1
I spent my hours below Mercury's winged feet,
where champagne and blue blood flow from
the veins of Statuario Venatato,
cut and faced to see its own image like Narcissus at the pool.
Wing tipped collars flutter like doves in a Charleston stolen from the time when Robber Barron's autographed the stairswith a monogram rather than ink on the page,
to prove that they owned everything including the letter.
2
An Ecuadorian shoe shine in the heart of Hell's Kitchen
in high chairs with old boys now taller with a woman in their midst.
Catching their hair cuts and coffees between trains.
I later polish crystal for their flock on terraces high above Fifth.
while the sun sinks deep into the Hudson;
their inner fires stoked with Red Label.
They speak of paperless offices while clutching cocktail napkins like butterflies in their fists.
They return as Pale Male to their mate in waiting,
talons clutching Chardonnay rather than sticks.
3
Under fire beneath Magnolia's blush falling
in courtyards where lawyers in training study laptops
while I learn the sky.
Filing past slipping on nature,
leaving tread marks in petal flesh.
I shop for genres on a park bench dressed in
shirt sleeves and tie.
My prose is too formless for a poem,
To rambling for essay, reminding me of
a onetime professor with the crisis of mid-life
taking students as suitors and pen as witness to shame.
4
Spring announces itself in midtown at midday.
Women wave Victoria's secret bags as flags of surrender
to men who tip hardhats like stagecoach dandies.
A chandelier waiting curbside in a Rubbermaid tub,
lying as a victim to spring cleaning.
Bronze arms reaching through rainbows of its own creation.
5
The waiter trades uniform from black
to royal blue to desert camouflage
because he got the call that officers are needed in the desert.
War pays better than pouring Cosmos for office girls.
He says he's got nothing to loose.
By day his battle is for custody in courtrooms
where he walks the line of contempt.
I think of a country so proud of it's neutrality,
but whose soldiers shoot wives when they turn to go.
6
Bartenders speak of The Towers like a wound
that bleeds upon the glassware.
Pushing hi balls into order in hopes that they will
cover the hole in the sky.
The Albanian is blinded to beauty
even though it surrounds him.
Like leaning into poems, too close to decipher
when your eyes blur words into one.
So he leaves to go hunting without checking
to find that his net was already full.
7
My Booker is asking if I need assistance
with the situation that I left behind.
His mentioned connections to friends
who know how to handle these things.
I skate to the Pope but instead join the Tibetans
in hopes that that He would understand.
I am passed by a nun on a Schwinn who flies
like an angel through the helicopters of Riverside Park.
