I miss you love; I am drawn to imagining
your face again.
I have put off such indulgences for the months,
years, hours,
Stacked like alcoholic anonymous tokens
I feel like a convict getting out of
incarceration on occasion
The slow walk to a long escape counting
down parole
Visualizing the chain-linked razor wire
sliding apart in an aperture
Of light to a highway with a taxi into
my New Orleans
The stagger of ordering a hard drink, shaky
hand and bodies
Noticing and not for the pace of
smelling the honeysuckle on the wrought iron
Fencing where a man gives himself
permission to roam
Afterhours and the meandering silences
of a packed Frenchmen Street
The trombones blaring, trumpets packing,
drums like palpitations
On a rhythm I have been unable to
normalize for the months, years, hours
Stacked like slot machine disks in a cup
thirsting to be slid into a mouth
Remembering the sight of purple bayou
irises burgeoning the lick of yellow
I have ignored the idea of greeting or
seating for an endeavor involving coffee spoons
There is altruism in the distance you
keep fitted like a sheet behind my preoccupation
With all manner of sidebars in writing
of politics, science, God and economics
The shanty-town parlor tricks wade
through receding hurricane floods
I remember what it was like in my
twenties belly hungry, broken-egg like
Thinking about novelty, virginity,
pair-bonding, matrimony, procreating progeny
The buffet was a career of personal
achievement served in a tea cup of what I thought to call you
Flavor was condensed like bullion left
to disperse in an ocean of soup
The brackish could never mend with the
Atlantic; too distant such lovers
Still water, yet the flowers cannot take
root in continental currents
Ignoring you has been like living at the
beach and never looking at the shoreline
I am beginning to think about glancing,
but all the salt still makes my eyes burn,
Stomach nauseous, ear canals sloshy, and
the starfish make a paradoxical canopy
I miss you so much and this charade as
an accountant, a brother, a father, a writer,
A home-owner, a voter, a grandson, all
of it is nothing to pondering the relevance
Of nonexistence, of this hobo life
staring at computer monitors, photographs of smiles
The irony of a heart than can sponge
leagues of empathy for every emotion
Tome after tome and never once know real
love
Knowing in my thirties I still have no
idea who you really are
Certainly an amuse bouche in glances,
the variety of kinship, children, fellowship,
But you, no, this is a dance of
forgetting, which will always bend
If we were to ever look in the eye, I
know not to listen to time, she makes promises constantly
How else is the clock to abide, but just
once could I have an hour?
The social oxidizes the tin shell,
gritty-rust burnt-orange crumbly
Words tumble to the floor mixed with
pubic hairs and post-it notes
Scribbles of dates, times, phrases to commit
to memory
July rains unforgettable like a song
that clings to me
Melodies rolled up in drenched carpets
after the levee broke
Watching wrens follow each other on spring
lawns landing on lantana bushes
As if they were butterflies, cocoons or
eggs, nests as plain packed-together
With the refuse of nature strings,
sticks and ornaments of autumn
Love, I will say your name like
Voldemort when I read Harry Potter to my daughter on the sofa
Time stuck like peanut butter to the
roof of the palate fitting in adult and weekend parenting
Every other time like a sweater for the
months, weeks, hours
The haze blurs if this is more Muddy
Waters or Nat King Cole
I will give up every vice if I thought
it right
I will do every grace if I thought it
made the morrow a better stay
I once did wish for heaven to have a
gate, to see that love had a blessing’s face
The cloudless is neither black, nor
stark, filled with every image to the state
Of matter a mind may contemplate, so it
is you are part God to me
As is every non-loving thing, antithesis,
antonym, I need not know your name to begin
To love you back, I love the world
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