ANOTHER WORLD GATHERS

I sleep in a bedroom once a horse
stable for a monastery.

The monks have all turned
& the cork trees stripped to red.

I am a weak thing. A body down,
an eaten up mosquito net.

A white candle drives out fear,
a red one drives out lust.

THIS IS WHY I NEED A GODDESS

             I love
those dead-eyed
winos, picking up empties,
their laughter of firework.

The city’s full and nuts
but I can’t hear
its usual neon,
thrum of its barges.

No, it’s quiet
and the devil blinks,
imagines small,
invisible things.

Tonight hurts. Fights.
Drops. Sleeps. It’s 3 am—
the Atlantic midnight
for a poet.

Come on, cruel finger
with your cruel
and refusing shake.

Come to me, finger
and not the bottle.
Go paint the bulge on this white
page. Write about hell
factories and cemeteries,
how they dance blurry
pieces of flames.

But instead you give me
the sea. My feet.
You throw love out
like an old sack.

A loaded mouth grinning,
a downer for dead
and night’s ripeness
inching toward wreckage

See, he’s got you too.
Finger, fix it and make it right.
Like a seeing-eye dog,
the lord will see you good.