To the people of the world,
you bags of stainless steel,
brooding slabs of flesh,
dented and fresh
I do not mean this
in the negative of my feel,
But I quit

I quit!
I quit!
I quit!
And I don’t feel bad about it

For I’ve already let
the barbwire of the ****
wrap around my neck
and it made me sick,
it made me sick
Until I finally
vomited  

And oh my stupid god
what a relief
to be a socket!
where electricity just does not exist

I plant myself to this wall
as I watch the bodies rack up
with the most beautiful of light
knowing that mine
has rocked down
to pitch-black

Those battles I had left to fight
are wars I'm no longer interested in

Because to spend another second
digging through this military kit

of firearms I point behind your back
of gas attacks I spit to make you gag
of hot bombs I drop to cop a laugh
is the longest death of my life

I find my health stepping down to this fight
Claim all the lives you want
but today I claim mine

*bang

The glimmer of light
skimming upon ripples
is so bright
I squint
trying to capture
its sparkling life,
to absorb its nature
and bare witness
while it yet exist,
before it slips
away
like a passing love
you would die to save.

I never got to love the girl
she spreads wide her rainbow net
where the sky plunges on crystal river
tides swell to hide her shame
ebb to fill her bag of catch

I never got to love the girl
her hairs in the wind
my dreams spawn
a flower rising from the riverbed
she grants a love in my head
spreads wide her rainbow net
thru the long night of blue moonshine
her frock fills up with sparkling life

I never got to love the girl
could no way be the right match.

The old man mumbles in a dying voice
had my sons been alive.

A tear wells in the daughter's eyes.

She pours a spoon of water in his mouth
and wipes his lips and her eyes.

Having lit the pyre of his three sons
he was willing to barter his daughter's life
if that made God grant him another son
and here is the daughter by his bedside
feeding, cleaning and even shaving him
her only prayer to God being to save his life
bartering her entire means.

Outside the thunder cracks the sky
and she spreads a tarpaulin over the bed.

my son laments the father.

Inside her is no cover for rain.

The right winter
for dope and ice
for walks along the river route
home

The right winter
for arctic pin-***** wind
holes in boots
turquoise dress coat
far too thin
for walks along the river

But The Merrimack couldn’t find her way
when fabric moguls migrated south
Fascinated by nylon nasties
they traded their silks and cottons
for those petro-polyesterdays

While she—
could no more manufacture life
than mint their money
So, they blamed her
Pronounced her—“Dead”
Decried her “*****”

Now—
She wanders sadly under bridges
stopping to eddy in an overhang of birches
In dank canals, I found her sleeping
angered only at the falls

Poor outcast!
with current edge she splinters light
from cities sadder still
retching her oily stench 
        past Plum Island
into the sea— into me

What’re a few warm tears
falling from someplace on a bridge
to the icy waters of the Merrimack?
Rivers get lost in the ocean don’t they?

Let them find each other there

He lies flat on the rooftop
looking at the stars.

Useless worlds birthing and dying
he muses
the colossal magnificence of waste

if atrophy is the verdict
why create a complex web of universe
just because someone from an island
would stare at them
in awe of the beauty
seeking a key to the riddle
himself a grain of dust
lost in reading the firmament
and not grasping
of what significance
he is
within his shrinking space and time
in an expanding universe.