistfuls of red petals and thick thorns

and for the longest time the ferns and baby’s breath
withered in my room with their vase pool
long since evaporated to beige dust
until even what might have been stems or sepals
suggested only hair and hyphens and broken lines
that well-meaning mothers sweep up when you’re out

so I had to make do with the tattered
inconstant cellophane offending me with its
transparency like so much of what we were
with our brutal honesty and single tears which
brimmed and released on the phone or
in starlit parks or when you drove away from here forever

which of course is when the red scrap of satin ribbon
that had held the whole damn thing together passed
from my palm to yours leaving me thinking
that’s all there is to it except you knew at once
what it was and so silently we both knew
all there is to it is us and that is enough.

One last hummock of rock salt
dissolves slowly on the steps,
final rampart
from a brief winter war.

Sidewalks are wearing their necklaces
of brown water, puddled in the pits and cracks,
reflecting nothing:
tenements and spires are wearing headdresses
of fog.

No one else is on the empty street
to see the altar built of plywood and piping:
twin bowls of oil burn in its fists
so the new year,
crimson with warmth, can find its way in.

I feel a bit like William Shatner doing spoken-word.

Divorce Song (by Liz Phair)

And when I asked for
a separate room, it was late at night,
and we’d been driving
since noon. But, if I’d known how
that would sound to you, I would have
stayed in your bed for
the rest of my life: just to prove
I was right,

that it’s harder
to be friends than lovers, and
you shouldn’t try
to mix the two: because if you do it,
and you’re still unhappy, then you know
the problem is you.

And it’s true that
I stole your lighter, and it’s also true that
I lost the map, but when you said
that I wasn’t worth talking to, I had to
take your word on that. But, if you’d known how
that would sound to me, you would have
taken it back, boxed it up
and buried it in the ground,
Burned it up and thrown it
away.

And you put in my hands
a loaded gun, and then told me
not to fire it when you did the things
you said were up to me, and then
accused me of trying
to fuck it up: but, you’ve never been
a waste of my time. It’s never been
a drag.

(So take a deep breath and count back
from ten; and maybe you’ll be alright.)

And the license said
you had to stick around until I was dead.
But if you’re tired of looking
at my face, I guess
I already am.

All the awnings on my street are white today,
heads bowed in prayer:
on a morning like this, everything is
weighed down with joy.