New age hari-kari

You awake me from a bus stop stupor;
I raise an empty box of aspirin
and entrust you with my last bottle of good beer.


Anecdote for a neighbor with a loud lawn mower

I stay up late writing poems about machinery
loud enough to ferry the dead back to Earth.
Such comfort exists in his finishing the task at hand,
but poetry is the stuff of detail:
I have timed him to twenty dull paces on aluminum flooring
before he hooks his index finger
through the crook of an old teddy bear's arm
and smells the cinnamon of his mother's perfume
that he renews every other week.
 

Sandman meets a lobster fisherman
for Stephen Crane

There are cages everywhere.  He asks the fisherman
what kind of a person could keep so much steel
on one boat.  The fisherman replies that the tide
always recedes when it is time for lower waters.
He helps bring in cages full of the red beasts;
they marvel at his being born of sand
and accomplice to their death.  In the ship's hold,
he finds a forgotten cage of four lobsters.
One is missing a claw, but exudes a shivering hope
that there is a lighthouse and saving boat
just ahead without pots boiling over with succulent meat.