[Love Poem: Watering Hole]

Because a few drinks does negative damage
to the soul. Call it praxis. Call it alibi.
Whatever the cost, the season’s shock & alter,
you find yourself in one of the following quadrants
at one of the following angles:

               a) Lurched over a gin gimlet in khakis & a tie,
                 last call three minutes & counting.
               b) Your cousin’s graduation party, punch-spiked
                & dangerous, reciting Keats, the dark, dark bird
                perched & smiling on your shoulder.
               c)

When I walked through them (the double-doors,
the fifth & vital chamber), the waitress asked my
poison, brought it my way on a silver platter.
I remember you, fingering your empty glass.
But what we need breaks the skin & spills over
the lip. God has nothing to do with it. Do the math.
The sacral, the diurnal, the sacred, the dead.
We met in that secret room, made a pact, traded gestures.

I’d come home that night to find blood on my lip.
You’d wake the next morning in sweat, taste mint & metal.
I had wanted to make clear to you the velvet within.
The black smoke, the contour of fire. To describe
to you a world, the world, to you. Is what I mean.