We Tried To Have Nice Things

                                    We tried to have nice things
                                    our first Winter together in the same apartment
                                     the windswept streets whitened at evening
                                     cluttered and shabby we
                                     romanticized each others presence
                                     in that darkened bedroom
                                    many an afternoon
                                    fervently boozing
                                    fornicating wildly
                                    willingly reciprocating
                                    each others
                                    willingness to learn
                                    what love meant personally
                                    that first Winter
                                    was affectionate
                                    and memorable
                                    things worked for a little while
                                    my reclusive drinking 
                                    a novelty at first and
                                    slightly humorous but
                                    how much a tell tale sign
                                    of the wreck my life was becoming
                                     my love for you was real
                                    and nothing more than what Romeo wanted
                                    with Juliet
                                     that was long ago and
                                     you are probably engaged to a veterinarian
                                     or
                                     shacked up in some lukewarm residential situation
                                     your heart is probably not in it so
                                     why kid yourself
                                     you are still a hot mess
                                     without me
                                    
                                     
                                                    
                               

Halloween

                                                The better part of a decade ago, on
                                                    delicately recalling vague memories of a young dark haired widow
 residing down the other end of a dimly lit apartment hallway. Dingy, dusk-filled dreams of abandoned alleyways. Fetid city streets below echoed his name through her sordid subconscious, forgotten schoolyard idioms precariously dripped from blood red lips among spectral notions of rush-hour traffic, awakening late afternoon to the remote thud of a door slamming through her drywall.
                                         
                                               This particular evening happened to be her first Halloween alone in several years, on mounting three flights of stairs out onto an outdoor landing, she lit a cigarette and vacuously stared
                                                 out onto a whitened
   October courtyard where thinly layered sheets of invisible ice remained torpid beneath soft downy drifts of fallen snow.  Exhaling heavily, her bleak reasoning and futile resistance to night's inevitable apex, she will be involuntarily drunk and intolerable. Stiffly pouring herself a dry cocktail, she pursed her lips before a bedroom mirror, determined not to be alone upon returning. This year she decided against her friends consultation to go as a whore to her work's annual costume party.
                         Couple hours later, feeling lightened and
                                     deeply involved in her getup, set her mascara down upon a varnished dresser-drawer, lasciviously sidled to her front door to greet an expected visitor. Two youngsters, the taller one, a  poorly dressed dracula mumbled "trick or treat", looked down to his younger brother, arrayed in a head-to-toe spiderman outfit, reached out an opened paper bag in unassuming silence. The woman sardonically looked to the older brother gloating "what about him, does he talk?", then maliciously directed her attention to the younger boy, lifting her voice, "huh, what about you, do you talk ?" A soft audible dribble made its way through the boy's costume "trick or treat". Astonished, the lady taken aback by the child's innocence, as a double-edged sword sliced to the marrow of her soul, "oh" she replied and went to reach on her table from a dish of candy, quickly dispersed the treats to the two boys, swung her door shut and plummeted to the carpet in convulsions, sobbing, "great, I'll have to redo my face" sniffling, as she arose and ambled back toward her bedroom.
                 
                                               
                                             

a price must be paid

 
                         A price must be paid,
                                  for dishing out afterhour secrets to the collective memory girl
                                  for late night piano lessons beside living room window air-condition units
                                  pouring stiff white-russians through stale placid hours of dawn
                       
                         A price must be paid,
                                 for a mothers son who took his last feted breath on my bedroom carpet one late
                                 summer morning
                                 for living by dried blood rendezvous routines in
                                 vacant county parking ramps                                            
                                 for flimsy green paper idols and
                                 decade old
                                 abandoned ivory
                                 silk ribbon
                                 marionette strings
                       
                         A price must be paid,
                                 for her autumn imagination
                                 one Tuesday afternoon in mid-october,
                                 recklessly removing sticky bandages
                                 much too early
                                 from fresh gaping wounds, yea,
                                 by pale aching fingertips
                         
                          A price must be paid
                                 for reading his obituary online, when
                                 only two days prior being booted
                                 from a men's recovery house
                                 I temporarily manged
                         
                          A price must be paid,
                                  in a forsaken patriarch land of convenience
                                  as you slam a car-door shut,
                                  lost in your daily mind
                                  motoring out onto evening turnpikes,
                                  back into tunnels of the living,
                                 while not far off in the remote distance,
                                 our numbers are steadily being pulled from the
                                 grim eternal bingo machine
                                 and you don't even care
                                 who is
                                 pulling them

it would be work

                             It would be work going to see her early Summer mornings
                             riding the regional rail out the city outskirts
                             beneath dry auburn skies
                             it was hard finding work, making ends meet and
                             staying drunk most the time
                            for her I temporarily lived and
                            for her I'd passionately die
                            lord, how I've grown to hate her as time passes by as
                            fallen ashes of lifeless smoke tears at her reddened eyne
                            amid darkened rooms, shuttered windows collect ashen dust,
                            curtains drawn drearily
                            limbs grown pale and feeble
                            knowing not what we do half the time,
                            it would be work packing my stuff into cardboard boxes,
                            recklessly hurling them into the back of a U-Haul truck on
                            the hottest day of August
                            it would be work getting to the liquor store that night before closing
                            keeping up the monthly rent,
                            maintaining whatever it was I could maintain
                            it would be work getting over her and
                             being a man about it
                            it would be work getting sober and
                            not pissing away the second half of my life as I did the first
                            it would be work considering other people rather than myself
                            it would be work not telling the world to go fuck itself
                            as I so badly want to do some of the time,
                            well most of the time
                            when I"m
                            at
                            work
                            
                            
                            
                       

the emt boys

                                             Introduction
                                         
                                         remains and the ruin
                         
                                  ( A vacant second story house efficiency,
                                   holiday wrapping papers, bushels of fiber glass,
                                   worn varsity jackets and seared bleached t-shirts
                                   personally hanged
                                   lonesomely within remote corner closets,
                                   a bucket of used cleaning effluent
                                   and three gallons of fluorescent orange ammonia,
                                   as city sewers bewailed oncoming nights,
                                   ravenous roars of incoming freights
                                   reverberating throughout a bleak county background,
                                   grim terrestrial outskirts contoured
                                   in ashen shades of wasted scrap-metal,
                                   junkyard trash piled in desolate concrete yards of yesterday,
                                   those decaffeinated morning routines culminated
                                   into dulled pantomimes of inbred futility)
                               
                                      The EMT boys packed up and ran off somewhere, leaving behind a cumbrous world of lifestyle commodities, no one knows why nor where, faded Thanksgiving portraits hung in broad abandoned hallways, years of dried-out gift packaging, not a soul to claim, a niece given to night-terrors on southern Jersey's sunny-side, embryonic shelved drawers of artificial seaweed, bought her a seashell alarm clock from an amusement park gift-shop that summer, accumulating dust beside a dusty family room converter box
                                      A man's daughter suffered and
                                       grew through his indulgent seasons,
                                      alcoholic sweat rained supremely down
                                      upon his fertile brow,
\                                     a good day's work didn't pay off anymore,
                                     drunken childhood pageants brimming in peacock feathers, recycled condoms and empty cardboard cases of Miller Genuine Draft, heartlessly throwing his family away into apartment complex dumpsters, working no longer, he drinks and saunters eastern beaches at night, lamenting himself with self-inflicted hymns of toxic nostalgia.
                                 All that vain energy spent, evenings in renovated department stores, coffee lunch break Wednesdays in darkened automobile garages,  A.M./F.M. radio sucked whatever life you had left in you, too many commercials, the same overplayed songs repeating themselves, they had good intentions
                                 we all did, eventually perishing in hollow centuries of harmful speculation,
                                 sentimental pillowcases of fallen angels, delicately twisted
                                  their lord and savior into
                                  woven covenants of tattered hope and repentance
                                  upon sallow evening dooryards, patches of green lawn undulated to steady breeze, in flickering moonlight premonitions, placid hours passed throughout empty residences, spectral visions of decadent heirlooms, meaningless sequences of vanquished domestication, sordid imagery of cape-cod weekends, short-lived grocery store triumphs, the love of a girl decades ago, or the warmth of a living room mantel in December,
                                 now, she's gone, a tumbler of Bailey's and a broken soul, solemn recollections of her in tight denim, smiling in familiar solidity, she was all yours, happy then, two hearts adjoined in eternity's misplaced storeroom,
                                  the EMT boys picked up six weeks before her, carelessly rolled-out with stuffed hungover suitcases,
                               we had no idea what we were initiating, no idea how things would turn, plotting our own catacombs in early February parking lots,
                                     next to a neighborhood liquor store, everyone played a role in our thinned out days and thawed out nights,
                                     except you
                                              or maybe
                                                   you did
                                                     
                                                       
                                                           
                               
                         

                         

Jackie Susann

                                  The adult book store has always been there, desolately grim on the darkened shadowy edges of town,
                                     as deadened ghost vestiges seek out cheap nightly labor, brushing stale alley debris deep underneath cryptic carpeting, squalled then hidden, Jackie never knew her real daddy, never knew how to handle women too well neither, truth being told, she won't find out, as long as out-of-work patrons keep rolling in off soiled city sidewalks from a dreaded populace thronging in felony fetishes and embarrassing internet browser histories .
                                      On the west side of Market St, ride the blue-line down from center-city 'till you hit 30th, on accurately reckoning in retrospect one rare Thursday morning of select manumission, I jetted  A.M.A. from a detox in Chester county, afterward
                                           recalling in clarity briefly crossing an adult theater/ bookstore amalgamation one early October afternoon, ambling casually toward a regional railway station with my ex, how embarrassing the idea of going in there sober was, how miserable it would be, a steady downhill degradation of morality reaching a bleak underground apex of shameful infidelity. 
                                           It wasn't until a particular synthetic disposition gravely increased my chances of concurrence, momentarily pausing, I thought the idea acceptable, I mean on entering such a place.
                                            Now, going back a few years to a heartbreaking neighborhood scene,  admitting not the slightest bit beatific, a musty carnal aroma enveloped dingy apartment foyers, ripped scattered pages of trivial magazines spread sordidly out along bedroom hardwood tiles, anyways,
                                      On getting what I wanted a few years later,  pharmaceutical benevolence from an elderly quack a couple of ethical physicians later,  prescribing me anything from death to life to sickness, back up to heaven, then eventually incarceration.  We both got nailed, he ended up serving the rest of his life upstate in Massachusetts, isn't it something how the weather changes, fervently, how restlessly discontented a restroom door remains ajar in five dollar theater basements laced in sticky semen tattered carpeting, (penal code 550)
                                         The adult bookstore stands in drab stolid hope of rare amphetamine midnights, its neon vernacular flickering, burnt-out faded dreams of worn cement and blood bleached trousers, on a drunken spree one gritty weekend down by 30th and Market,
                                  ( the things I saw that night in Maryann's eyne, her pupils dilated to credit card initiative and decrepit finances, a man stood outside the dissolute house of horror one sallow evening in early April, shouting "free girls".... words piercing my drug-induced ken, I've been thirsty for some time biting off more than I could swallow in toxic routine, it'll all catch up eventually, maybe not tonight but soon enough,  the gentleman's club literally denting my decade old denim jeans, what I want is something that will last, in short lived seasons of century old dissipation, not hip to tongues that gather forsaken lingerie in coming freight train mornings of stale counter whiskey vapor, loosening her skirt and grasping  the nightclub epicenter, from a south-philly rowhome pedestal out into......................................

Tammy and Elsa

                                            
                                                         Elsa and Tammy pt. 1
                                     
                                              Tammy and her daughter Elsa watched neighborhood cars hiss by a late living-room window one lazy summer afternoon
                                             cherry-lacquered awnings dripped summer moisture as sweat fervently gathered upon Elsa's auburn brow
                                             blond highlighted and seared to a crisp as burnt matchstick fingertips from lightened sparklers of a leftover 5th of July procession
                                             a polished hearse-like Chrysler rolled down fifth street one Saturday morning before a notable attack on homeland security ignited
                                            we (this woman and I) were a well furnished, well-to-do, young-adulthood couple, gardening through emotional tumult
                                           clinical ups and downs reciprocated
                                           between modern after-school episodes
                                           a censored evening television spoke through screened backdoor windows to us  in what was to be regarded as
                    "a vague residential attempt at creating somewhat of a therapeutic environment."
         
                                                ii) the evening kitchen boys
                                         
                                        In August's after-hour playpen, a rotary fan whitened a cushioned perimeter of sticky marooned-crayoned recreation, when we were alive,  myriad years ago, too cheap to cool our offspring, we'd crack a window and snooze through radiant Easter morning ceremonies, a sharpened butter knife resided beside my bedroom window, springtime never payed off in sullen suburbia, receipts of last years groceries still had to be recycled, you and I still hadn't begun being tired of Elsa's unnecessary aftermath.  
                                       
                                               iii)  a stupid bloodless equator
                                     
                                               Before you die, lovely lady, and I will not kill you
                                               say you're gonna miss me when you're gone
                                               these northern Pennsylvania battlefields are full of arid winter solace and nostalgic historical landmarks, for my deceased daughter I'll provide an antique palate of decorated brandy-wine and pretend she's dead already; now recall the beach of northern Maine that unendurable April, year of the last bicentennial, before you solemnly discovered my drinking problem, how I stole from the poor and gave to the rich adolescent drug dealers on Midwestern college campuses. 
                                     These sullen mansion corridors are faded azure and waxen, dingy in atmospheric dust-filled moonlight, beneath lunar billboard cycles a bible-belt  interstate thrived on solar midnight luminescence, off hidden county highways, brilliantly electric and eclectically rural, these southern neon theaters brimming with baptist bigotry, apocalyptic and inbred, initiated in preeminent centuries of worn architecture 
                                                   Elsa and Tammy pt. 2
                
                                  Elsa and Tammy knew the hollow lull of those old Jersey roads
                                  demurely dulled intricately between
                                   lackadaisical seaside twining 
                                  off old ocean avenues of Wildwood's
                                   seethed silent silhouettes all
                                  seasick and sourly out of season, two young girls
                                  scouring a vintage Atlantic city boardwalk of old splintered floorboard
                                  pour me another through
                                 dusty daytime barroom windows behind
                                 velour varsity curtains of dusk-filled deceit,
                                 bottles of lower-shelf bourbon and decade old grenadine
                                 unkempt bedsores on her once motherly contoured thighs
                                 thinned out throughout amphetamine seasons of
                                 widowed debauchery unraveling lonesomely
                                 down sinuous avenues
                                 bleated eyes grown pale and tiresomely puffy
                                 articulating routine days on end, what's the
                                 bounty on your son Ms. Beatrice what
                                 uncharted seaboard hillside settlement has he run off to now
                                 amidst trailer park television seminars on how to duplicate
                                 duplicate identification cards among artificial autumnal nests and
                                 refrigerator campgrounds where
                                 aluminum cans sweat, rust and carbonate
                                 now anxiously her
                                          feline eyes wept smeared water-colors onto a condominium lofted canvas;
                                 an older brother incarcerated upstate,
                                   their sibling camaraderie terminology is torturous and terminal.
                                     We all lose sight of what's important here (Elsa)
                                      local cathedral bells pealed in a remote churchyard cemetery ,
                                     welcoming the forthcoming night a
                                      distant freight train rattled a downstairs diamond
                                       chandelier, an imitation boar's head antlers centered
                                       a residential mantelpiece
                                        an unearthly game of backgammon
                                       threw a twisted shade onto her darkened
                                       republican eyeliner
                                                          Elsa's bourgeois perfumes pervaded these conventional lemon stenciled corridors, 
                                       Tammy, the horoscope liaison lioness pulled another parliament from her senior year sleeve and backed onto fifth street
                                    accountable for the weather now as the next girl
                                    paint a zebra-striped tattoo on her family-room portrait
                                    the center-city undertow is always sly and vacuous 
                                     resilient especially along these insidious downtown flats where
                                     cigarette filtered alleyways would remain long after
                                     Tammy and I discovered Elsa's body in the morning obituary headline
                                     in black ink getting headonned in a hit and run
                                      around midnight walking back from a dive along a main street sidewalk.,   her young tobacco lungs and feeble limbs climaxed into non-existence

a summer scene for you

                               (1)  a summer scene for you
                   
                         One late-afternoon foyer of complacent August years ago among
                             backyard kitchen jungle-gyms and
                               dulled suburban playgrounds
                            below a moonlit flickering of
                                    ethereal lightning-bugs
                                  and pre-autumn perspiration
                          humidly outside, mosquito-bitten and wearily we thirsted
                                 for domestic beer in
                                air-conditioned vestibules of young adulthood
                       purchasing mindless clothes in robust department stores
                                with daytime carpeting
                                shampooed freshly among
                               endless escalators of perpetual commerce these
                                   products will outlive us, out-give us, then inevitably
                                          bury us in overpriced boxes
                                             with inscribed tombstones atop reading
                                                     shallow anecdotes like
                                   "His name was Bill, he enjoyed smoking" or
                             "Sue shouldn't of went to work that day, but how was she to know?" now
                                back to tiresome housecleaning and underarm
                                      pinesol rug-burn rashes as
                                   a lemon-orange cleaning effluent dispersed
                                       an ammonia-like aroma
                                     languidly from your parents upstairs bedroom window
                                           into a residential noontime sky while
                                  a few miles away a
                                          rural town slumbered and
                                    exhaled its final summer leftovers
                                     down along the drifted quays aside
                                       a craggy river-wide embankment
                           
                                      (2)  these are the city outskirts
                                   
                              the drive-thru summer sundaes climaxed decades ago with
                                        the Fonz's switchblade comb upon
                                             warmed noontime docks
                               drunken with out-of-work fishermen, middle-aged and
                         fantasizing, romanticizing a dated boyhood pastime as
                              a lung-black nicotine nostalgia circumscribed her chest
                           reposed upon a parked public-bench along
                                            the fairmount foot-trails unwinding on
                                              either side of the oiled Schuylkill
                     a vacant warehouse horizon heaved its way into
                                  the coming nighttime skyline among
                             developmental forests of naive cupidity enveloping
                                              a cryptic seasonal cycle
                                       
                               (3) She bled for me
             
                                She bled love from a beaten heart within
                                    its pale body frame and
                            my amphetamine demeanor behind
                                  her eyes were nothing and not even
                                      love I reckoned I was
                                      etching sluggishly toward a
                                         heavy dose of heartache
                         one crimson family-room evening; burnished and battered,
                   her feted breath fluttered between painful intervals of intimate reprimand
                                  I put her through my personal wringer
                                          and what's worse was
                   aside all the dusted antiques and dingy residential furniture
                        her mother's turquoise condominium jewelry dangled
                        aloof from maroon carpeted rails of a fourth-story loft
                                 we'd never find god together
                              between sinuous city alleyways of
                                      tangled telephone wire
                                 spending all our lackadaisical time unraveling
                                            neighborhood discourses between
                        used automobile salesmen ambling down dirty-martini highways
                         rolling the dice, staying up all night, arising bleary-eyed and
                               malingering dreadfully down brisk neighborhood sidewalks
                                  ebb me out a water-colored portrait of
                                      us alone dead together
                            on a mangled front porch on Brooklyn's west-side as the
                      sable white-striped raccoon vindicate our retired lifestyle
                                better than we did each other if
                                    I can't touch you anymore then
                              I can't taste the shoreline lotion upon
                                    your slender shoulders anymore but
                                 if I can only touch your auburn highlighted bangs while
                                   chilled breezes roll in off the coast of northern Maine as
                                       that August afternoon on the beach we'd love
                                           each other forever and if only
                                                 then I remain
                                   envious of who we were
                                            I'll know
                                       something was right about
                                           our cocaine midnights, our
                            apartment balcony sunsets above twiggy twilit knolls of
                             our apartment manor courtyard if
                                            we can then begin to            
                                       start again within each other I
                                 may harm a fool, but not you always and
                                              forever adieu
                                                  silvouplait

                               
                             

whatever home was

                         She asked if I'd get serious a long time ago;
                                      as delicate seasons fervently transfigured beyond our ken, onto springtime riversides of daytime solace; lavishing green and reflected off melancholy mirrors of sea-foam memory surfacing; mud-filled walkways of early April desire, moss lingered and spoiled our Summer expectancy thrice over:          
                         I stared dully into a solemn afternoon courtyard; reluctantly drank in the morning, again off balance; morbidly enervated; repeating familiar oaths, fulfilling bleak prophecies; as studded mercury inhabits a dated thermometer, lungs gravely heaved within our third story window.
                         Her feelings admonished a brilliant blue dining-room table-set
                         in twentieth century livelihoods while
                         outside in the naked city
                         trolley platform foundations
                         perish above mitigated evening streets
                         gasoline dinner stoves exhale a
                         savory stench of dead gristle
                         arising into cloudless skyline obscurity, below
                         dead avenues of sacred flesh and routine existence
                         sallow moonshine grew cold around her tepid breath
                         chest sunk low and whimpering; smoker's cough and ruddy nave
                         wrought in due season, insidious playground of poignant May ruptured in
                         automobile traffic throngs of            
                         shimmering auburn deluge
                         at neighborhood bus-stops
                         humanity's misplaced squeal resounds in
                         glistening fonts of allegorical amalgamations
                         growing weary eating
                         at restaurants year-round
                         mindlessly grudging with
                         ourselves amid
                         boring Sunday boardwalks of
                         art-museums in placid August
                         sinuous heat ascends from
                         soiled mattress covers
                         another day's lease cosigned
                         by our bullshit.
                         don't pretend you're aristocratic
                         watching television
                         talk-shows late October night when
                         every day is Thanksgiving though
                         in the beginning it was Halloween when
                         we cared about our stupid guises and
                         fictional pastimes created by civil barbarians
                       
                         
                          Cindy is still
                          somehow sweet
                          in knee-highs stockings her
                          browned nipples trickling caffeine breast-milk effluent
                          on her pillow at midnight her
                          scent is soft and nimble as the cocaine commerce
                          beats down gritty alleyways of morning sickness her
                          voice shrieks immaculate violet feebly
                          awaiting planned parenthood purgatory
                         we share a bed-of late, her pregnancy prior to
                         our residential coquetry beside sill a.m. windows of
                         sunlight casements and predictable aftermath.
                                 We grew young and illumined aside soiled flowerbeds of daffodil and hyacinth. Crimson petals spread out across our delinquent readership. Winter gusts swept in prematurely off the east coast that year; we road-tripped across county mountain-lines. Rural and well acquainted; I drank truck-diner gin; suffered heartburn by the episcopal badlands, regurgitated nail polish on to Mt. Rushmore's historical visages. Gambled with the heavyhearted Navajo by the boarded Keystone precinct house. Slept with Belle Star on woolen bedspreads of rustic infidelity, inherited old western heirlooms worth hundreds, then threw 'em all away on the slot-machines
                        Discombobulated and starstruck; we overlapped timezones in your ex's convertible. Crystal meth freeways and overnight churchyard delirium.
                       Sullen and fatigued New Year's day, we parked on a residential hillside covered with snow beside a white and desolated graveyard; scattered drifts laden all around enmeshed tombstones.
                       We made love in the backseat with the radio buzzing, then slept and continued to sleep,
                                  we slept through leap-year's larkspur that February, awoke in mid-march to the sound of tractors clawing up plots of thawed earth from the adjacent cemetery. I leaned into the passenger seat and reached into the glove compartment for cigarettes.
                                  Without speaking we knew
                                  it was time
                                  to go
                                  home
                                  whatever that was.
                                           
                                               
                    
                          
                         

a self-inflicted series of adulteration

                                     
                                                    l.
                                             
                                              Stale after-hour miasmas arose from sticky linoleum floorboards, as quaint human cogitations pressed a velour curtained sill shut,
                                              while two-floors down darkling streets shuddered through sapient sidewalk premonitions; awaiting carnal hours of dissipated commerce and nomadic refuge;      
                                              concupiscent mammals of climatic routine welcome          
               personal destruction and its alluring precipice, jagged tenement windows are all that remain.
                                               Meanwhile, rusted bed-springs thwart in dull mechanics, solely she goads an opaque retina with infected hangnail, itched her motherly calves to bug-bit complexion.
                                         
                                                     ll. sleep and dream
                                       
                                             Prior to dawns illumined shadowing, frail straits of dreamland circumambulated her deluded sub-conscious,
                                            a feminine psyche dissolved below rash equators: lurid moonbeams of oceanic lethargy encompassed an institutional bedspread perimeter.
                               (Blue diamond-sky vestiges wafted 'round the plaza fountain effigy.
                               A maternal penitence wallowed grimly between hollow centuries of her forsaken ancestry and pawned heirlooms).
                                         She wiped her crusted eyes and momentarily quivered, sheathed in embryonic laces of traumatic childhood then
                                          cursed herself beyond last night's toxic solemnity.
                                               
                                     lll.  cockroach kitchen cupboard tupperware upholstery
                                           
                                       An automatic forenoon effluent impressed her lukewarm senses, aromatic auras imitated a lost inclusive nostalgia, like sauntering uptown towards Wall St. in stolen leather heels-high on methamphetamine.
                                          An a.m. sink-spout swaddled in worn browned fabric. Trivial hyperboles formed at the drop of a pence
                                    from cavernous depths of her sallow throat, and
                                       fervently spreads as
                                          rabid reptiles unfurl down neighborhood streetlamp wiring.                                             She initiates a phone-call, claims her bruised heart as her own to give intimately
                                  after expediting her soul to any everyday patron,
                                         her skin reddened knees hung
                                              feeble and cloaked in beige knickers.
                                           a feted breath reverberated vulnerably from a pneumatic lung
                                          into a germinated receiver to her connection  (a man in Venice)
                                         as Italian couples publicly commiserate into
                                        sinuous canals of disposable filth-ridden gondoliers.
                    Disgustingly prehistoric hours dwindle gradually as leaden soot falls from morning chimney grates,
                                            above a sleeping city into the polluted firmament
                                     interweaving public transit stations to a jaded metropolitan skyline
                                   pedestrian passengers aloft in slumbering repose and one-eyed visions of urban billboards, flashes of trees slide by as translucent frames of an antique kaleidoscope,
                                              the elevated train supersedes the old trolley line
                                             supplicating the lower-class west-side by early winter evening pilgrimages windward,
                                   play me a lottery ticket; shriek the winning number throughout anfractuous alleyways of dolorous intent,
                                            lv.   a domestic digression
                                               
                                    We'll continue struggling
                                          not to break a sweat on weekday afternoons, its only stomach indigestion its only acidic fluctuation,
                         its but
                            a seasons cycle through the prostrate eyes of network demagogues: A candid voice pressed out through artificial screens of electronic domestics.
                                                 I arose and dallied to an evening refrigerator; and she: my doleful orator of temporal romanticism; vibrated in dark silken apparel 'till a midnight demeanor assuaged our situation toward retirement.                             What is rank and unappealing now, we'll try again tomorrow. 
                                            We faced a week's summit together, ambling through your sister's arboreal backyard down rural pathways uncoiling out onto outskirt Appalachian freeways, among summer weevils sipping honeycomb in tranquil intervals of deliberation.
                                         
                                            A couple of years ago I fell into a nocturnal self-induced abyss of nothingness, that's the worst it'll ever get,
                                     but now I have to wait at the warm narrow gate as pleasure-seeking foreigners harass me on the other side, calling me stupid names.
                                  
                                     

An Aerial Allegory

                            We may of been chosen,
                            while dead-end city streets remain interwoven and gritty. Soiled alleyways of poignant effluent unravel below traffic-signal equipage. Sordid ink-smeared newspaper elegies dissipate with seasonal gusts of scattered thundershowers. Hungover denizens may curse morning traffic spilling convenient store coffee staining bleached collared shirtsleeves, splashing mud-filled puddles upon poor spirited pedestrians.
                         I've been picked on and picked up, ascended into celestial havens of ecclesiastical symmetry.
                   Carnal midnight eternally weeps its strayed acquaintance.  Ariel rays of golden sunlight draft below velvet curtained windows draped in sallow evenings aside fiery residential mantels. Routine alloy cutlery cordially placed upon bleak damasks of hopelessness; I've seen her pale face embroidered, bewildered: inflect off silver soup-spoons.
                            Quarter to one she popped Valium into her sparkling poinsettia. Crimson fizz rose off her polished glass onto a scarlet tourniquet. Her supple face rapidly flushed to complexion incarnadine. The process initiated early that day, she started slurring forsaken languages at a quarter to three; and no one came to see me that day. I reached into my torn pockets for refuge and cough medicine. Lascivious syrups of desirable dementia; don't forget myself lover amid sour bourbon aftershave kisses, below auburn coffered ceilings she rambled on until placid daybreak, "but how rotten and spoiled you become the next-day my love, being so bittersweet on evenings prior! You my love have created a narcissistic weapon, a warped existence consisting of backsliding ideals and mistaken morality."
                              Gradual digression diverted us through the wee hours of Saturday night into dawn's sleepless highway of depraved serotonin and forlorn acrobats, were we to awake the next morning? And pay homage to a local delicatessen owner catty-corner to a neighborhood baptist cathedral, the one with those neat stained-glass windows we enjoy every other Sunday.
                            Rosemary:
                                    Rosary, grief-stricken mother of opaque vestiges, maternally weeping mortal transgressors, "my son is a corpse in repose, they turned his father's house into a den of electronic signatures," Pawnshop street plaza counters tick off and on, unwinding monotonous minutes to frail business infrastructures of commerce and protocol, below skyscraper skylines of shrouded constellations.
                                   "These heartless concubines and their graceless husbandmen, lead self-absorbed lives and children through wide gates of Eden into numb faceless abysses of sweet-smelling purgatory, this bread of life, this subway dough provides unnecessary indigestion to mindless populaces. In frantic rat-races destined to death and disease"- (it is not written that we pray to her)
                                Its easy and leisurely to be chosen by Satan, all you have to do is open your eyelids. Society moans and pangs along vacated tenements of brick-columned mortar and nocturnal desolation. Austere declamations of lukewarm predecessors abide in painted urban murals.
                                The pigeon women, and all the pigeon offspring lowly hover around a village epicenter scavenging breadcrumbs and soda-cans: how blessed they are!
                                Christ came roaring in through the frigid tropics, melting a gaping hole through Israel's hollow equator. The ground-breaker, the game changer- the one and only glory through godly retinas of forgiveness, unconditional love and humility!