rose

found you on the bdfm stairwell hanging not far from a friend

very whole very forgotten picked you up

never gave you to anyone brought you home dropped you in a glass of water

with a toothbrush that tasted like hands there were bubbles

but the number of bubbles declined quickly as you

rotted you had been smooth and round but you were now

wrinkled you had been red now brown and speckled like a faun

thought to throw you in the trash with blood and snot and paper

brought you instead to the window where you lie doomed in a cold sun

will drop your shrunken petals ten five one down the fire escape

and you will be in a place in a shape you never were before

A list I found

SWAN $50

2 -- 1/2 + 1/2

3 -- club

1 -- pineapple

1 -- watermelon

1 -- cantaloupe

Ent. Donuts

Under the Arch

Hey mister, anybody ever tell you

that in a long, tall glass of water

you're the chunk of lime?

Legs like legends, unspooling,

and your concentration's blurry

and your clothes are ironed sharp,

all lines and angles and

protractions, a whole made up of fractions,

mathematical, leaning precise

in the decadent magnolia air,

in the bowed mahogany sound,

in the softness of spring

you are clear as ice, cut right

and reflecting the starlight that

no one else looks to see.

Union Square

All trampled in

footsteps, chess boards, agonized

phone calls, cigarettes, harassed by

Greenpeace, cornrows, dreadlocks,

little children singing these are a few of

my favorite things: sunglasses and high heels,

iced coffees, marketing, we're going marketing here,

plastic flash shopping bags cash flow,

man on a horse peering over us, me and you,

new bride bursting in strawberries

and cream, shotgun wedding,

ravished Union Square.

Mannahatta

My great borough, Manhattan,

city of profitable bargaining, city of economy,

city of the flow of money, city of business,

city of hard work and pay earned, city of opportunity,

city of converging lives, city of many disconnected bubbles,

city of soap-bubbles, city that gleams rainbow,

city that shines in the greatest compromise between commerce and art,

city greater than everything put together, the hub of the human universe,

city of neighborhoods, demanding, curious, incurious,

maintained, maintained, scrubbed and rebuilt, scarred by ubiquitous entropy,

I am yours, city, I am yours, I will always be yours.

first snow

held in, not fully

formed until born,

spat out in shapes specifically and

caught

on hair coats gloves concrete so quickly melting:

this sleet, fleet

impermanence

The Squall

Unclarifying, merely muddling,

puddling,

I'm weather that never

ends, only pauses

like the whine of a newborn.

Sickly, almost sticky,

and pairing with wind to ram skins,

I am slick

and slippery, can be

insidious, residual. I

change all into fuzz and rust.

Eye-catching shine,

and those black wings I've snapped

broken. I'll wait

'til you think I've left. You forget

and go out without your boots on,

foregone, and

I'm not gone at all!

I make raincoats gain a hazy glaze

like snails;

I leave sidewalks undrained,

beating down

(downbeat).

And the buildings drip like sides of meat.

10 Washington Place

Here are yellow curves,

orange cubes, a floor of suede

and dimmed reflections on the floor,

marbled. The stairs drop

like a Jacob's ladder. One wall

is shapely, the other bricked;

trios of lights harmonious,

seven suns, black-and-white and glorious.

Columns hold up the ceiling

like verbs, attached to phrases

at both ends. Speckles and

moving squares like adjectives,

decorative, and I can sit on these

nouns as if they were couches

and chairs. The walls glassed.

(Language, here, is glassed.)

A hushing building, the air filled

with invisible words, unyelled.

washington square after a rain

somehow the benches are dry,

somehow the world is pastels

and the clouds are soft, the

air is soft; somehow the

quiet pervades, pervades;

dogs are walked, smiles

are swapped (some brighter

than others, some bright

as the hiding, peeping sun);

and when somebody has a

diabetic seizure while he's

playing the guitar, cover

songs, the paramedics

come in the sleepy calm

of after-rain and move

unhurriedly, professionals

don't hurry... and meanwhile

the two men on the bench

next to mine, one white

and old, one black and young,

talk, too, unhurriedly; they talk

of children and of bedtimes

and of how no one wants to

have a seizure in the park when

it's such a nice day.

Yoga

New Age music is on in Coles and

the flabby women soon to be draping naked in the

locker room splay obscenely with heavy

rotten breaths beside you, cobra,

cat, pyramid, hold it --

breathe in, breathe out like a

moron -- nothing further from

exotic Gandhic philosophies thought up

in a language you don't read.

Perhaps if it were done

in a world pretending to be India --

asanas on East Fourteenth Street or on Canal Street,

put in the street vendors but

pay them to yell and to hawk,

arch the bridge in the middle of the intersection of

Houston East First and Avenue A with

taxicabs honking and bikes swerving surprised at the veering shapes of the street --

breathe in, breathe out.