Out past the threatening blackness, tangle

of meaning and sound that is the ocean 

at night. Smooth pink and purple stones, markers 

and pens quiet distinctions, the weekend’s

loose kimono. What's left unsaid misplaced 

and the bare horizon a single line 

from an unopened book. Anchored tankers

spell these cold-water flashbacks. Moored lightning 

is cursive neon lighting; adventure,

a backlit mood piece, lost, overstepping 

phantom crabs, fragmented badness. I see

your pining, toes huddled beneath damp sand

as a beer can warmer than blunt air stays

your laced hands’ trembling, but not your face. 

I’d been green, a thrifter, no twisted sleeve,

trod leaden arches, crumbled, bridged pitted

malls in disbelief; clenched while morning burned 

outside my soiled underpass. I smelt 

the forlorn shore, so familiar for 

so long away, distend my trap rock floor;

empty beers roar marine, held to my ears. 

Something’s hard between the ground and me: I

tossed stones at the gulls circling their plights. Thrift 

had had none but its own late reward. Why?

I'd been a wet book, a cheap date; I'd left

a trail of breadcrumbs up to heaven’s gate,

of apple seedlings back east receding,

and of all the novels I’d quit reading.

Nothing goes wrong where red is green, stop go;

even so, darkness domestic for light begs:

With love's key - mutuality - debased,

the embraced closer to the embracer

than the embracer close to the embraced,

and reluctant gifts granted, she'd become

veteran, grim, (her sacrifice's sum:

superiority) beyond reproach;

each round fired seeming some false tracer.

So the soil flew its own paucity

and like pollywog between egg and legs

stunted, in windowsill jelly-jar glow

fool roots, as the cutting's fate is to broach

only retardation's opacity.

Lonely while, on the appealing other

hand or side of the same coin, enjoying

the lack of all sense of obligation,

I vainly wait for real consolation                   

or reasonably wait for the merely –

what? Wet drink, to indulge an empty glass?

An ardent partner, whom I won’t much like

and who won’t much like me, for just one night?

Well I don’t drink wine and anyway she

had none (the empty glass clumsy and slight

as some inapt metaphor), just Pepsi.

Needy as I was, I reached out for her

to map the measure of my precedent

waiting-for; limn its limited content.

The job is not the pay: What she felt was

seasonal gloom was a plain old work day’s

ripe bouquet, futile parfum. Lateness

wreaths, compounds; might keep for a thousand years 

like poison ivy or honey deep in

Pharaoh’s tomb. Prompt payment was a virtue

on a wobbly barstool like an egg 

webbed with cracks but whole. Hard boiled or no,

a criminal’s no stronger than she. He

bides his untallied captivity on

a display of weakness. Drop your trousers

at the urinal and come to missing teeth,

wake on the train to find the only trace 

of your nameplate necklace is a tan line.