On the People Who Write By

You alone over there
With the ink on your hands
And your eyes like a pop
Listen to me soft:
I want to speak
Your thoughts
I want to practice
Your pain so I can
Feel your drops
And when I have you
Summed in my bones
Maybe we can get two
Cheers
And talk how it felt
To be alone

Green

There is a green in Connecticut
which I have seen
only on occasions
in Brooklyn.

The grass for once,
little patches of easy
movement between the farms
of pavement built by registers and the
hopes of generations of trys
and streetlights and the
horns of the rushed but

the roof for seconds,
at 6:21
when the sun has just begun
over a line of jagged
buildings and your drunk hair
waving between my
breakfast burrito thoughts,
on stage, a project I just started
then it is green
in Brooklyn.

On my 26th birthday I go back
to Connecticut and we are kids
again, pounding and leaping ultimate
frisbee watch out
for that fucking telephone
pole!
Are my shoes the goals?
Are your pants out of bounds?
There is the grass again
right under our soles
and I'm inspired like I haven't been
in Brooklyn when I'm
searching for those stamped
urns of earth at rest between
the urban farms.

When I move soon
to another Brooklyn
I'll be hoping hard but I have no cash
register with no plans
to ever own one.
I need a window with a little more light
I need a place to go outside
where I can see a few more trees
write a few more lines
and think about how the green in Connecticut isn't for me
because all I had to do
to "succeed" was to ask real nice.

I'm still looking

for a home in Brooklyn where
to succeed you have to describe
how the hoards like flocks of rooks
muck shit wailing
the homeless the poor the oppressed
the failures like a firehose and the relentless drive
to settle
my own impossible definitions of myself today
and my self tomorrow
the fucking and walking hard and running to be
on time for somebody else
's dream
the unbelievable stairs and stars
they are all green to me.