Life On Mars

Languishing on the verge of being

bumped into tomorrow

they sit in coffee shops and bodegas

waiting for their paycheck

while they cover their bodies in dust

and try to remember

if there was life

on mars

The Fairy Tale Factory

we met in a factory full of fairy god mothers and tooth fairies

young and broke but full of

dreams

long before you developed a taste for fine scotch

you and i would watch color tv and

get lost in

space

kicking forward twenty five years latter on the

lower east side at an aa meeting

we met

again

i didn't tell you that i didn't believe in this

rhythmic kick it

crap

and the only reason i was here was to meet

women who

drink

over coffee you were somehow able to encapsulate

the last twenty five years of your life

in one perfect

paragraph

but no words were needed to feel how broken

we'd both

become

and then you smiled and i knew

that you

remembered

when we were

both

new

The Final Draft

I laid on my back looking at the sky that afternoon

imagining trees when their leaves

were still

green

while an elephants trunk investigates

the still air

all the wild places i never got to visit are now

just a bunch of insta-matic photographs

that float in my

mind

the elephants and lions were first

the horses and dogs last

setting across the barren landscape

like an ancient

glacier

with a million stories and

a thousand legs

there was no poetry that night because

all the wordsmiths left long ago

to soak

in the memories of tomorrow

and prepare for

yesterday

we were the only animals left now

all the rest just a memory

a moist

imprint

Invisable Scars

as real as a gutter ball

we fall strike

three

into the dirt and

forever

hurt

it's been 40 days of

dust and

pain

purple hearts

and yellow

rain

and i heard him say freedom

is just another word in

a car

commercial

before he was

inadvertently

tossed

and forever lost

somewhere

between a memory

and

nowhere