Yesterday, you sat on the porch with your scotch and waited for the sun to go down before lighting a cigarette and turning on the radio.

While reading the Age of Innocence
I stumble upon a curious
Japanese doppelganger

Kurasawa and his man
Toshiro Mifune in
an old samurai movie
a classic
like Edith’s novel
but the two might as well
be Martians to each other

But I have a little more whiskey
and therefore a chance.

around me, the snores,
the window tree,
its overgrown slap against glass,
the scamper of tunneling mice,
the quake of the diurnal
in their murmuring beds,
moon’s spider-leg progress
across the wilds of the ceiling –

I live in a shack in the wilderness.
Without ink, I write poems in my own blood.
I pick wild roses just so the thorns
will pierce my skin.
It hurts but I need the metaphors.

We’re too distracted by our lives
To notice the life around us

So wrapped up in our status
We fail to see anyone else

Thinking we’ve seen it all
Without wanting to see it again 

A face stares out 
from the album cover,
worn eyes hiding
behind tinted lenses
the darkness of
the Hollywood
night lit by
a single spotlight