Errata, Verses and Rhymes from My Notebooks: September

You got us a cheap truck 

And tickets to the show 

But doing coke

And ketamine

in the backseat

We never got very far 

Summertime girls and wine

I’m on my back, my love is pallid

I’m watching from autumn

as you touch me, 

in seconds my hands are as dry as the wells 

You collect the tiny horror of me

Hold me like you don’t mind touching me

Be afraid of me

The vitality has turned now 

As if it were a season 

Dig a well babe

Each year we lose water 

How can you drop something 

You so deeply hold

Leave it at the bottom of some hole 

I used to smoke blunts

In the field behind my house 

Pay rent just by taking my tits out 

The nausea rolling on the inside of my eyes 

The golden fields of youth describe 

 nostalgia for those sweeter pains, 

When it hurt for the first time , 

Fresh wound, in youth 

Is meat .

With what innocence on offer

My love is a butcher

And I’m hanging 

from a hook 

in the basement

I’m feeling patient

I’m biding my time 

*************** 

I know something :

I’m gonna take your shit

an angel, unheralded

a terrorist 

Tick tick

You think I’m gonna reach inside,

and then I come up 

right behind

*************** 

When I went crazy 

I was so lonely 

That there came 

something in the walls 

To keep me company

*************** 

On the shadow pendulum 

My heart was cracking in the back down.

the skeleton in my ears 

Could’ve been anyone’s. I dreaded what I seek 

Hips cracking

Are you running ?

Justice on the scales 

If I play two hearts

How many would you pull out 

Ere belonged to me, 

To do my bidding

Is this the powerlessness

Of the weaker sex

*************** 

King lear becomes 

More lucid by the day

And I go insane 

*************** 

You have ships, a fleet to sail across the sea

I am your passenger, though I don’t want to be 

I was an exile Before I knew you were king 

In my cabin

Everyone is a traitor 

Blood on all their hands

And everyone is scared of me

And sometimes I scare myself 

What ships would I ever have 

To launch for you 

Just a little boat 

To smuggle you through

Tell them its apples and gin 

And my new sun is setting in 

You are my atomic twin

No hulls could ever 

Hold you 

But hell itself,

Where we are going.

By my doing as much as yours. 

I am frightened since we left the shore. 

The ships rely 

on us not knowing 

What we’re fighting for 

But you remind me

There’s cold sheets

Cold windows 

And children that slipped overboard 

*************** 

I know the chase before you know it is afoot 

The rabbit stirs downwind, unknowing 

But I already labor 

It is I who must live the hunt longer 

Does no one consider 

The fear of the hunter

You, rabbit

Consider

The galloping horse of time 

That *I* must ride 

That I have mourned your death before it was known to you

And I am in the wind tonight

*************** 

Who would blame me if I were

To become lonely

The outpost is in a swamp, 

The sweet decay

The water grows into the walls 

I’ll see my own reflection any day

So I press closer 

Such fantasies that would fill instantly 

a stage for my play 

*********************

What difference just a hour makes 

For pain to acquaint you. 

Sometimes it is only in

Painless you 

That mine goes away. 

*********************

Theres another castle somewhere

For a different life 

We are living there right now 

Over there is not much better

Than here 

Nor are castles for miles around 

Or years in any direction. 

I think about the other life 

And carnivals circle the ride. 

********* 

My lover

Pulled from me 

Something darker

In a darker garden

Than where we had first taken repast .

The sun was one hundred degrees.

In the old people’s eyes,

Death was slipping, 

seeping from the slits

The skies were black

I lay along you 

And was chilled

Turned off all the light

But it still shone on me 

Until he put the candle out

Had he found any spark in me 

He would have taken that

But there was none left

********* 

For andy 

You were born in the sea 

You were wet

You were shining 

You were my hotel california 

And sure enough you would die. 

We turned to each other, in ecstasy  

Beloved,

 Let us go to the bottom 

And we began to sink 

And it was infinitely agreeable to be together

And it was hell. 

One day in san francisco 

We were gutting in the well . 

And when I came up for another one

I was by myself