Knowing when to leave the party 
	
down on the street	the sidewalk rips a hole in me
I dig for my keys 	come up always empty 

and when you arrive
you say the words I cannot write

I said		I see a stranger in your eyes
the night was wet and my demise 

was forcing words into jagged rhyme

like love, like captor     
my poetry 	my lie  

then the light beam of my mind 	transforms it
so that you and I had gathered there for it 
catching wind of something we mistook for the rapture

we had scattered the ashes long before it
had felt the blue earth moving toward it  

the fracture echoing cold in the heart organ 	
courting my orbit with some false notion
that in a past life I was an orphan 	               
          
  but it’s cruel and distorted

and the sound comes in torrents – 

                  I was trying to tell you – 


                                       it was so important –