Lou Barlow's Smile

A toxic salve,
so easy to fall into.
Saves me from myself
by consuming everything.
He is the joy of childhood crushes,
the part of awkward, shyness, curiosity
that never grows tired.
The euphoria of the first kiss,
even better, the longing stare.
What I would give to see
Lou Barlow's smile
in that moment again.

June 18, 1999

“Ha, it’s done,” she said.

The paintbrush a glinting cobweb,
or her wrist, dangling in the air
as if to waiting for the daybreak rousing of its next
fever. A split second. “It’s done?” she asked,
surveying the fulsome scape
of the canvas.

“The picture of safety,”
the artist decided one morning, told me in piercing and impatient tones
at the core of the broad crest
of her living room/studio. Seeds of paint spray everywhere.

Just then, a bright blob of quaking crimson
made its way down the slant of her bottled filigree tray;
there, propped on an uneven end table,
poised precariously on the air
against nothing- defiant, as it were.

The iced cobalt of her eye
became vapor when she painted, and her face
a study of fissures
the very wrinkles, the slits that sought to undermine
Time’s whispered insecurity- those static, castrate conditions.

Imagine, so slight a woman
making a canvas yield to her like that.

I’d swayed there.
Watched the swelling preludes.
Now in front of her,
further, the picture evolved.

What, exactly, does security look like?
Is it her lock boxes
balanced atop iconography…
is it a blonde, closely shorn head,
the smell of leather,
default crosses or well-rehearsed prayers…
is it stifling familiarity?

A wily old gal, silver mop and
malformed spinal cord- she’s the shape of a question mark.
Lizzie liked to talk Tuesday afternoons:
God, how unsafe the world is,
how one had everything- and nothing-
to do with the other.

A Found Poem

Something for Nothing

You and I could walk into a casino,
look around and realize
this place wasn’t built on winners;
but I’m sure by now
you realize not everyone thinks the same way.

Like the gambler on tilt.

It’s no longer just a chip and a chance
for the five percent of Americans
who have an issue with gambling.

Michael Jordan bet big,
was investigated by the NBA
and acquitted.

Pete Rose couldn’t control himself,
was banned from baseball and imprisoned.

Pseudocode

“a compact and informal high-level description of a computer programming algorithim.”

Do
be passionate
while I am near.
/
If nothing else
at least be that.
(It doesn’t matter what you do
or when you do it
be passionate with me.)
If nothing else
please do that.
/
Else
drain the kefi
if we are through.
/
Delete the memory,
purge the system
as we are undone.
/
Do
make haste away, love.
*//
Else
Else
I am undone
if you go.
/
Who knows his way around
my many tricks and turns
like you?
/
Do
return, love.
End-if.

Womanhood

Is Carolyn Keene more than the sum total
of her flat arches and brow lines?
More than Clairol red, number 952,
self-assurance in a cardboard box?
I thought as much as a child.
Nine and ten and eleven…
Reading cover to cover every Nancy Drew mystery
in what seemed like flashes of time.

Keene’s creation, intrepid girl detective,
carried me through many a green
awkward is the night. Before long,
my attention shifted to more pressing matters like

Disco, Rock n’ Roll, Hollywood, Malibu
Barbie even had an incarnation as rocket scientist.
Eleven, twelve, thirteen…
In what other scenario could I study
a woman’s figure? I needed to know
what to do with what, and when to do it.

And though she lacked anatomic reality,
I learned feminine direction of a grander sort:
when to cry in front of Ken to get your way,
when to lean in too close, when to whisper,
when to let your gazes linger.

While peers moved on to real romance,
I still indulged in make-believe. And though eventually
my fealty was packed away in the attic,
that tendency lingered in which I fantasized the ideal,
never wasting a precious moment
on what was merely possible.

I had loved Robert, Don, Eddie. Adored them.
And as my hormones started throwing themselves
against metaphoric walls, I dreamt of these males
on a moonlit canopy bed, indulging in the impossible.
Not with me, not even with each other,
but with 21st century woman, ideal woman, perfect
“me,” version two-thousand one-hundred twenty
point-oh.

By the end of junior-high, I began to
re-acquaint myself with the lovely flippancy
betwixt author and character. Salinger had Holden Caulfield. Moriarty
ran circles ’round Keruoac. Irving’s Garp got him into
all sorts of trouble.

Meanwhile, this was all to know of womanhood:
heroines like Meg Ryan, Julia Roberts, Drew Barrymore.

The r sounds in each of their names
resolute, ready, rolling like the rumblings
of a standoff-ish purebred.
Nevermind Ryan’s impossibly wholesome image,
or that Roberts’ husband was married when they met,
even Barrymore, addled, ill it seemed, for a time.

Pink, cotton candy, matinee women.
Skinny, tall, ‘made to complete men’ women.
Big smiles, eyes a warm, approachable brown.
Boobs big enough to satisfy but not
enough to threaten.