I prefer the seas days
When problems only came in threes,
From a teenage witch I groped on old quays
Skipping needles in gray waters on turnpike bays,
Where we caught our cancered sun rays
Downstream of New Jersey factories.

Throwing beer bottles at mermaids
Kicking dead crabs on testing dares
and spray painting boardwalks under piers,
With screaming heroines getting made,
That’s where I touched your whispered accolades
Beneath the glow of neon palisades.

All night long, we screamed at the sea
As It answered us in kind.
We danced till our steps were entwined
And kissed by bonfire’s breeze.
That’s when Poseidon decreed
Our love’s fated irony.

Remember who you are.
Remember where you came from.
Remember what you’ve done.
Drawing breathes and stitching yarns
And have only but begun.

You are Chicago royalty.
You were born from black and blue.
You’ve got Maxwell’s equations,
Maier’s eye and Leaf’s Coney Island hue
and you owe no one explanations.

Know what you want from life.
Know that you can take it all in stride,
Know that you have Sandburg’s shoulders
Rising like a skyline, dividing like river
and winding like the city.

Lady Libertine, I beseech thee.
Transform me with your kiss.
Infuse my tongue with drunken song
And curl my hands to fists.

Slake my thirst with your cylix
And feast on my ruined bones
I have nothing left and offer it all,
No family,
No country,
No home.

I am the orphan in need of suckling -
the drunkard needing weaned.
Clutch me to your cold breast
and swaddle me in sage.

I slit my wrists and bear my chest.
I beg you strike me down
Give me one more drip of inspiration,
One last rite upon my crown.

Let me die with you on my lips
and bleed my heart onto the ground.
Lady Libertine, I beseech thee
end me with your kiss.

Love sucks like every inaccurate description of a black hole
Where the designer got physics wrong and the dimensions droll
Our singular minds cannot understand the mathematics required
To calculate the blow out of our heart well’s desire.

What dilations of space and time can explain your gravity
As you bend the light toward my eyes and concave a cavity
Shaping uncertain principles and impossible probabilities
Outrunning you breaks constant laws and my capabilities

Reduce me to a singularity’s point
When ego means nothing and the self is disjoint
Stretch my being until the fibers untwine
And give me a parsec’s unit of time

For a looping eternity would not be enough

Two black flowers reach
over graves of parted past
to touch leaf and stem

Their roots feed on buried bones
So their buds can bloom anew