When it’s 6 AM inside the Pavonia/Newport PATH
station, across the Hudson in New York

and in Philly’s hometown blues and you’re swirling like
the sugar cubes in the morning cup of Joe

Jan the waitress at Pop’s Restaurant brought you, the
color in the clouds drains as her stilettos scrape

along the streets, stain your spirit with oil or orphaned
blood. This byproduct of an evening with Chanel

dictates the sentiment of 6:05 AM in Florida’s retirees
and cool hand co-eds, caught between

every verb she struck against the evening’s matchbox
to light the early morning argument, because it’s

always 6:15 in the cracked hands of heart mechanics,
through the soulmaker’s viewfinder, the eternal

lightning of Mjölnir and our bagged boulders movers
never seem to stop moving in Sisyphean grind.

And it’s 6:27 beneath my quiet desolation, alongside the
part in my hair, dangling off the frills of

a scarf made from possum fur and reserved for October
daybreaks –– silent and soft only when

it’s not 6 AM in my first pair of Doc Martens, battered
and beat like all the lips that lost the way while

we each wait in one PATH station or another, losing hours
to thought, standing stiff or stamping feet and

watching rats deliver messages from Tibetan gods along
the train tracks, unhindered by schedules.

 

Poets need places like the Beechwood Café,
warmly lit by tea lights that

flicker back the black shadows of all the
quiet ghosts they endlessly exorcise

with every etch onto eternal blank space.
They need coffee black and bitter to battle back

the Letheless river reveries of yesteryear ––
cloudy, watered down and far away.

A café shows its sympathy in 1950s doo-wop
and 1980s hip-hop and all the tête-à-têtes

about the too-frequent flat tires no one man can
repair. The cream steadies the light with

a sweetness –– a shadow the poet tries most
desperately never to cast.

I wrote a letter to Baudelaire once,
tucked it beneath a brokenhearted stone
amidst a dozen others in hope
he might read my words,
in English, see just how far his French
has come, crossed oceans of salt and sand
and time to impress on these eyes the
keys that would unlock a most hidden
mystery –– in a word: poésie.

I wrote a letter to Baudelaire today,
in hope he might see it nestled near
blackened flowers withered by deepest
gratitude, plumes of sympathizing
charms, and this: a sole dead stem,
rose head bent the wrong way,
a single fleur du mal letting us know
he’s still here.

I wrote a letter to Baudelaire today,
(mon semblable, mon frère) and laid it
where elsewhere candles may have lain,
or photos, perhaps. But here, only
words stay the trapdoors of this world,
unexplainable and perfect in its
intangible silence as we poets –– for it was
he who created me –– scratch our woes
onto pale, empty sheets, scribbles of ink
letting the eternal groundskeeper know that
we, too, are still here.

Charles Baudelaire's headstone at Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris.

"we poets ... scratch our woes onto pale, empty sheets..."

The "woes," I left behind for Baudelaire.

I dropped 30¢ and a letter on a sandwich he left at the bar,
took a bite because it needed taking under the
hot sun lamps –– smut on my nose. That 30¢
should be enough to buy a one way phone call to
another time. Same bar. New me?

And the letter?

That’s good for a lap dance, some laughs or her love
on the side streets of a smart phone world, where
dreams walk with medusa-eyed muses and poets
Lethe away past sips, sleep off tomorrow’s sins
against a bar wet with serpents

eating their own tails…

The bite in my sandwich. 30¢ and a letter. Unread. Again.

The ouroboros (οὐροβόρος in the original Greek) is an image or archetype of a serpent shaped into a circle, clinging to or devouring its own tail in an endless cycle of self-destruction, self-creation, self-renewal, the Eternal Return of the Self in and for Itself. - Ouroboric Philosophy

I woke in her bed somewhere in Tervida, 1864,
whisker-eyed, lips blood-veined with

dreams stoneground to ash and crusted along my
tongue –– now, a city of gravestones.

I looked up God’s alias in Heavens’ phonebook,
found nothing but winkless stars and cosmic

vultures, and beside me a bride-to-be lost in the
not-so-quiet safety pins of thought.

We’d slept through a thousand years of drought,
but here, there are no Cadillac songbirds

tra-la-laing outside our dew-damp windows, only
brick and mortar in strange prison patterns,

no way back towards the familiar scent of glass.
When she finally roused herself in my bed

somewhen in Tervida, 1468, she saw she’d gone
further back in time, saw me, steeped like

tea bags epochs older than the length of land mines
I’d lined along the banks of a prior future.

Yet long before the Apple incident that ceased our
smiling, paved roads and gave birth of the

fashion industry, we’d have outwaited time just
to awaken in each the other’s arms in

Tervida, 1684, and save one another the trouble of
sawdust and oyster shells…if only

for one night, whenever that night might come.

A live reading of "The Last Sip" on December 16, 2010 in Hoboken, NJ.

The short of the long of it is all bumper sticker
proverbs, half-life wisdoms like

Life is Good^® and your favorite band making
the world gleam with new car fragrance.

Businessmen’s fingers tap Swan Lake
on keyboard stages,

a metaphor for all the lost chances beatniks
had to make it, infatuated by allusions

to Faust and A Soldier’s Story instead of
golden cuff links for handcuffs.

That’s why kids who color inside the lines scare me...
I was one of those kids. Once.

That’s the short of the long of it ‘cause the long
of the short is that the straws we draw that

seemed largest at first always tastes best between the
teeth––new age hoboes bound to nowhere

because anywhere is their exit to everywhere.

I still remember our garden vegetable platter that
sullied Saturday night’s hay & straw pasta.

What started out as a Greek Salad afternoon became
balsamic and olive oil amidst the organic

chili con carne in her eyes, a pair of MTB lips and
those iced coffee thighs I salivated for in

between each crunch of crouton, letting softly
fried tofu simmer down my throat to

somewhere between her bean burrito hotspot and
my half-eaten hummus. The $1.50 boost on

a cup of T. M. Ward didn’t help. It became a
mixed greens evening, and the mix was the same;

any pulled pork plans for tomorrow curled into
a corner of burnt bacon, homeless fries and

eggs sunny side dead, caught up in this dinerside
drama we couldn’t find an ATM out of.

How quickly the muffins of yesterday become
the scones of today…

It’d take only one banana bread word from any one
to the other to ring in some new management,

and then the only ones who’d be lonesome are the
waitstaff, as with any 24-hour truck stop

from LA County to Jersey City and everywhere else
where seasonal specials aren’t available

during brunch hours.