Tropic of Libra

henry miller playing
in the background on
a tape you had made.
12% malt liquor resting in our
blood and stomachs.
you fucking me,
i fucking you, and us-
fucking each other.
i laugh to myself  and
thank the gods we're both people
who read books.

Elvis

elvis costello would have given you
a high five
if he would have seen
what happened later on that night.

the romanticism of suicide
has been murdered.

for its own sake

a life ruled by passion rather then reason
you hide from this, run, dive under desk in classrooms
like they taught you to do with the storms.
the fall occured, Augustine was wrong
lust still runs around the city, crosses the borders, still
smokes cigarettes.
pessimism, irony
lust does the dance of the seven veils
and tells the seven deadly sins to fuck off.

honey

I tell myself to slow down,
take it slow,
red lights usually mean stop
but the only thing I do slow
are the thrust upon your body, my fingers
tracing your sides and the kissing done
to your neck, back, and forehead.

write poems about me

The only compliments that I
want,
I want to come from a
male librarian.

They wait outside like it's christmas eve and they haven't
gotten their children presents yet, or their wives.
Their usually drunk, or stoned-always smelling
of the night before, of cigarettes and sweat and the outside.
They race up the stairs to the computers,
where they sit there for hours, wasting, staring at screens,
looking up websites of naked women just to have that
feeling again, inside their bones.
They've been caught touching themselves but can
you blame them?
They can't do this on the street or in the shelter,
so they come here.
They say hello to me everyday,
even when I don't want them to,
and even if they don't want to.
We've become family, almost
 like at a bar but I without a drink in my right
and a cigarette in my left.
They talk too loud and leave their malt liquor beer cans
inbetween Nin and Rimbaud, emptied but i'm sure
they've left drops on the ground, showing
respect for the forgotten writers.
They follow the girls through the rows of knowledge-
sometimes trying to show them some off the street.
Their just lonely and desperate, I tell myself.
Their just human beings.
Ones without homes and families and food and sex
The last closing annoucement is at fifteen til
and they slowly follow each other out the door
like some funeral procession.
They tell me goodnight, they wave, they look-
I think the only hope they have in them is that
tomorrow I'll be here waiting for them, watching
in a new outfit with the same red lipstick
wondering when they'll read a book.