Supermoon

I thought I’d never start a poem like this:

the moon…

it seems too cheesy

a bad joke, like that bad joke

but it is the moon seeming

larger looming, slicking

roofs sick of frost on the first night of spring

offering us; the bewildered

                                            answers

not found in rolling coverage of earthquakes,

a shoeless girl weeping the soaked tatami

where isotopes dare her wait a half life for love

or in the cracking of Africa’s burnt crust; 
the sudden end of history 
as we knew it the last time our moon dared so near.

Realpolitik in its ghostly glow breaks

free of the dossier haunting headlines

but doesn’t seem as mad, 
as you and I dear, raving
for nights as bright as this,

feeling wolf hungry, daring the lunatics

to draw their curtains, and set us free.

Your little finger

Your little finger

is a match in my hand

I strike it like a cartoon cowboy

on neglected stubble

to light your cigarette

You’ll need a manicure now,

and the flame surely burns,

But the smoke is consoling

and your eyes reflect fire

like amber in the sand.

Brain Heat

The bed is harder than asphalt

hotter than tar cooked

to a gritty treacle by July

and although it’s March, winter

still grips the roof with killer’s fingers

the heating thuds guilty carbon belches

and I writhe with the brain heat,

cranium cracking like a fault fired pot,

flames finding weakness and licking it.

I made this mind a crematorium

and for assembled family roll us in

corpses on a barge blaring

all the rock songs of summer

and winter’s dreams of heat                      

lost in the absence of consoling sleep