top of page

Poems

Intentionally Mispronouncing Tic Toc

There's a megaphone where my mouth once was - 

I'm a sexy siren.

I wreck. 

 

though

I've been secluded for years.

----------------------------------

Quiet!

 

Parents are always already asleep,

While we are out back lighting fires

And playing truth or dare

Only,

The Truth is always Gehenna,

And the Dare is to be always

                                        already

                                          aflame.

-A Desk at Work

2022

Ode To Drugs or Ode To Excess

 

Coffee is so loud on the body 
Pot settles in
Liquor makes the drinker sad
The lottery is slim

Cigarettes take your breath away
Ex leaves you grim
Sleep steals away the day
Diets wear you thin

Acid flash without consent
Sunlight stains the skin
Time will leave you old and grey
The earth will fold you in.

-West Philly

2019


Homage to Dorothy Parker

Millennial Academia II

 

 

And Oh, the green lawns of Manicuria, the uniform haircuts!

 

Hard-wood humid dance parties with crystal punch.

The stately mantlepieces,

And Oh, these genitals all!

Proper genitals, I'm talking, licking the corners of pink moist mouths.

 

We speak consent here, or else. 

 

We Speak the teat of suckling imperial wit, Sir.

Why there’s room for everyone who’s known the nape of daddy’s whiskey driven tennis practice...

 

 

The Main Line, Pa

2019

3 Letters Abroad

I

I'm still here, Love,
While you're off,

Being off somewhere warm.

P.S.

December is extra handsome this year with snowflakes.


--------------------------------------------------------

II

I'm proud of you, but
I want

Answers!

Please:


1. Is Paradise a jello mold we're both stuck into, me here

and you there? 

2. Can you remind me what you taste like?

--------------------------------------------------------

III

Have you returned yet from scouring the globe for Eden? 

I hope you're home 

where you are.

 

P.S.

I was expecting a return letter covered

in dirt and tears and 

no words.

-------------------------------------------------------

IV

 I can wait.

 

 

- North Philadelphia

2017

UBER Driver

 

I was wondering who "Jo" was, whether
It was a boy or a girl.

I am Jo and
I am neither.

 


...

 

Well as long as you pay me, I
Don't care what you are.

 

 

   Northwest Philadelphia, 2016

 

Wrinkled, In a Busy Restaurant

 

In contrast to how you've
slowed with age,


the delicate glass
fumbled   

                  clumsily

from           

          your fingers
Falls

 

as eager as ever.

- Rittenhouse

2017

Love Advice From Different Body Parts

 

 

-Listen,

              let lax the fists in your chest.

-Unbraid your belly.

-That foot ain't gonna rub its own worries out!

-Go home every time you move.

-Wish for love on every eyelash.

-Drink every soul that shines like that.

 

 

- East Passyunk

2014

 

Thanks to Poetry

the memory of my father

has begun taking inventory of

the thousand words its worth.


                        And soon,


as the image inexorably blurs at the edges and frays,

               I can stick these words into

           the cracks

      to maintain the illusion

that some things never die.

 

 

- The Bronx

2016


 

What Did the Watch Say to the Capitalist?

  

Now is not the time to take time,

Now is the time to time time:

You can make time to take time -

But there is no time to make time to take time now.

 

 

- West Philadelphia

2014

 

I Used To Consider Bars

 

Spaces for old mustachioed men to go and get sad.

I couldn't resist the sight.

 

Now

My skin is sagging noticeably under my chin

And my upper lip itches of bourbon.

- Fairmount,

2014

 

Station 
 

Ah my fellow fellow!

Something sinister awaits you under that split-flap Clock-

If you've got the time to sink that far.

One can spend a lifetime here underground.

The Clock has started to remind me of my mother.

One is discouraged from leaping in front of trains.

- University City

2013

 

Uniforms at Work

 

I rinsed an apple for a child who walked into the market, barefoot.

 

"Thank you, Ma'am."

Then the Apple rolled over, revealed its face, and winked.

 

I wondered where the child's parents had run off to, smirking.

 

'You're very welcome.'

 

The next guest,

Drenched in himself, 

Coughed a nasty nasty cough.

And                 

The Apple hid its face once more in the child's hands.

- North Philadelphia

2014

 

Old-Heads

Keep ready
on your way
to listen to the universe sway,
this way
then that.

 

 

West Philadelphia, 2016

 

An Introduction To the Great Whatever

I


      I  awoke from childhood in a college dorm.

But it was just a dream I hadn't already forgotten.

--
     Last night was tarot cards and whiskey in our summer apartment.
Luke read in his hand that a cataclysm was all but certain and
that he ought to consider sharing his feelings
with that special someone.

 

       We felt no desire to wash the dishes that were groping their soggy way out of the kitchen sink.
Fruit flies billowed out in a flittering cloud as I lurched groggily over the dishes to espresso myself awake.


- Drosophila Melanogaster -the fruit flies-
their species name became a song I sang every morning with a side of jelly toast –

I welcomed them,
I fed them the sticky residual rings of mixed drinks from every last night. Peach Schnapps.

Sudden study of Biology - the murderous subject!
Discarding tiny heap after tiny heap of drugged out drosophila into a petri-dish to meet their soapy doom -
but not before ascertaining their genetic breakdown for science: 

- Eye color: 3/4 devil red, 1/4 purgatory white –

Punnet perfection.

Come summer, I was done with death and
I made it law:
No one is to squish, swat, squash, wash away or do any violence of any kind to these benevolent guests.  I was still drunk from the most recent night before. 

 

There was no fruit in the apartment.



II

      The subway stung my nose of urine in puddles and someone was smoking a cigarette on the platform. It was July, and hot.

The woman sitting next to me was a waitress. She spoke suddenly into my shoulder:

You ever have these before?  
[She handed me an obscenely orange tiny plastic bottle]

No.

I'm a waitress, so I work 12-hour days & I - 
Well I don't drink the whole thing, just this much. 
[Glug.]

Right

I got on the train, and didn't see the waitress again.



III


      I swore this was my last styrofoam cup, paper sleeve and plastic top I would ever send to a landfill.

      I wasn't sure if I even enjoyed my coffee.
The man next to me drunk from a “Giant-Gulp” – the straw made a hollow squeak as he neared the bottom.
He suckled the last bits and dropped the cup at his feet where he sat

for someone-else to find.

                                                                              
His eyes were hollow. The advertisement on the subway wall ahead of him was for a slick plastic cell phone.

                                                                              Well designed.



IV


The events that followed have been described as our "Neo-Sincerity-Hipster-Cliche-Post-College Adventure."

-A baby blue minivan.
-Our degrees worth little more than the swank paper on which they were printed. 

 

We were burning - the four of us.
We were certain. 

We believed in believing in believing in
The threat of being ordinary

prickled our skin like dried sweat.
It seemed there was nothing we couldn't shake.
Society is a myopic cyclops  
and we are

scurrying under its nose in sheep-skins.

 

 

- Haverford College

2013


 

Unknown Integral


Show me this street, please,
Without a single atom for granted

Let me

humbly burst at the seams of my Self

Spontaneous, all over the sidewalk.

--


But today I have a headache from my nose always between my eyes


And Skull and me have an understanding, which 

Precludes Street's unhurried tune

Too sincere for my time-lapse mind


And I'm too tired today of always being in the wake of my own careening

So I begin slinking toward my favorite illusion

When suddenly, I am rung


By a most improbable Them,

                        - all magnitude -

                                                                             
                              Smiling their poem straight at me.

- Center City Philadelphia

2015


Readings

  • Appiary Magazine's YouthQuake @ The Monkey & The Elephant, January 2017
  • Sun Drunk: Show & Tell @ Crime and Punishment, May 2017
  • Story Slam @ Elixr Coffee, February 2019
  • Story Slam w/ IGWBT Theatre Company, February 2021
 
bottom of page