There’s a place in me
despite it all
where contentment lies
fragile
a guttural home
of solace and loathing both
for joy
not found where others
locate easement and meaning
you will not discover me
spearing a whale or
circumferencing your fattened
demand to chain my needs
for more than this routine of
sorrow.
Indeed it will be likely,
on Tuesday you find me
supping with strangers
libation undulating in my wine
blotting out focus
lighting humor’s wick
on Thursday just as likely
the ledge and its cold
grey slate, quivering beneath
my teetering weight
as I rinse myself beneath falling rain
and the impulse to let go.
This is the clatter of a discontent soul
made such from before recollection
no excuse, no explanation,
sometimes in mendacity
surviving without living, only
able to get that far, past and future
not present tense, as if vaporized
an empty window with no view
the back handed slap
a ruined chemise in your teeth
for whom of us really knows?
How discontent works into the marrow
the trickery of sorrow leaching
satisfaction as silent hemorrhage
I could point to bad habits
reeking of gluttony and a switch of
madness or else
modern world’s awareness
calcifying our retinas with
24/7 neon lights
nudegirlsnudegirlsnudegirls
I peal my sins off one by one
leaning into you with regrets bosom
and suffocate the very spit from your lip
until you are blue and unmoving adjective
like my fucking heart.
Maybe it is the torrent of rejections
piled like sawed off limbs
miniaturized in pill boxes
for Ash Wednesday’s cross
I may expect too much out of poor, dear life
rickety wooden hope almost burnt to a char
but what fancy isn’t ecstatic joy?
Indulge me, or write me off as
vagabond hedonist, but never
was a math class or week sitting at
office desk, an ounce the pleasured
meaning found between your oiled legs
and that as they say
is the naked truth.
you can condemn me a coarse, vacuous being
malcontent and ululate, and you’d probably be right
especially on Friday nights
when displeasures wick burns low and
all hallowed souls gather to
seal their profligate covenant
to dance flung mad beneath kilowatt moonshine
arms outstretched in varied postures
of abandon and short half-life glee
sticky with fevered imprint, they
shuck off adornments and expectations
grown over with moss
and when it comes to lapsing daylight
dive nude and fluid like seals
into the sea’s very throat and its briny acceptance
of traitors and rebels and girls with
too many bed fellows
where all but the sheer furtive birth of freedom
glimpsing off unencumbered skin
chewing the skies
with effervescent glow, is sate
as if mermaids were beseeching
tender men and women of houses
and diaries, book weights, lapsed vibrators and bottled ointments
leave your rules and your sadist alarm clocks
set for 6am
abandon the car you upgrade every three years
before it’s lost its new smell
to impress neighbors who give you no heed
retreat, retreat, retreat
past scraped plates of burnt lasagna
fox tails, lube and licked spoons
to this emptied isle of underwater
solace and lay your wretched superlative
disappointment in our laps
that we may render you
lost
and because of that
unfettered liberate,
eternally
blushingly
free