New poem

Yeah, running a little late with this week's TWiN, what with Jaq and Joe's wedding this weekend and Willie being in town this last week. No worries, you'll have it soon enough. To tide you over, here's a new poem I wrote a week or so ago. Enjoy!


The Last Bullfighting Fan in Laredo

I was reading the Sun
Also Rises on the green couch
in the day room when I suddenly
proclaimed aloud that I loved
Ernest Hemingway.
Lillian, who had been diligently
pounding nails into the coffee
table, looked up at me, startled, her
eyes like two fallen scoops
of ice cream melting slowly across
a broken sidewalk. “Oh, you do,”
she said. “Well, who do you love
more, him or me?” “That’s tough
to say,” I replied, looking at her
face but not her ice cream scoops.
“Hemingway captured in prose
the fractured soul of man after
the first World War, but he has never
orally stimulated my penis to the point
of full climactic release.”
“Yet,” Lillian interjected, and “No,”
I agreed, “He hasn’t. Yet.”
At that point I pretended to return
to reading, leaving Lillian to her
dark task, but secretly I began
to consider the total cost of a bottle
of whiskey, a large-caliber firearm
and a plane ticket to Key West, or
if necessary, Spain.

Disturbing magician's sex poem

Nothing Up My Sleeves

I hover above you like a plague
of birds ready to descend
and rend your tributary
flesh as ancient oracles
await to divine what fate
your blood describes
for Thebes.

Still, you, like a magician’s
assistant lie frozen helpless on
your back, smiling bleached
teeth upward at the ceiling
so the crowd suspects
nothing, your eyes calm
heartbeat at adagio
patiently prepared to be
dismembered.

Depressing winter poem I wrote a few weeks ago, lost, then found again

Poem Written On the Back of Instructions to Old Stereo Equipment

The grass rots sepia
like an old photograph, a dry
daguerreotype, and the remaining
patches of snow are where
the memory has faded.

When a bee mates
with the queen, he
dies. And when he stings
he dies.
Bees are obsessed
with Eros and
Thanatos.

I gargle saline
like the doctor instructs
me to and imagine
I am drowning.

And you are a mermaid
who has revived me
on the seashore.
Making love to you I feel
like a phantom limb,
both here and far away
and always
aching.