(Tag: Lavender Granola Switchblade Nun as Sugar Ray Robinson, Pound-for-Pound the Greatest. Elegy for the Word Garden Blog.)

Sugar Ray, Sugar Ray,
when sweat exploded
across the ring,
were those bright drops poems, or
cockatiels, or exile?

Sugar Ray, Sugar Ray,
as your punches echoed
from the rafters
we felt each steam-driven word,
lines jabbing like pistons.

Sweet Science, Sugar Ray,
Sweet Science. 
Was it honey or blood we tasted
at the end of your gloves,
were they horseshoes or velvet?

Emily your cornerman in ‘52,
no shame throwing in the towel
collapsing after 13 rounds
in the Garden’s 103 heat.
Eden is a tough kitchen.

In the clench and clasp
what did you whisper in our ears?
What light did you shatter
before the KO
Sugar Ray, Sugar Ray.

For Shay’s Word Garden

The river creaks like old floorboards,
but I don’t walk on water,

I stumble down the waves
to where you are asleep,

My shoelaces and your forgiveness 
untie me.

Dredged from silt, I play the bones,
my body’s voice now soft and muddy.

You listen, my wind-chime nerves
flicker where we watch the trawlers,

those steel-toed ship of dreams.
You touch my driftwood skin, 

Your eyes push back the tide.
I will sink or swim.

For Shay’s Word Garden

Again, city of the dead,
where there are no words
for higher ground.

Young girls have come, 
hair still wet and tangled
from unstill river arms –

turn and spin and down and darkness, 
until lungs confess their air,
breathe in prayers of water. 

Silent, as they must be.
Simply, without fear, 
as they must be.

Among the living, no words
for child, name, voice.
We drown in broken promises.

For Shay’s Word Garden

Lightning cracks open the night –
let's go baby, demolition time –
into the dumpster, break back

this plywood attic of dreams, 
jumbled stars twixting 2x4
shanty-town constellations –

I jam my claw hammer under the moon, 
pull it like a nail: extruding, 
extracting, bending light –

Neither safe nor sorry, you and I 
run like squirrels from feral comets
loosed by rotted gravity.

Heaven’s bright vault wide open –
Ministry of vandals,
I hand you the can –

What will you tag on God’s walls?
What thirst will you spray
in black and light?

For Shay’s Word Garden

Humidity drooling all over, sundog light 
jumping us, tongues and tails banging,

we're wiping the – wuddyacallit – spittle off 
while we stumbledown 42nd Street praying 

air conditioners are on in the museum of 
phony celebrities, being cool a cheerer upper 

until the power goes and we die of heat 
and boredom, counting the hours like aspirin 

doled out one-by-one into our palms, 
clock hands limp as warm lettuce, straining 

to move a tick, but giving up, like time has its feet 
glued to the sidewalk of Times Square, gooey

hot gum playing off-Broadway, you, incognito
in your movie-star shades, my corny jokes,

Spiderman thumbs a cigarette like it’s holy, 
record heat spinning viral, vinyl, nerves,

needles jumping tracks in the city’s groove.
Selfie-stick. Selfie-sticky. Selfie-stuck.

For Shay’s Word Garden

For Allen Ginsberg

I found Ginsburg's busted glasses in my bedside drawer – 
black plastic rims skinny and hungry after all these years,
 
holding out his empty gaze like orphans' begging bowls. I ground 
up the lenses – both light and dark of what he'd witnessed –  

fired until molten and spun on wheels of hobo trains –  
new glass eyes for my blind poems. I poked starry pinholes 

in them to let in holy sight, connected their nerves to God's 
electronic neck and groin (let's be honest about this now), 

said prayers to hamburger stands and public restrooms. 
Waited for his phantom voice from the world's last radio, 

his auctioneer's cadence counting down the end of time 
sold to the highest bidder. Going once, going twice. 

For Shay’s Word Garden

But I missed clapping 
the fly right over 
my soup, adding him 

to the minestrone, his 
death and mine mere 
inches from the surface, 

life’s zuppa fateaglia –
stewed fate and beans,
its mélange of garlic 

and curled fingertelli 
pasta beckoning,
calling me spoonwards,

scent of fresh basil, all
giving both the fly and me
reasons to let it be.

For Shay’s Word Garden

Your voice quilted under blankets:
"Stay safe out there…" Sure, this is 
New Jersey, after all, but I don’t need 

brass-knuckles or mace anymore though 
winter wind still mugs us and the river's
light flick-knife slashes off waves while

a cop-light sun peers in through 
morning's fogged-up windshield as you 
and I scramble to cover up – but it
 
is you in your dreams and underwear
I worry about – your heart with all 
its windows and doors unlocked,

trusting in love's single porch-light
to summon wings – moths disguised 
as angels, hawk-eye lumina quivering

against the screen door – inviting 
safe-crackers and cat-burglar poets like 
me. What if you forget how to rain – or 

worse, let go of time – your days
loosed to wander among hyacinths – 
the hyacinth girl – then streetside, 

thumbing for a ride – each to seek
new futures in distant realms – 
your seconds rise as scents of 

cardamon and cloves in Istanbul's 
hustle markets, hours take 
Augustinian vows, keeping vigil at 

Matins in St. Sulpice, your months and 
years set sail before the solar winds to 
new worlds and suns, past where light 

sleeps naked – leaving me to wander 
a universe of lifetimes once again
to find you.

For Shay’s Word Garden

(She’s been feeling ill this week, but this is in thanks for all her work)

XOXO

Doctor F., slip-sliding blood, stents in the wrong heart –
all pig parts now – and I am a wild boar, snorting and rutting –

Then new eyes, eagle-twitched with talon lust, I’m a bird 
lifting the gurney, arms and elbows reconstructing flight  –

What else could I expect after my wife and the nurse 
played tic-tac-toe with a sharpie on my neck and back,

the locations of incision marked for winning and losing –
Lord! My organ donor is the Mormon Tabernacle! Where go all 

those pipes! Staves for vocal chords, Bach pulling my nose stops, 
Toccata and Fugue I arise, Oh Creature, and know my aloneness 

for the first time. And yet… I am large, I contain multitudes, 
the pull of zoötic moons, monstrosity a begetting, like gravity

For Shay’s Word Garden

You stab a finger at your pork, 
warn me, as always, of trichinosis,
what a sin lockjaw would be, gone –

my words that strut like peacocks 
before the tabernacle – my voice 
no longer a feral priest –

no miracles by flocks of geese 
in the cattails, levitating baby Moses 
with my honking.

Wait, no! I remind you trichinosis 
is roundworm – nematodes – 
fallen angels in the bloodstream.

If I must suffer corruption,
then Lord, let me take
those monkish vows of silence –

barefoot and in sackcloth,
when I step on a rusty nail 
of the true cross

I will not cry out.

For Shay’s Word Garden