He was a Sailor

Look onward, psychonauts!
Scrape the paint off the gilded cage,
as you murmur your melodramas through
the straws in your mouths
and then softly ask,
"Where is my ego today?"

"Dead!
Dead!
Dead!
Dead!"

Inked

maybe tattooing
old, wrinkled skin
feels like writing
on wet paper-
don't want to
rip you, you:
so fortunate
to have survived
the rain,
the time.

but watch as a grandmother
sits in a parlor

age seventy-two,
abiding in agreement
with her twenty-something
granddaughter.
"nothing you'll want to hide
when you're my age."

see her flinch
from the needle as it
traces lines on her
leathery, brown flesh.
"i passed four children -
there isn't a pain i can't bear,"
she keeps repeating,
not intending to remind
anyone but herself

bandaged, they walk out,
and under each bulk of
thick, white gauze
lie tiny etchings of
Sahara totems:
an itchy hieroglyph

Ducts of Whiskey

you cry tears of Dewar's,
and lick your lips when you speak of the past,

how do you do it?
gesticulate with all four limbs
like that.

you speak of things
you've seen that
i cannot even dream,

infancy is strange,
when it lasts for
twenty years.

maybe these memories
were meant to be
discarded,
into the Great Lake of
regret.

right now,
a poem will sound good
to me only if it was written
in anything but
first person perspective

but today, i am
fine with being
mediocre.