The Dying Upper Class

Levitate
Above oiled silk parasols
And tilted top hats
Ascend
Above waxed mustaches
Propped up by astonished mouths
With widened eyes
Assaulted eyes
Raining monocles
To swing like pendulums
From laundered vests
Hover
Above turquoise railings
Over barnacled piles
Mantled by
Weather-beaten boards
Float
Along gently
With the thick salt air
Past Palace Pier
And her pebble shore
Drift
On out to where
Grey sea greets grey sky
The neutral womb
Of a muddled horizon

Runner-Runner

You defy the inevitable
Gliding over statistical probability
And sure things
A faith-shaker
Meant to destroy souls
And poison confident minds
With the fear of
A type of uncertainty
That would stagger
Heisenberg himself
You are the Hail Mary
On mud-slickened fields
When time stops
You are the phalanx
Of twelve black craters
Crowning ivory plateaus
Admitting quarter to my enemy
When slaughter was so imminent
You are the runner-runner
Drowning all that is right
In the depths of The River
And you make me sick

Nothing Fancy

For years he lay prostrate
Pinned down by the gross weight
Of nothing fancy

Yes, frozen on his own account
By dreams of greatness tantamount
To nothing fancy

A man’s own meekness we’ll forgive
To spot success so fugitive
A life so useless kept to live
Is nothing fancy

The Writer

He squeezed and squeezing thus,
about the quill,
a grip of iron, clutched
gnarled fingers etched and fussed
Black ink did spill
the words this pulp to fray

See now the beaded sweat
on down his brow
The cords of rivulets
from pate flow unto neck
'Twixt beam and frown
his countenance displays

In past, what shames were born?
What losses reaped
this gilded crown of thorns
delusively adorned?
When truth's too steep
for parchment's price to pay

Here lies the writer's lie:
print pressed and prim,
His life's spun alibi,
His false tears' alkali
polished of sin
Beneath ground to decay

In This Time of Night

It's late at night
Really late
and I'm awake
thinking about a lot of things
namely
Kerouac's memories
of the small town he grew up in
and the seasons of change
that shaped him
and the City that drew him in
and the hurricanes
brought on by adulthood
that forged him

In this time of night
close to the hours of the morn
I know that if I begin it
right now
I can write
The Great American Novel
in one great stream of
consciousness
in one majestic session
where my fingers hammer out
with fervent vigor
the sum of me
the theory of things

Artin

I can see where you’re heading
Even before you can
I know the path you’re taking
Because I’ve been there myself
And at times find myself still on it
Trying to find my way back
But you’re young
It’s easier to change your direction
You just can’t see that
Because all those
Apocryphal walls
You’ve erected
Keep closing in on you
And the ringing in your ears
Won’t stop
And all the tears boiling
Out of the corners of your eyes
Won’t stop
No matter how much you try to smile
Because all that raw anger
That you’ve buried so shallow
In your deep heart
Will continue to erupt
And spill over any happiness
You think you’ve temporarily found
Flimsy happiness
The kind that makes you forget
Your father died

The Couple from Tehran

In the Shah's Iran they had a living room
the size of her whole condo now
and he was standing there
near his office
by the windows
in nothing but blue, cut-off jeans
with yellow, sandy hair - a white guy
he'd of been about my age
standing there while she looked at him
from the kitchen - an Armenian girl
looking at him
swaying there, in the middle of
dozens of albums scattered on the floor
smiling there, in the middle of that rock and roll
deciding there, in that loud living room
which one to throw on next
and she swears to me now
that she can still smell the air from the Shah's Iran