Comptine

you were playing comptine that day
out in the living room when i woke up and
heard it in my sheets, except
i’m not sure
you got past the first seven  

notes and when i came in, 
it was in imitation of your cat, i started
when you found another sound and had i known
you would play the piano for me, 
i could have asked for so much more. 

Bangalore and its ridiculous orange sky. I’m not having it.

Atomic Tangerine

Past pumpkin and the pretention of princeton orange,
Portland orange, or the color of papaya whip,
Which seemed like the dripping stasis of eggshell off-white, 
I was looping the brush in a curl through atomic tangerine,
When you came down to help in a dress that was positively gold - 
Or something else altogether, I could not have said, 
In between the obscure parts of that familiar spectrum - 
Darling I was like a balefire that summer day. 
But you were atomic and you were tangerine
- or something else altogether.

For Margaret, After A Party

After Frank O’ Hara

You sprayed Febreze to get rid of the smell
From the joint we has passed around nine strangers 
And I was sprawled out on the flock print sheet 
Fashioned from a curtain and 
You didn’t know it because you do not always know
What I am thinking but then 
It was about the other ones, before you, 
When happiness seemed to be coffee 
On the clock like a routine declaration of love - and
How I was withering with the need for it 
Until you were loping onto the scene with a refusal to 
Exist in any way but the way I had seen you first,
Red-eyed, mouth pointed in a smirk and 
Your talent for erasure a reassuring tenant
In my capacity for nostalgia. How did it happen?
I took in the gin and smoke of your skin 
                                        Until it was euphoria and 
Not the other way around. 

McCafe, Frankfurt Transit

After making my way from concourse Z to
A, which of course happened to be right next to each 
Other, in the Dewey logic of airports, I sat with
My 2 euro coffee and croissant 
Watching the taxi dances on a gloomy tarmac,
And what would have happened? If one of those wheels
Near the plane’s wings turned backwards and 
Exploded, so that the businessman in seat 50A
Looked from the small trap window 
As though he was suffocating  
While a requiem screamed from his custom headphones,
Oxygen masks stuck in the top panel - why,
Eyes comically wide in the realization 
Of the doors melted shut for a mass funeral where
Frankfurt would see what the sun looked like. 

“menses”, my mother called it

[Of course the stripper would win]