Sunrise in Asbury Park 11/16/99
Fall's light flooding
on an ambition
of empty streets.
A black girl's beat.
And loneliness-
a black-top, boarded window sunrise
bleaches the city
clean as a new day.
And for one long minute
the carousel house is
alight again
with sunbeams and twinkling dust.
But the beach at the end of Second Avenue
is still full of crushed butts
and empty works.
And the burnt out buildings
whisper a whore's promise
of a good time, boys, a good time.
New Brunswick Sunset 11/10/99
Finish the day at sunset, molten-pink
as the slash of coral on an old woman's mouth,
a bright ring on a crushed cigarette butt.
New Brunswick sunset-a gaudy scene
to rival the Mexican girls on hot Summer nights
click-clacking their impossibly high heels
down the street, arm in arm with their
toughtender boyfriends in tight, black jeans, swaggering
past downardly-mobile college kids
who wear their poverty
like a preacher, righteous and proud.
And the Mexican girls would laugh
if they knew
that poverty is a noble cause.
The sun sets on bodegas and beat kids,
the black men swigging from paper bags,
Catholic schoolgirls, running home with the threat of Fall up their skirts.
A smudge washed, pastel display smeared across the sky
and settles into deep purple and crimson thumbprints.
A long figure stands outside the ER and bums a cigarette.
And the New Brunswick night comes up quick, like a bruise.
Provincetown 1998
I thought of my love
on the Saginaw bridge
and the wind blew ten degrees colder.
I thought of my love
in the Shawnee forest,
black trunks stark against the sky.
Ten thousand twisted pine reaching
reaching for something that never was mine.
I thought of my love
on the docks off Commercial,
where, wondering where, is my home?
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