Some poems published in Medusa's Kitchen back in April. hope you like them

TOMALES

Came out last night.

It was snowing on the moon.

Pretty hard too.

Gusting about

like a room full of laundry

looks when you’ve lost something

in it.

Down here, I’m drinking splits,

looking at the road map.

Everything here is relative.

The moonlight on the beer foam,

bubbles rising like the stars.

The storms ease on the moon.

I ease out the back door

to look at the night again. Huge

drifts of snow slide through

the sky. I am amazed by

the intensity of the storm.

The moon moves across the back

of a fog bank.

Fingers of wind make noises,

almost music, across the tops

of the beer bottles.

__________________

I WOULD MAKE NOISES DEEP

in my throat that sounded

so unlike anything I knew

that I would scare myself.

I became ceremony in sound.

A whirl of phlegm, crackling

and sputtering up from the

rooms I guard against time

and her dancing princesses.

A quaking, as if a bear suddenly

came into the room on hind

legs and performed the crushing

of an arm as if it were a

dance and she the music.

Now, autumn pushes clouds

ahead of itself with a yard

full of leaves, I hear these

same sounds again issue

from their scraping across

the drive and think them

a familiar music, something

treasured, like a Nocturne by

Chopin remembered by the fingers

long after the mind has forgotten

the specificity of the notes and rests.

It is a rustling of lace

in a room draped with silences.

___________________

LA NOCHE

It bothers me

that the night

is outside minding its own

business while I am

in my room half

expecting you to appear

in the bed next to me.

You, with your brow arched,

surprised to have been

shipped across the night

like so much luggage;

the white roses of sleep

still in your skin.

I would be as surprised.

Hello? It would be like

saying hello to

myself on this late August

night, where the voices

of dogs are so small

in the distance, that my breath

seems huge. no, hellos

would never do.

The dark just outside the

window waits for me to put

the lights out. It has ways

of getting to me, of opening

the dreams like oranges

and spilling these thoughts

of you all around me,

before I can catch a glimpse

of you shuttling across the

night air, not alarmed

at all by this thinking

it is just the changing

of the season that causes

these things. not alarmed

by the love of it. not at all.

Knowing you will wake up

far away from this room,

the night being busy

with so much else. with

traffic and dogs and things

of its fabric as to

make such journeys a

matter of reaching to the end

of the bed and pulling

another blanket up above

your shoulders.

__________________