Good Advice

You can make your own money,
You can make your own way.
You can make good men love you
You can make bad ones pay.
You can rest when you’re weary,
Make your bed when you wake.
You can make up your best face,
But you can’t make love stay.

The Shape of Your Name

the shape of your name,
its weight in my mouth

is less perhaps than that of
a coin
a thorn
or a kiss.

your name
was never mine to have,
but i'm not fool enough
to let it fall
from my famished lips.

He Was All a Man

Dirt under thumbnails
Whiskey on his breath
Eyes blue as smoke under the brim of his hat
Perfect slope of torso
From those wide ribs to
The long knots of his killing hips:

That was how he caught me
The first time, without true words,
And let me hold him in the bonds of my body.

Hold set shake and give him up
Hold set shake I gave him up

I gave away all that;
Still not enough man for me.

Lament

“…You may
blame Aphrodite

soft as she is

she has almost
killed me with
love for that boy.”

- Sappho

Whiskey and sex,
Wicked men, cigarettes.
Why I love what makes me cry:

There’s a little death in all of them
And a little of me that wants to die.

You Dare Regard Me

You dare regard me as if
I didn't spend my childhood

Adrift in the seas of
my own mind's rambling,

As if I never knew
my first and only self,

As if the selfsame loneliness
I feel now, without you,

Were as foreign to me
as another country.

My Mother's Drum

It was sometimes the smell
Of loamy tobacco
That rewarded me

When, on vacations and
The times your mother came,

I chased you down in your
Waved-away veil of smoke,

To see your jaw set under
A blaze of eyebrows,
Warning me away
From a moment of solitude.

Is this the gesture I seek to repeat,
Every time I sit with that blue pouch,
that twist of paper,

And spin my own contraband,
Thinking of flight?

Dream Seen from a Window

Like waking in the night
Lost in a familiar place,
I watched red curtains billow from inside your window
And looked across to faraway rooms,
Their walls paneled with undreamed forests.

There, walls invite the slender trunks of trees,
A secret green light into their corners;
There, limbs are flashing
In the darkness.

I wondered what that place could be, but never knew,
Never wanted to wake to know
The way I saw it half-hidden.

And I pleaded:
Don’t reveal yourself to me now.
Stay undivided, even if it’s a dream –
I’ll never want to know if I’m woken.