It is indeed the devil’s chair
that overlooks the winter night
from a box of yellow light:
a third-floor dorm-room window on the town.

I swig a bottle, swill it round.
Bubbles, like storm-tossed ships,
like the warmth of willing lips,
go spinning into naught without a sound.

No, not a sweat-stained gown,
not another drunken fight,
nor another yellow slip:
“you did wrong, did nothing right.”

For all the lights that shine across,
and all the boxes just like mine,
friends and lovers,
strength and mind and swaggering eyes-
I feel as homeless, desolate and lost
as Grendel in his rich and heartless lair.

I step outside to find a girl
and watch, on the way,
the very breath of the wind
carved on the sheets of the snow.

The robbing-men are out tonight;
ghouls beneath the streetlight-glow.
sucking at the marrow, carrion-towns,
a world of faces that I wouldn’t know.

I’m steeled to fight; walled against the cold
like a darkling castle town of old,
warmed by trite and petty little rhymes,
hid against the breast, jealous of time.

The bells of grateful cities ring;
homecoming in crusader lands,
things that all sound cheap in words
that you, my reader, do not understand.

I remember Heather who hung herself;
her swollen blue toes traced
slow circles in the savage inch
between linoleum and her-
Jenny told me so, whispering
through a night gaping like a wound.
Elaine too, and Yulia;
too many times my fingers
running under skirts find scars.

Don’t let yourself remember Amish summers,
girls skipping barefoot down the rows, singing as they work,
and little boys who look you in the eye like men…

The burg is humped in silence.
Clouds part, the storm speaks
voiceless, and blurs the light.
Snow! Like a locust-swarm, like
every petal falling in a breeze,
falling forever; a curtain
opening on the end of days
when a black hound will howl on the moors.

I’m almost eager, teetering
on the verge of it, almost drunk
or I wouldn’t be musing
on a cruel world of things
where evil men make
good bars of soap.

C’mere kid, into the alley.
I’ve got a shot of truth for ya,
like a little bump of coke, a word:
VICTORY- when the heart’s a bird.

OPPRESSION
hisses our perfect state,
‘a problem to pathologize,
diagnose and medicate’ sneers
a ratfaced Georgetown brat in my left ear,
and on my right a red-robed angel:
‘deus vult…’

Ulysses’ bow remains unstrung,
upon my wall a pistol’s hung,
four-hundred years unbarking,
beneath a flag that begs embarking:
grinning bones with grim and mocking eyes.
Put on the one old song that makes me cry-
At the table, on the devil’s chair
I calmy ate my hatred with my wine