Boys and Girls of America

I have seen how we grow cross eyed in classrooms

and am concerned with how little most of us

grin when we kiss. Where are the ones we left

in backseats of our mother's station wagons

fumbling for the braclasp of the world?

Please touch one another more.

In exceptionally public and overcrowded places,

demonstrate that affections exist that are beyond

the scope of our control. I will not be offended

by your tactlessness. It does not matter to me

if you are unattractive. My heart has been beating

at a concerning rate since Sunday, but I believe

that the way it touches the roof of my ribcage

is affectionate so I am keeping myself on this diet

of coffee and nicotine. If I have a stroke,

please call my mother.

Ladies and gentleman, I am ill suited to the bluelight

of the television and its thick film of noise.

My yelling days have passed and now the only place

I am interested in being loud is bed. I am not embarrassed to admit

that I still have faith in poetry and its quietude,

the manner in which it compels me to stop for

a moment and admire its self-certainty

like a pretty thing in heels

whose pendulum sway somehow distills

the screeching motion of the world.

Most of us have been writing about a feeling that can

only be communicated through the touching of lips, but

after a long day I still want someone to read to me as

much as I want sex and a glass of whiskey.

Boys and girls of America, there is nothing

unstylish about being genuine. I had

two drinks before writing this because I find

the idea of your judgment terrifying. Still,

I want the best for all of us. If I had your names

in my address book, you, collectively, would be

the first on my dinner party invitation lists.

I spend most of my time alone wishing to be disarmed

by your honesty.

To Be Titled

If you ask the man with developed opinions

about love, he will tell you that the

lipstick leftover from the Prosecco and kissing

last night is actually just clarified moonlight.

If you are on the bus staring at your knees

he might ask Are you feeling okay? and

and tell you that, for a

broken heart, the remedy is not The Cure

That you can get commiseration from your

friends and your liquor and what you need

is public radio news to quiet you down,

the sound of some permanently composed,

eminently educated

reality going shhhhh. This is going to turn out

just like it turns out.

The man with developed opinions

about love knows about the gardens

in Times Square and Hell's Kitchen

that grow your favorite flowers

but thinks they smell better plucked

from the lapels of NYU students.

He doesn't even live in New York. Sometimes

his pretensions will make you want to hit him

in the teeth and sometimes it's enough to make

you tender. He does not believe bouquets

should be limited to flowers, thinks that every page

of written word is just another apocryphal Gospel

and that really, truly, he is someone you can

count on.

If you ask the man with developed opinions about love

if you're pretty, he will write you a treatise. If you ask

about the ocean he will say, “how wonderful, to live

in such a medium that makes it so we cannot deny

our connections.”

But when you ask the man with developed opinions

about love about love he will give you a sad smile as if

you're forcing his hand. There is a train he will have

to catch, an appointment to keep. He will kiss you on

the cheek and turn away. It will be a month before

you get the letter that explains that love is everything

you say as you're in the process of saying goodbye.

Truer

Sometimes I miss the old sadnesses

that made us truer—when we were teenagers

and it was all exposed nerve endings and the

miracle of sexual desire, when a smile

from anyone could break or recompose

our hearts. Older, we are reasonable

but somehow out of breath when it comes

time for the I love yous. Purposeful with

our passions as if they had some utility

beyond the way they felt on our tongues.

Let us articulate to our lovers the electricity

they produce, the way their skin tastes to us

like the drinking of honeyed wine. And if

we manage to may it never be the stuff of self

congratulation.

Remember

we have been forgetting the days when goodness

was not something built but something found

and happened to us like a car accident leaving

our bodies bowled over on the sidewalk,

staring without sarcasm at the untouchable birds

finding their way to more tender climates.

Rain #2

When it finally rained we could barely
walk from the night spent drinking
pleasure from skin
and I thought maybe
someone was congratulating us.

The week before
there had been wildfires at the edge
of town. Refineries enveloped themselves
in plumes of rich smoke and I made guilty
faces over cigarettes dropped from car windows.

But now the Southern sky
clapped
for us and laughed
till it cried

The next night a congregation
of puddles had captured the moon
on the porch just to show
what they could do.

It made us nervous in the way
that beauty always appears as
conspiracy to modern lovers.

Dog

We put the dog to sleep when
she started to have seizures
that sent her fish-like onto
the tile floors.

At your parents' house in
Dallas I cried for twenty
minutes as you held me against
your dress soaking through
the thin blue cloth of your heart.

Two months later at my
grandfather's funeral
in Portland it was
all spent.

Shadow Tricks

I see your shape in crape myrtles and anything
bone thin. Thinking of you as winter comes
degrades both of us because I broke
you at the turn every season, so often
wondering whether age would transfigure
you to bloom or if you would ride the ridges
of your disaster to their termination point.

I never knew why it wasn't enough
to just share the pockets of a coat with you
standing out there in your backyard
watching the crepuscular light play
shadow tricks on the rippling lake.

That evening, you told me
that bare trees pressed
against the sky looked to you
like the dendrites in the brain

lit up
county fair style

and, yesterday, I read something
similar in a book.

But it is getting harder to separate
you from your teleology and remember
all those nights when we were the only
living things in Texas who even bothered
to smile.

Untitled in October

Whenever our lips part
ways all I want to do
is the autumn