Partying in 2009

I remember nights of the sexiest people 
dancing to Santigold in the after-dark hours 
caught between tattoos as decaying warehouses 
threw off their death shawls and came alive again. 
The walls were shaped like men with bags 
full of spiders under their eyes, left over 
from the dreams that kept them awake or stuck. 
Their daughters kept scissors in their back pockets 
and would always talk about how you could cut 
through moonbeams like tissues. Easy but flimsy 
like a rooftop perched over a world about to end.


The Promised Land

I’m at the corner store buying an AriZona Iced Tea 
when I overhear the cashier worrying about a refund 
he didn’t process correctly. “I know the guy is gonna 
come back and make it weird,” he says, his hand 
hovering over the large knife on his belt. Then he starts 
talking about being Jewish and I have to show him 
my Psalm 42 tattoo to calm the situation. It works 
but outside, everything feels fogbound like a pension.


Deliberately Sabotaging the Situation With Poetry

One time I hooked up with this girl 
and the next morning I was driving her back 
to her car and playing Ginsberg’s “Howl”

and she was like, “What the fuck is this?”

And at that moment, I was thinking I’m probably 
not gonna see you again. She’s lucky I played that 
and not a scratchy recording of Eliot reading 

“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”
In a few short years, we'd both be etherized 
on tables, having been destroyed by madness.