My days are wasted like wilted spinach.

Fireboy (I know you)

Fireboy, in time please cool your hot flame,
you are liable to burn the house to cinders.
You rattle the walls when you slam the door,
but your love should be stronger than plaster and paint.

I remember, Fireboy, I was you years ago.
Hair hanging to cover my eyes, shielding
my heart that burned as hot as my head.
And your heart burns hot like your head.

Fireboy, you write in your journal to no one,
poems and memories of your youth. You ache
for the women you'd die for and for their sullen eyes.
Fireboy, you have to learn to let her cry.

Your mind is a stormcloud, your fingertips buzz
and flash like lightning. Fireboy, you fashion the weather.
You make the sky crumble like charcoal.
Fireboy, rain is bleeding from your arms.

You think that now you can never love again,
and Fireboy you are just so wrong.
Pick yourself a clover and a cloud to go along,
and rest your red eyes, Fireboy.

Oh! Black Jordan!

Sullen identities shed easy as sweat or a brown water snake’s skin
in the cool whiskey waters of July. The moon rules as a queen,
fireworks blossom above the highest pines. They crackle
in the smoldering asphalt night, then wither into the ghosts
of garden spiders creeping across the sticky American South.
The spiders shed their skeletons, the snakes shed their skins,
the crabs are blue and the crabs are molting, too.
Every living being wants to burst the boundaries of its shell.
Sacred wadi, Jordan’s twin, ten miles more, seven times joy!
The water washes my feet like a woman’s brunette hair around my ankles,
I hold out my hands to touch her dark, rolling grace.
When the rains refuse to fall I’ll walk with you,
carry my leather sandals and I’ll carry your canvas shoes.
I’ll stretch myself to lend you a place to lie in the shade,
my skeleton an arbor, my hair a hyacinth vine for you to hide behind.
I’ll shield you from the sun if you’ll shield me from my sins.
I want to be under you, cool, and two times more.
I bought for us three bottles of sweet red wine, let’s sticky
our lips together. My tongue finds your tongue and it tastes
like watermelon, pink and cool, with no seeds to spit.
In the hammock between the pines, you, a mosquito and I.
Our naked blood to her is as sweet as the watermelon
or the strawberry wine, and she sips with the delicacy of a connoisseur.
Even in an Egyptian cloud of mosquitoes
I would count every star on my back with you.
When the last rains finally come I will count every single star with you.

The bits of broken glass scattered under my feet
mirror the stars some noble hand has strewn across the night sky.
On my two legs I am standing, stuck
in the midst of a million points of light,
each one the window of a family home.

Slingshot

A great deal of my life has been spent waving goodbye to women in airports. It seems they are always leaving something pretty good for something mighty distant. I try to chase after them, tell them don't board that airplane, but I only trip and fall like a fool to the floor of the terminal. I stare, bewildered, at my feet -- some rascal has tied my shoelaces together! A sideways brat tugs his mother's skirt, points and laughs with wicked glee. He is the culprit, I know it! But I should be the one laughing, and I tell him so, because here I am lounging while he's sliding off the side of the Earth.