Manhattan Magazine Collection
Published in Manhattan Magazine (Manhattan College), 1989, 1990, 1991
I am stupid (1989)
and yes you are pretty
and what a grand job we did
fishing with hooks of pure
vanity.
We have caught dinner tonight
full of ourselves when
we put ourselves down
caressing each word
Of their reply
grabbing each compliment
and running away.
They’ve called it insecurity,
it just looks like
vanity
to me.
In Retrospect (1991)
It was all so very imperfect.
I was chatty and I believe you said catty and
don’t forget insecure.
You chose your words right:
You were truthful, a noncomformist,
you suffered so as a child and now
you want to sleep with your mother.
How suburban, you yawned, my middle-American ideas.
I wasn’t the artist you thought I was so
I apologized profusely.
It was all so imperfect, the nights entwined
uncovered truths.
We just did not know what to do with it all.
Babies in 95, you said.
Sex will be sublime, you said.
Whatever you say, I said.
I was old hat in two weeks’ time.
You were consistently never home.
I was steadily silly, and innocent.
With breath hot, canned, and sticky I
hissed into the aftershave embalmed telephone.
I stripped.
I begged.
You let me off the hook.
Clothed, I sat on a bowl
and heard the shuffle around my stall.
My palms grew wet as the enfolded my
aching face.
In the future we spoke-
it was as if we never met.
Just the way you liked it.
All gone-all
in retrospect.
Now, you and I are
perfectly
safe, separate.
PASTE POEM HERE
Good-Bye (1990)
Don’t know where, I will begin
white desert of
fresh paper
stretching forth
(a vulgar sin)
Heart knows just what to say?
Steady, dull, thump
thud
bumping
Brain is reeking with crud, decay
Taillights flicker
I stand
where you used
to be
(for the worse?)
Red, white, and blue truck
brings me to you,
Looping ink
into
shapely
words-
Glue taste on my tongue, tasty goo.
Missing you, helping me to be what I like
better than before.
Taillights flicker into black tomorrow.
I stand alone in dim today.
