Ahwahnee Dining Room (Majestic Yosemite Hotel Dining Room)

September Heat

That September night we followed our
party back to a twin near City Hall, under
an aegis which was not for us, & which
included our enemies, dirt & grime came
down, settled on our backs. Now, I blame
a sense of excess which was just the Aughts;
I got used to knowing a step up on a Philly
ladder could be a step down. They were
snorting coke in a room upstairs at this
party, and, it was rumored, playing Russian
Roulette. The pistol (I saw) had a silencer on it.
I looked up, from the landing, at a greasy light.
September heat cast an eerie glow of nowhere-
someone pushed past me to join the affair.

Interior: Ahwahnee Hotel: Yosemite Valley, California

Tears in the Fence 66

Tears in the Fence 66 is now out and available to be purchased. It features two new sonnets from me, lots of other good stuff. Many thanks to David Caddy. 

Learning to Dance (Heller-Burnham)

Trooper (for Jeremy Eric Tenenbaum)

In La Tazza, a coffee shop in Manayunk,
a stairway led you stiffly into a high-ceiling'd,
Spartan, red-painted basement, where I
wound up with Chris one autumn night
in '97. How Jeremy's group picked us up
I don't know, but we all wound up in an
apartment on Main Street. Everyone was
wearing army jackets; Jeremy was uncharacteristically
quiet. He had already lost control of his
cabal, & blew in the wind. The poems lay,
then, wrapped in a dossier-like presentation,
at Villanova, among other secret files; as they
lay, also, in Jeremy's brain, as tokens that
he once cared to be a real army trooper.

Wolf's Hour: Carnal Apparition Poems

An interesting placement for the Wolf's Hour portion of Apparition Poems.