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Isn't it pretty?

a month of Sundays

you come home from
the bar again

Drunk.
Alone.

hoping he will call you,
know that he won't

for many reasons,
the most pertinent being

that he doesn't have
your new number,
no one does,
and that's how you like it

good and hard
with no chance for redemption,
I'm sorrys,
or even a good bye,

just you and a bottle
that doesn't help but
offers a pretty good
excuse
for being
so fucked up

and Drunk
and Alone
on a Tuesday night.

(from Se Refiere a Nosotros: Poems for You)

t bars

I
Slow night
at the cat house.

Women sit with their backs
against the wall and wait for

money,
compliments,
maybe a drink.

The men lick their lips and
take their pick of

sagging breasts,
broken smiles,
nervous fingers.

This is a loser's game;
This job gets better with a drink.

II
Slow nights
for fast women
don't end well.

Some get drunk
and some start fights
and no one wants to pay.

Men wait in the parking lot for
the women who will leave for pills.

All this pussy
just waiting for a buyer
and no one wants to pay.

Women leave with the men who
lick the powder off their noses.

It's better for business
to finish in the car.
They cost less that way.

(from the guns get bigger and bigger and the girls move further away)

small favors

last night at the bar where
we sometimes see each other.

there is a show,
music fills the spaces left between
the bodies of all the people who
come and go through a little place like that.

i am working in a club across town
so i do not hear,
until i am home,
and from a boy who did not see,
about the the someone who was struck,
the man who is a man no more
because a car sent him from this world to the next
at the corner just outside the bar.

and i do not know
his name or even
the color of his hair,
only that a body lies in a pool of blood
in the middle of the street--

it could be you,
it could be you.

and the news won't say a thing
and the boy wants comforting
but his body makes too too much noise lying in the bed beside me while
maybe you are expiring on the pavement
and i am not there to collect you.

no, i cannot sleep
next to this whole and breathing body
so i leave it in the other room
and curl up in the darkest place i know
wrapped in the blanket we once wrapped ourselves into.

and as i sleep my dreams are
Empty,
when so often they are
full of You.

and in the morning,
waiting for a word
and there it is:
You are alive!

Alive!

And breathing and sleeping and alive, somewhere,
it doesn't matter where,
and now I know that I can live without you
no matter who you live with
or where you keep your body,
so long as you do
and so long as your noisy breathing
keeps someone up at night.

I make breakfast and it is the best food
I have eaten in a long time,
and really the boy isn't all that bad.

You are alive.
You are alive.
You are alive.

Thank God for that.

(from Se Refiere a Nosotros: Poems for You)

RR X

and while I am driving through these obstacles
and away from my obligations to be with you and only you,
you decide that I am not where you want to be.

But the car is stuck in fourth and the brakes won't work and
racing ahead of me is a train on the tracks
and the conductor throwing empty bottles from the window.

and you are waving safely from the other side
calling out all the reasons why I am not enough
so I pull the emergency brake but it comes away in my hand and oh god
this is the plot of a bad movie and if I'm dreaming
please let me be dreaming and
please can I wake up now.

But still you are waving and I am drowning
so I try to throw myself from the car
but the door is stuck and the window won't break
and the train, oh god, the train.

(from Se Refiere a Nosotros: Poems for You)

populist poets

and from these failed relationships that make up your mid twenties,
all you have left is a collection of books you would never have read on your own
(which are mostly ok but you could just as well live without)
and hearing loss suffered at shows for bands whose names have long escaped your memory
(and for that there is good reason, and now you know for certain-sure that you do not like punk music)

and your husband (God bless him) does not listen to punk music
and reads only the sports section and the occasional political magazine
(and for that and other things you love him and you
appreciate that you know that he loves you and where he sleeps at night)

but you never dance together until 4 am in a bar full of strangers you never stop to know
and you never miss the train on purpose to sit together on a beach and
watch the clouds run across the waves like foam

and this is the result of those mid twenties relationships that have brought you to your early thirties
where you are so much happier and your life is much more certain--
but yet, but yet---

(from Se Refiere a Nosotros: Poems for You)

one more trip to the record store (a poem to Postsecret)

One more trip to the record store

"Nothing helps,"
she said, "but
vodka,
weed,
and kissing you."

Her words flew
across the country to
shake me
from my dreaming,

to take me to
that summer
when

I came to the edge of reason,
when I felt that
rush of madness,
that dazed and giddy
freefall

that was loving you.

And then you went,
so now I find myself
with only
weed and vodka,

while that lucky girl
can still count on
kissing you.

But
if I smoke enough,

when I am alone and she is
kissing you,

and if I drink my fill
of Swedish vodka,

and if,
while I
am smoking
and drinking
while she
is kissing you--

if I play enough
ten-cent records and
put that heart on the stereo
one more time

and do not think
too clearly

of your face
and of your smile,

that haze of summer evening on
the lips that she
is kissing,

then I can stand another day
that you don't call,

another day of seeing you or not,
and of wondering if I will,

another day of longer, colder night,

another day that she has
vodka,
weed,
and kissing you.

(from Se Refiere a Nosotros: Poems for You)