Romantic

Our love would be a constant rain.
Smiles in a mask of new water;
The chaos of overgrown grass,
Sodden petals, and weeping flowers.

Our love would be metallic,
Built over years on gothic stone.
It would be operatic, like winds,
Or the spark of the city's traffic.

Days

Days under carcass clouds
When mischief wind does its best
To cool love and trample hope,
We chose defiant laughter
Backstreet photographs
And underground poems.
We chose sacred noise;
Beauty in the city’s
Profanities.

We chose glamour visions
And the joy of our
Spacious spirits.
A second childhood
In the traffic’s
Vanishing moment.

Times Square Hustle

Manhattan in the mist,
neon romance in the rain,
my bare feet soaked to the bone,
tracing the sad steps of heroes,
I stand under the theatre bill board,
with coffee and enthusiasm,
and watch the world’s busy nomads rush.
Times Square is like one large
smoking electric dragon,
a brutal, Islamic paradise.
a man called Chester-The-Joke-Man,
comes up to me and sells me a smile
for a simple “donation.”
I just got hustled.
he hustled me because he knew
I was waiting to be hustled.
I came to New York
just to be hustled.
I came to Times Square
to meet the lawless,
who are all to happy
to oblige my textbook romanticisms.
I laugh and finish my coffee,
walk back to the Waldorf,
my heart leaping with pride.
I want to go die, go tell Kerouac.
Jack I did it, I got hustled on Times Square too,
when I was feeling ashamed,
when I was drenched,
when I was hungry and with a caffeine panic.
Jack, I made it!
I too am now worthy of a modern novel.

First Poem in London (a la Corso)

My skin is oily, my eyes are blue.
My hair bunched like a teddy-bear’s.
I can see wrinkles, but they are not ugly.
They are manly.

Lines on my boyish cheek, chin unshaven.
The angel face is getting weather-worn.
But there’s more and more light in those eyes.
More resolve.

An always increasing
Sacred stubbornness.

Mudang

Favorit ---
the night a sprinkled secret.
a banquet of decaf and nachos,
beans, toast, and shit soup
--- dostoevsky ---
--- anna akhmatova ---
you go quiet at a mere mention
of John Hurt and Jimmy Yancy
--- quiet like night-time gardens
like trees in Basho poems,
as your breath turns warrior soft.

but that’s nothing, right?
compared to your eyes like blades
when we swap war stories,
tip-toeing our wounds,
discussing enslavements,
psychosis – ancestry
- an emotional biology.

your spirit – a tender membrane,
a volatile warmth,
emanating a thousand
unwritten poems – novels,
a literature of spells,
recipes, and rain dances,
that outclass the gods.