On the way to Cooper's Landing

I got it bad for a woman who can ride
just sit in the passenger seat and ride
while I drive down dirt roads repeating
is it this way or that
She says I don’t know babe, I’m just enjoying
you and this drive so take us baby
take us whichever way your hand
turns that wheel, just keep one
right there on my thigh while
I light this smoke and sit back
and imagine you and I riding just like this
in fifty years when I’m gray and your hands are crooked
when you’ve forgotten how broke you are now
or that your daughter is squirming away from you
and yes, I’m thinking of the day
when you’ve forgotten that time
you said you made me cry and I said
good

Things done I wish I could undo

that we hadn’t gone to the market that morning for the butter nut squash
I was to cook with coconut and brown sugar or the watermelon,
small and seedless, your favorite, and those damn red delicious apples

that you hadn’t fixed the wobbly kitchen table my kids and I
abandoned months ago - when I’d cut their pork chops
I thought it would just collapse right there on the sleeping cat underneath

that I hadn’t bought you a toothbrush, the green one that stands diagnal
leaning up against mine, orange and worn because of my obsession
with teeth, yours sharp and noticeable, mine brushed countless times a day

that you hadn’t done that one load of laundry for me while I was at work
the one with the bathroom rugs that I should wash more often, the mint
green one that when freshly washed shows footprints by the shower

the one with your print, from the last time you were here

Drink

at 90% water I am at low tide
sitting with my glass of amber
barley and hops drying my nucleus
hoping for a tickle of my brittle brain
you sip purity with a straw
with hopes that at 98%
you’ll hydrate into your own
private ocean
or evaporate from yourself
from me
when we hug my mouth is dry
and your eyes seem more aqua than hazel
I drive with thoughts of adult swim,
wet lakes where I can see the bottom
and you, poolside

Beach Walk

the first time I saw a beach of pebbles I thought of you
how sand sprawled into forever, the way my foot sinks into it,
it has no beauty compared to this sound of water
receeding over pebbles, the tree trunks humbled by l
anding there on the beack of rock, so fortunate to be away
from gritty sand and those broken shells that stick into my tender arches
the way you stuck into me with sharp broken edges,
like a broken fossil, or the snail’s home
abandoned and broken by the raging waves,
how I hoped for smooth pebbles, dark and emerald
under Pacific waters and some pink like the parts I’d shown you
and standing on miles of smooth I laughed at my marginal self
wondering where you were and what jagged thing wasunder your feet

Just another thing to long for

Told my daughter
yes my heart is pounding
though you can’t feel it
through these breasts of mine.
Yes, it is weird to put my hand up here
and not feel the rhythm
while I feel it inside,
feel the knot in my stomach
the shaking of my hands
with fingers long and narrow
like yours.
I never really thought of it
how I haven’t felt my heart
the same since I was about
your age.

He named her Leta

I teach her to wash her face,
the white bumps nomads
across her freckly nose, she fears
she’ll never become a star,
never strut down a cat walk
or sing on a New York stage
I say hold your hands under,
cup them like a bowl
catch the water and bring it up,
it helps to blow out a bit,
yes make little bubbles, like
when I taught you to swim
in the plastic pool of star fish
and seahorses in the swampy yard
or at the lake where your dad
taught you how to put that slimy
thing on a hook
before we walked to Nanny’s grave
too soon, not yet situated in the earth
but still a mound your father
cried before, your 3 three year old hand
on his shoulder, with the purple
glittered star barrettes in your curly hair
The photos of you are the same
just miniature you’s they are
my star child, my gift of May
with sage eyes and serious brow
like dad’s I’m afraid
He also dreamt of being a star,
the sores on his hands unhealing,
strumming a base and singing
“I’m so lonesome I could cry”
while he sat beside me, one of us
comforted, the other the lonely one
as we looked up at the little town
stars, he put his hand
on my then flat belly.

Like Juliet

give me a soliloquy to shed those water logged
words that creep through the hypothalmus
sometimes that even seep into the marrow of who

who it is that tortures the cells consisting of water,
nucleus and that in-between, it’s all that in-between
which separates, barricades like a city street arson show

show me the mirror you look into on Mondays that reflects
this drowning, wants-to-be-swimming tadpole
shimmering to the side of the baby food jar like it’s first grade

grade me on my speeches, they have been countless
these failed efforts at writing your languagestruggling to speak Hooked on, Suffering, Hopelessness

Loverboy

I shout I love you when you sing
"O My Darling Clementine"
in an incestuous moment
that reminds me of my father
while in a sanctuary of bass drumming
Savannah ritual your rat-a-tat
heartbeat makes my lips quiver,
your broken poetry sliding
like a tear down my thigh.

Meanwhile you write of a woman on traintracks.
I see the soul of the rope and its pain
as it's tied in knots by the river
before being criss crossed over her nipples.

Then there's the way you say baby like crystal
without bubbles and the plexiglass
between mine and yours melts
like it's laying in desert sun
where I drink you like dromedaries do-
filling their humps.

I pierce you, my finger a bayonet
in your somnolent torso, weary like me,
hoping you pour out more for us to float on.

You the gondolier guiding me as I surround
your Venecian boat vessel.