She lounges in huge brown corded
armchair, blanket with woven
floral fresco draped over the back
cushion, great padded arms too
far apart for one sitter, it's a
short chaise longue. She's half
curled up, knees drawn in to make
perpendicular with her rise and falling
belly. Ribs, spare, breastbone and
collar make neat cage that seems
to urge forward from the deep
chair every inward breath. Her
elbows oppose like an Egyptian or
a strange demoisselle, framing
the contact lines and soft creases
of her breasts. Over the scaffold
runs the light membrane of fabric
of her top in yellow and tiny dots,
still bleached like her lightening
hair. Her shoulders are embarrassed
red, caught red, fair and baked
by the slow afternoon dropping rays.
Her thick hair bunches against
the armchair cover, catches in her
thin black eyebrows, shadows those
dark Italian lids. Her lips and nose
tip are pert and flushed, oval
of white teeth in pink buds, below
her shiny suntanned jut. Her
white legs are pale warm branches
grown parallel, shins inbending
infintessimally like first shoots
straining. Her shadow-cast feet
are two veined vivid fruit
hanging in the heat of the lamp,
a bunch of fives catches enough
of the glow to make her toes
into some ripe painted mural, each
one bent and tucked just as her
hands, arms, belly button. Her
butt peeks out of her short
blue shorts, the pocket is dark
with the same shade that's over
her hand, and is unbuttoned.
Her cheek, the colour of an old
playing card, the softest peach,
runs up to her modest dipped
eyelashes; two still recesses
holding bulbs that dry the contact
lenses with rapid eye movement
as she wheezes like a tiny
cat, dozing softly early evening.

N Y C

Washington Square Park the old guard
are kazooing out of the woodwork,
sidestepping, tambourine in hand,
the gaps of gum disease and cool
to gather like some lame-ass carnivàle.
These juvenile geriatric wannabe Bart
Simpsons shout and spit roach butts,
sing First Cut is the Deepest, rapture
off this decade's mortal coil back to
Woodstock, poor old disenfranchised
hippies. They make Ob La Di sound
like the Anthem for the Doomed
Youth, they grunt and shake,
jazz hands in hands with acid
flash backs, children of the garden.
The rain comes, they shelter under
the monument and sing through blunt
yellow teeth and watch the fountain.

Below their tattered sneakers, rumbling
of the subway, pirate dance troupes
jump on and off steel carriages
and tumble, spin, hustle change, beat
box, swap shoes. In the corner,
an old black man shakes his walkman
like a maraca and croaks along,
eyes shut. Uptown lady gets caught
in the closing doors, head lopped
off laughing by the wall as the L
speeds out of the station. I hold
my hot hot dog between my teeth
to warm 'em. I sleep on my
girl's shoulder, she feel my tongue
rattle on down the train tracks.

Later, Broadway's cloaked in mist
that condenses on neon Coca-cola,
golden arches, Hellow Dolley, M. &
Ms. M&M copulating above a crowd
of buck-toothed English tour-bus tools
holding Guggenheim mugs. I dance
at the periphery to Beyoncé piping
out of the Times Sq merch-marts,
like some MTV clown, ticket tout
shouts "Do it, white boy", I laugh
across the black and white stripes,
the white man says walk, don't
bump your head on our yellow
traffic lights. I turn to look
back down the street and see
la femme jolie qui sort with me
lit up like a saint in LCD,
red, blue, yellow, fauve aphrodite.

She takes my arm and we go
NoLIta TriBeCa SoHo NoHo,
glowing dough ambrosia, serenaded,
fed, spun, flipped, bloated, wind-
tossed, gripped in the concrete arms
of this mad grandfather, left
to drift in the rock pools of ancient
Manhattan. Wild trolley bums
rattle past in baseball caps on cell
phones, vendors pack up thinking
of their homes, and we head for
the sound of saxophones. Greenwich
Village is all sex shops, blue notes.
Stray jazz men want your love,
Toys in Babeland want your lust,
it's dizzying and flamboyant, glaring
street lights blur with rain as we
stumble down the steps into the club.

When all your paper money's gone
the city churns on, orgiastic and
brave. By tomorrow all the scraps
of litter, the tramps under the bridge
by the river, will have been inhaled
and blown off down some avenue
to wilt and shiver in the morning
light. For now, we get our coats,
leave a tip, walk out, and offer up
our fragile bodies to the night.

Tremors

Any feather, oiled and sprung, can be
smoothed over, its tensile spine lulled,
unwound by a touch. I stuttered darkly
for months, coiled and tired in my bones,
and fed on regurgitated love-lung.
No more — you, waiting for hours
in the airport lobby, were the light
that struck my unwrung nerves;
cabin pressurised and frayed all over
I was hand-held and led across
the city. That night we clung, lumps
trembling to sleep, sung off by cats
fornicating on the sly. I let out a
rib-deep whale sigh I'd been holding
since the winter. You remade my rag
and tatter skull, stitched and whistled,
needle between your teeth, and stood
me up again, shook the splinters from
my skin, patched me up where I
was thin. You can just sleep, mouth
gulping like a frightened child's, your
head in my lap, until the TV startles
you awake again. This shiver; pop
of a flash bulb in my iris, baby blue;
vivid thread strung out from me to you;
shudder of my diaphragm puppeteering
a tremor to my fingertips; my stars
racing your stripes and rolling, spastic
with laughter, to the floor —fits and
taut translations never turn a hair
to time. There's no hole you can't coax
me out of, sleeping beauty, you're mine.

50th St.

50th Street the stars are out.
At home, they hawk you drugs
over the tube, arthritis cures, prozac
and viagra, may cause miscarriage,
cancer, impotence, consult your
doctor. Between commercial breaks,
America may sing its song.
What JFK say? America is a
chorus line? On Broadway, Liza
Minnelli heaves her chalky train
and stamps, whale-bark, croak,
paunch flung out to meet her
public, before the parade passes by.
On CNN, Tiananmen Square 20
years on, they blocked the news
cameras with undercover police
umbrellas, on CNBC exposé
of drug companies diluting chemo
doses, many murdered, the FBI
wept. The humanity. 50th Street
it's all song and dance, the glitz
of chemical death won't blunt
tits ties teeth tans tunes tap shoes.
The veterans of decades on the stage
tear up and talk of overwhelming
joy, just pray we're not in for
a revival. They cry and gnash
their teeth so you don't have to,
oh boy. All America is a spasm,
drug-addled divas, artistes that
suck their own penis envy, ain't
we pretty here in the big city?
A spasm centuries wide, paid
up with medication, insurance,
sponsorship, self-love, insanity.
I might laugh, cry, scream
bloody murder, please somebody,
quickly, pass me a mic,
or palm me a placebo.

Chicken Soup for the Soul

At a Formica chair and table
I'm a scratchy will-o'-the-wisp
with a stomach turning over
pulped Mc Do dough, egg
shat by some light-starved peck,
sausage stringy like a fish cake,
fermented grease ragging
on my pancreas. In front
of me a metre wide mustachioed
cowboy flicks through a mag,
you can see his neck fat grip
each bovine sway his body makes.

In this nowhere back lot,
a book shop should be my best bet
(what else, Toys R Us or a picnic
on the pavement?) but even here
there's a fucking Starbucks, whales
and business types thumb-flick
self-help, Twilight, Stephen King,
and slurp hot slew to brew
with their homely bile, heave
their ham and weep in the Real-Life,
Business or Christian Fiction aisle.

It's not Kafka they're after, it's
chicken soup, live the dream, a deal
whereby they're gladly duped;
as long as there's calories
and Catholic values pumping through
their arteries the nation-trolley
keeps on pushing. The publishers
know just the kind of comfort,
pseudo-science, bigotry and fear
that keeps the shelf-stock moving.

New Non-Fiction is stacked with
shameless mongering, cellulite moslems
are coming for us, what we need's
a ream of women hacks divulging
their period anecdotes and turning
our lives around for us with tears
and hugs and sickly homilies.
In American bookshops they give
you a shopping basket at the door,
and ask "Is there anything else?"
at the counter. Feeling queasy,
I get a Mountain Dew and a bun,
swing through the doors and take
a stroll beneath the billboards.

Drunk Love Poem

Coffee dripping Spanish TV lull,
epic swells of violins and violence
but under covers, soft and warm.
Our house is lit with amber
lamps, our suds are soaked.
We scattered over motel
floors and broke the seal, pushed
together and sighed back
under the billow of heaven's roof.