Fairweather Friends

Down and out on 9th and A
ten days sober with a girl that wanted to kiss me
and a lawyer that paid for my shrimps --
I would walk through Tompkins Square
with a bucket of mashed potato in my gut
my hair some kind of archipelago
plastered to my face...
Heather would buzz me into the record company
to peddle my mini muffins
and I'd get a glimpse of the slick boys
she had to grease to make a living.
I heard she relapsed and I'd often wish
I had summoned some kind of compassion libido
to hold her tenderly, her stick figure flesh
subsisting on pizza rinds and diet colas...
I can still see her sunken whole wheat cheekbones
and hear her voice break like sun-streaks
through a junky's drapes...


The lawyer was ex punk rock,
with eyes like chainsawed blue benitoite
fighting down the gems of rage
reformed power breed
fear-jerked by an electric collar -
walking thin, suited and sleek beside me
the mashed potatoes in my belly
poking out in stubby asexual rebellion
and him buying me shrimps to appease
the godless, lawless banshee inside me
that reminded him of his glory wrecking days...


around that time I ran into my Italian
high school sweetheart on 10th and University,
he looked plump and well-fed,
eyes glazed over with the green slumber
and a sad gaze that encapsulated our failure.
He was no longer playing bass, no,
now teaching high school math and let's
leave it at that.
I stumbled away
stunned by the slow atrophy of passion
the way people moved on
like beasts of domestication
all protest corralled offstage...


and then late at night in the evicted penthouse
where i was squatting on a slab of socks in a pillowcase
i put a pen onto a page -
and wrote things i didn't know how to say -


i took a break on the can
and right then there was an earthquake -
the planet bumped me up off my butt
and when i landed i laughed my ass off
just feeling this huge love well up
for everyone who had slept through the adventure