--BEING AFRAID SUCKS

I’m So Glad You Came

Today I am blind

looking into white infinity.

Just six days ago

a dutiful doctor with

square, squat teeth told me

it was nary time.

When I laughed at that

he said, “It’s okay to be afraid.

We all are.”

For many years I had insomnia,

waking up in pitch dark,

the house a foreign land with

no hint of where to grab or hold onto,

and now the sheer nearness

of the end

is very much like that.

I hear the door open--

click and sweep and close--

but nothing more because

they’re afraid I’m already dead.

Even blind,

even teetering on the ledge

with burning toenails,

I tap on my hospital mattress,

“Please sit.  There’s room right here next to me. 

I’m so glad you came.” 

Too Many Men

There are too many men

inside me

trying to escape,

each one too slow or clumsy,

cowardly perhaps.

They like it here,

hiding in the chaos and bramble,

playing Hide N Seek,

Tug of War,

Russian Roulette.

Now that I’ve grown a beard people

tell me I look like Jesus or Lincoln.

Who I am is never who I am.

I don’t know the difference authenticity

and an orange that’s been bit into.

Am I saying too much?

Does this scare you like I thought it would?

Now let me tell you the worst thing:

I never loved you, not like that.

Instead I was too weak to walk away,

too many different people inside my head

saying, Marry her.  Marry her.  She’s as good

as you’ll ever get.

Jetsam and Flotsam

I sit on a sidewalk

listening to the rain,

how it sounds like

chicks pecking on the pavement

as a thousand cabs slog by,

sloshing a filthy rainbow

of water over me.

We’ve taken cabs

up and down this same street,

over the Brooklyn Bridge

to Bryant Park.

You said, “The rain is nothing to fear,”

even as the floods came,

boats no longer moored,

boards like broken bones,

the essence of what was once us

nothing more now than

jetsam and flotsam

wafting away with the rising tide.