Category: Poem

The Beans and Potatoes Days

During the beans and potato days
when he was still doing school
and the future was like
a fogged windshield
with a broken defroster,

Benny was dating a girl
with family money and
no worries.

Secure in her station
she loved to laugh,
and smoke and screw,

and talk in an exhausting carnival
of ceaseless randomness,
a fascination of which
she never tired.

Her temptations were an
intoxicating distraction
from his murky prospects;
her generosity as boundless
as her monologues.

Benny was seduced by
his newfound fortune - 
being fed and dressed
and fucked and given gifts of
clothes, big books, 
candlelight dinners,
and antique shit 
that accumulated
on his crowded dresser.

Yet, he saw nothing
when he looked
in the mirror,
could not hear
above the noise,
and though he was
comfortable without
a map, he felt himself
stalled and sinking
in discontent.

I can’t do this anymore,
he blurted out one night
during martinis
and foie gras.

But I can give you everything
your heart desires,
she countered,
What do you want?
A Porsche?
A boat?
A romantic trip to Paris?
Anything?

Benny just shook his said,
said I’m sorry,
then left her sitting there,
alone, stunned
and waiting 
for the check.

He couldn’t explain to her
something he didn’t 
really understand -
that he was living where
no one was home,
and that she couldn’t
possibly give him
himself.

January 20, 2025

He has:
	no class, 
	no charm, 
	no cool, 
	no credibility, 
	no compassion, 
	no wit, 
	no warmth,
	no grace, 
	no shame,
	no ethics,
	no wisdom, 
	no subtlety, 
	no sensitivity,
	no self-awareness,
	no  mercy,  
	no humility, 
	no honor,
	no humanity.

Eighty million chose him
and not a goddamn one’s
gonna clean up his mess
when he’s finally gone.






The Monkey Jumps Into the Water

Now the monkey jumps into the water.
                         —old Hungarian saying

The monkey jumps into the water.
Dilbert tie, crooked grin,
corn silk wig and bad cologne.
He doesn’t know how to swim.

Nobody does.The crowd leans in,
half-drunk on hope,
half-dead on lies,
half-waiting for a punchline.

They clap anyway.
Because what else is there?
The same tired circus,
the same bruised lions,
the same half-assed clowns.

Someone lights a cigarette,
someone spits into the street.
The monkey thrashes,
and we all go under.

Beneath the Rusted Sky

He sits in the space where nothing begins,
A man folded into himself,
his hands still, as if waiting to explain
what the world refuses to ask.

The shutters are closed, the light withdrawn,
and yet the graffiti hums—
a hymn of guilt, a language he cannot speak,
scribbled by ghosts who pass unnoticed.

Behind him, the city vanishes,
its weight pressed into his spine.
He is no longer afraid of falling;
the earth has already claimed him.

Is this the moment the world forgets him?
Or the moment he forgets the world?
The air thickens with questions,
each heavier than the silence they fill.

Kandy, Sri Lanka

Gull on Asphalt

Gull on Asphalt
it started with a crack of light,

a wet push into the cold,
and the sky—always the sky—

waiting to swallow you whole.
you learned fast.


claws on stone,
wings slicing the wind like knives.
you laughed at gravity,
but sickness hit like a sudden storm,
a sharp crack in the clear sky,
leaving you stunned, spiraling,
ground rushing up too fast to fight.


one day the wind felt heavier,

the horizon farther.
and then—this.


blood on the pavement,

feathers bent wrong,

the sky doesn’t even care.

Portland, Maine

Radios

The radios sit, Bakelite husks,
Colors dulled by decades of light—
Red, green, blue, once vivid enough
To brighten rooms that are empty now.

Time hums inside them still,
The slow, indifferent tick of hands
Marking minutes that carried news,
Ballroom songs, the war’s end.

Music spilled out in tidy portions,
Tuned to the shape of ordinary lives.
Now, they gather dust on shelves,
Perfect and mute, outliving us all.

Waltham, Massachusetts