​Craving


I broke the long stems
of dry spaghetti
into worm-sized pieces
that I ate as I watched
cartoons on TV:
Baby Huey in his tiny diaper,
Porky and Petunia Pig.
I popped the round top
from the Hershey’s chocolate can,
spooned the unsweetened
powder into my mouth.
Mom was pregnant.
At my eleventh birthday party,
Dad patted her belly,
bragged to my friends
that he’d blown up that balloon.
It was the beginning of summer.
My friends had begun to kiss boys,
steal candy and cigarettes
from Von’s.
I spent the long afternoons
lying on the floor,
cartoons flickering silently
on the black and white TV,
the cord of the telephone
wrapped around my arm,
whispers of the high school boy
l knew from the park
slipping into my ear.
I ate the skin
from the tips of my fingers,
from the tops of my toes
until they bled.
I didn’t know then
what was bitter,
as my life spilled out around me,
fine powder from a dark brown tin. 





At Thirteen I Meet Holden

"Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all . . . And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff.  What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff— . . . " 
                                                                                                                                      J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
While in another room,
my girlfriend screams
at her mother,
I lie with Holden
in a field of white chenille,
whose tufted thread I stroke
with my thumb
as I read about Phoebe, D.B.
The days so long
this summer they poke
from night all endless
and awkward, the way my legs
poke from shorts:
hot, brown, useless.
Days lengthen past bike rides
to Stony Point, past
trips to the pool.
Lengthen into hanging out
with kids I never liked.
My friend and her mother
are pretty stupid,
stupider still, my folks at home
having two hemorrhages apiece
over some secret I’d told.
I love Holden Caulfield
more than anyone I know.
And I know that a field of rye
will be as soft and cool
as white chenille,
and smell even better than grass
cut from the field next door.
And on that cliff,
higher than Stony Point,
I will be safe.
Holden Caulfield will catch me.




​
Poem to my First Love

​
Because our fathers
were too drunk
to pick us up
from the high school dance,
you walked me home
three miles
down dark empty
valley streets,
past tract houses
past orange groves
whose pungent blooms
perfumed the still night air.
I remember your black hair,
green eyes, the cleft
of your chin.
At fifteen, you were
six-foot-four
size fourteen shoe.
Your father beat you
and when he couldn’t anymore
drop-kicked you
from the house instead.
In school you were famous
for being handsome, smart
for football, and lighting
cherry bombs
at lunch time on the quad.
You’d be a doctor, you said
on our slow walk home
not a plumber
like your father
his life all shit
and tight spaces
no wonder he’d become
a drunk.

-three poems from Transforming Matter, PEARL Editions, 2000