How Bad is it Really?

after Frank Sinatra's "Summer Wind"

We were classy.
Big time classy like
dark and light grains of wood
on the same floor, but from
trees nipped at the coasts where
currency comes in the form of gold
smiles and sunlight not hot
enough to fry eggs, but motherly enough
to make breaths take like yellow bodied cakes
with chocolate frosting
and easy like spring form pans
and slow droughts from fat lipped wine glasses.
We were classy.
Mad classy and maddeningly uncaste
to the rat packers and packed self identifying
brash and brattish hunch shouldered cats.
We were brass and cool to touch.
We were wrenches in worked palms
and pens to inkblot finger tips
and idea crazed and insane more still
and passion possessed like river swells
in a season dry enough
to malnourish all of New England.
We were classy and hellishly so.
It's not just the sky that's blue
now that the sun is high.
It's not just the clouds that are gray
these days
when contrast goes away.

We were classy
and summer 9 weeks out of season
and better than stubborn
for the sake of expectation.
We were classy.

It's Been a Tough Day

It really is not so bad
that I missed the chance for a promotion
as much as it is difficult
to explain the sensation
of the six of me being rejected
all at once
when I didn't cite mental disability
in my job application
to begin with.

Generation Y

Having successfully taught myself
to deep throat
I don't know who
I am supposed to tell.

Form and Funk

It appears in my efforts to place function
well before form in all that I do
and wear
that I have begun to err
on the side of the homeless man
and that maybe that is why
you've opted to sit
at the other end of this train's car
though the seats intervening
are completely empty.

Smoker 5

I don't miss
squeezing our puffy plastic coats
shoulder to shoulder
in that one good seat on the bus
above the space heater
as much as I miss
the argument at the bus stop
across the street from our apartment
and the seconds I stood dumb
when you said
stop me if I'm wrong
and the opportunity
to keep this thing going
pissed away like a dream.

Yes, I Am not From Here

I'm inclined walking your streets
to say something that sounds bigger
than the phrases on the reclined beggars
paper board
and am distracted before I speak
because it's easy to assume eloquence
should be reserved for the landed
folks like you
and me brushed aside in your wake
on your way to make a deal or
appraise someones made stuff or maybe just
to catch a train thing
in some epic fifteen second triumph of
taking steps two by two and slipping
between sliding doors like a
greased shadow,
but it occurred to me, while wishing
this place was all hillocks and bluffs and
"fucking tourists" with nothing better to do,
that it's easy
to say the best foundations are made
with healthy sized bricks and
the best bricks come from hard baked
and thick stacked shit
and completely miss the fact
that what is built on that foundation is really
built on what went into the slurry before it became.
Folks like you