Velvet Hours

I

On the concrete, I think of my sister.

While–

  I sit beside a sister-like fire hydrant.

It is so warm and so soft, glowing like the fireplace

of  The Moon.

And because the moon is out, I think

I have fallen 

below 

the line 

of stoicism. 

For the past week, the Marriage of My Life has

been insomnia and splendor, both the two smiling grooms

to my groomsman. 

It is only 

out here, where 

it is

so warm and soft with Kindness, that I take

the moment to acknowledge my pride. Not in the terms

Of my vanity, no, but rather of a simpler cloth that I am

Cut from:

I. 

Am. 

Romance.

(and) I find that within anything I do, Anyone shall find praise

so easily, like the Expected Pill Bug under a shallow rock.

Those who see it, too, elevate my Breaths and Thoughts;

Things that dance, just as we all do,

under the streetlamps of ourselves.

I do form intention, and for that reason,

I am precisely the alchemic mixture that bubbles up.

And up. Then over.

Another day, another week, another waking 

dawn 

before we roar,

Consider:

a bus is filled with cater waiters: black and white and red-

Socked things drinking themselves to death and back

avec corner store coffee and old fruits.

The cigarettes come later.

Later in yawns smoke takes in lungs,

later, in those yawns before The Sun and after The Moon, there is a gleam

of patent on the leather of the street,

which is surely to be piss up close

I look from a distance;

I’d rather the shine be leather.

No one can wear heels here. No one can wear anything, really.

Boston was an angler fish, just dark enough so you can’t

see. it. coming.

And New York is a waning gibbous, 

Both will take you by surprise, 

like the English coast.

Of course, that’s what my sister says.

she is fond of the moon since birth.

II

And under those dimmed streetlamps of distant provinces

there are cataclysmic cha-chas; 

one, two, dancing feet.

Like a Tuesday afternoon.

The women’s legs are at aphelion

,men’s wrists in perihelion.

Where Charleston used to be the rave,

Now, in The Dark, there is Russian Roulette

just outside of oil-lamp glows.

By the ferry building, couples and throuples take

to the sea by means of their shoes

that should not be exposed to water.

Haven’t we danced under that sculpture before?

But now, it is only carnivorous cries that kiss the laughing

of the tapping dance shoes.

No one can see the bow now.

I step away from it all to look at the Party-and-Church-

Goers of my life, unfolding themselves.

They are drunk on revelrie, excitable by the aqua stars, and

as they sing and stumble on their arms and voices,

I know that they all belong to me. 

Their loveless and soundless humping, I should think you’d like the image.

Because before the morning there will be a gun

SHOT of eloquent insults, But, 

for now, there is only us. And them.

I am not in love.

But I do know what I mean

when I speak of the party of my mind

and those that attend it.

Outside, in the opulent champagne

that is a puddle of New York’s finest yellow,

I find a glimpse of you in the whoop of a drowning woman.

Where once there was a beauty from afar,

it is only reality of the newtime daytime.

And the daytime has no shine.

Wet and happy, they all return

to dry land.

Then, in the open air of the sky,

guests have long checked and taken back their coats

and now is the hour that their jewels rise

on Necks and Things

into the wakening white pinpricks 

Above.

Initially published in Reverie Magazine*