A Tipped Glass for Thom Gunn

A bunch of purple virgin grapes
growing below the old verandah
offer no objections to a handshake
that isn’t firm enough to be manly:
the season is a sympathetic crutch
holding a pair of blushing glasses

Between the sun and ants that crawl
across the captain’s battered knees
as they buckle back the drunken breeze:
such seduction ferments the synapses
even if the urn turns into an ashtray
and the spoils of victory soil the dowry

Among the red teeth and tedious laughter
that lash together the vines of necessity.














Blind Spot

There’s a blind spot between the cataract in the basin
and the blade slipping across your chin:
a glossy photo of your father floats in that space,
white with lather, black with stubble.
Shorn and washed away with a disinterested flick,
it’s a matter of unfinished business
best left inside a leather bound album safely shelved.
It’s a matter, immemorial and static,
detached from the nick that you must nurse at work
and work forever to command—
the grooming of smooth patience, of a self-made man
who keeps life in the present perfect.














Scarborough Bound

Leave
well enough
alone for steering

Scar
borough county
stitches over stitches

Switching
up rhythms
with stoplights

Seeing
the right
of way point

Away
from farms
locked by silence

Seeing
dim injunctions
of humble rustics

Dying
with ambition
for city lightshows

Oh,
seeing me
say can you

Know
the wormhole
opening into those

City
limit signs
with population statistics

Bullet
hole creations
subtracting zeroed addition

Mine
field studies
of muscled mathematicians

Cruising
in steel-toed
stealth for shotguns

In
the main
artery, main witnesses

Main
street wizened
by time restrictions

Living
nude nothing,
boozed on benches

Parties
of fistfights
clenching ragged bills

Waved
sullenly away
from law’s invitations

Front
porch whining
like sidewinder skins

Inching
toward victims
of relative innocence

Denizens
of wherewithal,
dubious but penitent

Welcoming
homeward shackles,
rock jawed citizens

Friends
of enemies,
baffled without enmity

Gut
checked feelings
for moral clarity

In
a landslide
of mistaken identity

Amerigo
opens wide
and aims tall

For
stars, stripes,
Scarborough’s long arm

My
dashing board
of paroled roads

My
gear shift
of focal points

All
the wayside
to wayward stoned

Behind
the wind
shield broken boned.








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