Day After Halloween Haiku

November, and the
Air tastes like cold glass beads in
Summer tired lungs.

Almost The End Of The World

I tossed the dust of you out the window of the car, ashes mixing with the dirt and the sand. Hard white bone fragments being powdered by the tires of trucks rolling over dead asphalt, grains of dinosaurs, grains of the beach sand where the animals played, grains of lizards suckling their mothers' breasts while the asteroid fell from the sky....Ashes, dust and sand, is there anything else left behind? Please?

I Hate October!

The sky's turning darker and the air's turning colder, and it's just one more October....there can't be all that many left, can there? And your tears are raining in my eyes, salt burning 'til I plead for mercy.

Rainy Night In Brooklyn Haiku

Chilly gentle rain,
The asphalt wet and shiny

 In October mist.

Watching Norah

Feeling you leaning on my shoulder tonight, dark vision in black crepe and red satin, petting Skunk with your toe while our chopsticks duel for the last piece of seitan in the stew. I let you win, like always....
And your skirt slides up your thigh, a few more inches of black fishnet showing above where my hand rests on your knee....
And Norah is singing "Don't Know Why" while you kiss my fingers, and I kiss the top of your head, shiny pink hair with bright yellow tips....
And I kiss your black lips, warm and soft and hungry....

And now it's a couple of hours later, I'm watching you sleep. Soon I'll have to wake you and put you in a car to go home, but for now the sound of your breathing is enough....

Summer 1966

A thousand feet in the air, behind a grimy marble railing that nobody in the street can see, looking out on carved goddesses and griffons, the sun barely reaching these lonely terraces where even the elevators fear to tread.

Up here, the marble turns to flesh, up here, the sculptures start to breathe. Up here, it's magic. Up here, the rungs of the ladder carry you endlessly upward til the handrails dissolve into clouds....

Labor Day Sneaked By Me Again

The air still feels like hot mud, but it's getting dark so much earlier now. One of my best friends had her first child last week. Won't be long before Orion is rising in the cold sky. And I'll remember the night I first saw him, more than fifty years ago, walking home from the Congress Theater on St. John's Place on a Monday night with my father after seeing a Three Stooges comedy (he and I were the only ones in the family who appreciated them....).

East River Late Summer Haiku

River is rising,
Dirty water washing sand
from the old pilings.

We Were Friends, So Long Ago

Joan Of Arc is burning in the harbor,
white flames, and cold blue salt water.
Can her screams wake you up?
Or are you sleeping too soundly?

It's June Again

I've been in love
with angels and zombies,
wraiths and virgins,
Ophelia, and a ghost
I met on an autumn
Sunday afternoon.
And nobody comes close to her....

Titanic, Second Time Around

April Friday, one in the morning, stars are floating in the cold black river. They only shine upward, so you can't see the bottom, the midnight sand that never knows light. Water and starshine conspire to fool you, make you think that you're wading when when your feet can't find earth....


Cold sharp sea shells that roll in the breakers, ocean glass worn smooth on the sand. Green beer bottles sinking down to the sand dunes where the shipwrecks are sleeping and the passengers dream....the Captain swears, it wasn't his fault, but then he retreats to the bridge as the windows cave in....

Haiku For Titanic, One Hundred Years Later

Clean cold salt water
Washing my poor eyes tonight.
God, let me sleep, please?

January 1, 1984

The light from the street lamp outside leaking through your match stick blinds, reflecting in your brown eyes, two deep auburn candles and your arm around my shoulder. We were used up, anything more was beyond us. Your candle burned on, but your breath was finally slowing, and you whispered in my ear, "That was totally unexpected, and totally pleasurable!"

And Christine was sound asleep in my bedroom, just ten feet below us.

And I've never regretted one second of that night....

Almost One Hundred Years

Life is drifting down in slow white flakes, coasting the miles under the sea, white hot compared to the cold black iron lying on the undersea mountainside. All is quiet now, where the windows on the bridge caved in, where the hungry ghosts in gowns and tuxedos danced to the ragtime rhythms while the hold filled with water and the children looked toward heaven, where I pray that the hand of the ocean sands off the name from the life boats.... I can't ever read that name again without seeing Mr. Guggenheim dead, and Mr. Astor dead, and Ms. Brown barely alive, having broken the curse. Let the sun dry you, flames burning the roof of the tunnel,white canvas jackets bleached under springtime sun...

Haiku For Amelia Earhart

The radio's prayer
drifts softly down the sunbeams
to coral and sand

Emily On A January Night

It's the coldest night of this very young year, the stars are like ice, the ice is like stars. The river is rolling in cold solitude, ice on the pilings, ice on the shore. The sand remembers the footprints from summer, when people were grateful to wade in cool water. But now it's all chilly and smoothed by the currents, no signs of life, icy water is all.

And we're lying in bed with a blue candle burning, too late to go anywhere, too cold to go out. Your skirt's folded neatly on the back of my desk chair, your sweater so carefully folded....

Jenny's Haiku

My life would be so
Dark, the light so hard to find,
If I'd not met you.

Haiku For Someone I Love Very Much

Full of grace that you
Don't even know you have, you
Whisper to the night.