Le Mardi Gras
We trip into our favorite bar
The summer night clinging
Exacting a sea change from the humid air
For the coolness humming inside
The Jazz Age booths curve around us
Your hands pool on the heavy oak table top
Trickling coyly out of my grasp
Never letting me catch you
Alone
The end of the night finds me
Still anonymous and unschooled
Etching my message to you
On a chalkboard in a bathroom stall
My love is all limerick and bawdy rhyme
While yours is poetry
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Second Beach
It starts with the ocean
Waves pulsing out
Their rhythmic catharsis
A relentless bombination
My cries well up like keening gulls in my throat
Until you remind me
That we are two pebbles in time’s pocket
We are the only ones who know
Underneath the pounding surf lies another world
An ancient whispering
The machinations of the stones
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Laughing Gas
Silver canisters all shiny smooth
She lines them up
A duellist awaiting dawn
Counting bullets that bring a giddy death
Ridiculous and flirting
Strung out, holed up in a cheap motel
Isn’t there romance in that?
Smoke and neon stain the rough sheets
Stale air suffocates in a familiar way
A lover’s weight that pushes her to the bottom
She rests in collapse
Annihilation as easy as the next breath
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We Take On An Emblem
We take on an emblem
Burning, blazing
And smolder it with time
We take on an emblem
Reaching back
Among the relics of the mind
Your key
Your recollection
Your path and mine
We'll each destroy the emblem
We cherished as divine
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Nascent Spring
Camellias droop, heavy-lidded
On sleepy boughs
A soundless breeze
Shadows you to the water
As the butter moon dips slowly
Into the cobalt bay
There is a name for this
Estuary
A buoyant channel from sweet water to salt
Collective calm to the cauldron sea
When you emerge
Star-splashed and bioluminescent
What will you remember?
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