Apple Cider or Some Kind of Vinegar

I am the poet who died

inside you, although

my world is green and close

at hand.  I am who you killed

sometime in ‘93

as the hot Phoenix sun

cast itself long into

the bright day--you were

alone and the only thing

left for me was to die.

I am the poet who didn't

drown at the pool.  I was

no fool was I to fall in love away

from you, alone and sighing

for release.  The was no error

there in the hot light, the dry

ugly city surrounding us like

dead rocks--it was a colony

for the insane, I swear, and

driving by the hospital scared

me, at the end.  That you

would leave me there. I knew not

what powers, what unreason

kept me at your side for so long.

So when you killed me

I fell into the marihuana haze

of Eastern America like a leaf

falling from an oak in autumn.

Of the distant highways

I've traversed, of the stony shore or

the delights of heavy winter

snow,  you’ll live in me, a cold

ghost who I couldn’t banish

for my shame is gone and I see

nothing but the darkest of skies

ahead of me, there in the closing

distance where we'll all fall down,

 letting time overtake us

in his big red ‘67 GTO--

we’ll have no place to go,

and I’ll watch my children from

his back seat, as they build

their own impossible cities

along this road where there

was never anything to begin with.

There’s a poet dying in me.

Now.  In the clearest spring

air.   My body, O my body's

made of glass.  The mind

wanders to its end, the rustling in the trees

awakens in me things I've never seen--

the silent white window frames

of the neighbor's home in twilight

become absurd portals to my existence

out here in the suburbs

where summer advances

whether I like it or not.