***
Imagine that I do what is essential only:
walk past a church or subsidized commuter homes,
past children reaping joy from movement of their bodies
in this pink light, gone puce, of early-setting sun.
Voices from the roof fall to the ground — they're human.
They may lack personhood but their timbre holds accounts,
and class is as if augured in the wind, emblazoned
as a crest upon their cadence. Shadow creeping
over me, is it you? Whose key is in my lock?
My friends, my mostly-smiling sound bites, bluntly tapping
quick-fire news, year in, year out, upon the screen 
that fades to crystalline, true silence when inactive —
I’ve seen your cursor flashing, flashing next to mine. 
And if I took these poems to the livid street
in mad abandon, in stockinged feet, half-naked,
you'd sign the affidavit for the state to take 
possession of my will, or vouch for me and tell me 
in a letter: soon luck will turn, keep scribbling 
on what lunar scraps are given. I pluck my eyebrows
one by one to play the part, pray curtain opens 
on the depth of winter. Enter. Exeunt omni.

***
You ask what became of coming home — 
I to you, you to me, our simple 
parity, our broken shield. But now
I frame art inside of life, draw space
around it, not foreign to it, not 
outside it. And words unrushed by pen 
to paper, by the key in the door, 
heard but never written. What to do 
with your request for sperm, to frame me 
for someone I can’t know, make image 
of what life would be? Callous, away, 
I stride, go past the kindergarten,
kick the winter kindergarten leaves.

***
Post-Fordist tedium of waiting after clicking for the grinding 
hum of this machine’s plussed workings makes me stiffen
so that I spy through inner windows, sniffing at library air —
my animal, morose desire — deadpan, death-like — for the space
between each book, each page of long-unopened books stuck close
as sticky as the child’s hand in the honey jar of Sartre’s viscous,
for the daring, darting glance of one whose breath I can intuit
opening a book, whoever — for that one I lie in wait, quietly
fine-shredding thoughts, here in the corner, by the scanners, 
where pale veneer hides the unthinking, wordless half, where
dry pages hurt dry hands, as outside it may as well be winter.

***
Snakes of steam from winter roofs and potholes
streaming make in these faubourgs an atmosphere,
its cemetery morning lasts all day. 
I’m hitting coffee out of the park, lining 
up the tasks, like bowling pins, and striking. 
Breakfast waits. Into recycling, the journal 
with a hundred poets and I the oldest 
of those still alive. It’ll soon be dark. 
I’m heating up my breakfast; the plates drip dry. 
What’s to be done with day as many grays 
as pigeons, chronicles of poor decisions, 
whims, fantasies that spin under my needle 
feeling for the sounds, it slips to starkness 
of the final circle, now tapping slowly 
out slow tap of its defeated purpose. 

***
Winter Landscape: ice floes on the beach, 
dismal rosemary in the garden, 
crow calling crow — the pallor of sound. 
A bird against the screen: absence of sun
on a blue wing. Back of light, wet bark. 
A moment that passes passes by, 
I listen to the tremolo of years
changing hands. No trace of change, humorless 
earth: black rot on tall stems. Missing parts, 
parks full of them. Breath still, silent grass — 
obituary; in hindsight, a life. 
At 3:12 am, January 5th, 
the night of the 4th, I thanked you for 
everything you thanked me for, and more.

***
Winter is dwindling. It’s humid 
in Houston. Got a new notebook,
how happy the blanks. Mostly white 
neighborhood, $3 coffee,
not saying no, just pay the rent.
A Lebensraum of lofts, LaCroix, 
gelato, yoga. Thick people 
dress not so much. No post-posting
pout, we’re taking pictures! To each 
their own. Oily skin. Coed Coders. 
No judgment, swipe me to the left....
These rhythms underneath the breath.

***
Winter, have I lost your thread? 
Downwritten whole around you? 
I laugh at my poems, scare 
my friends, see carefree moments
in the distance, at what cost? 
And if I write this backwards,
stay time’s goosestep march, with this
superfluous smoke, one more  
glass of claret, one fragment 
of a poem — all too poor 
copy of wild abandon.
Without your thighs to burrow, 
I smell the passing age, quick 
era passing over me 
to where it proudly hurries,
cold of heart. This penmanship 
delights in its own decay —
downgraded to scribble, a
palliative effacement, 
bathos sutured to my hand.

***
A thousand winters’ words have sounded clearer
than my own. I hold up the wind, admire its color.
A thousand trees and no one speaking, no light.
The cup tries to empty but I keep it full alright.
I regret that while I lived, I never drank enough.
It’s my own fault if my life is bitter; tough 
things will flourish here. It makes me sad that need is lost
for torches — as day dawns misty, I’m a ghost.

Eighteen poems in the cycle From A Winter Notebook
are now available as a chapbook from Alder & Frankia.