when it rains, sleep beneath the fall and call it love

I do not excuse myself as I pop pills of poetry beneath my tongue. No one is watching or everyone is and does it matter now. In a perfect square room with exposed brick and wine, it rains drunk shards of split open metaphors and memoir’d memories. Outside, the rain reminds us how we appear from within.

When poets flirt, they get louder or announce masturbation preferences or they drizzle their drunk against listeners’ lips. A woman licks the left side of my neck and calls it a poem. The rain washes her off of me as Brooklyn is mopped clean by the leaking sky.

Call it perspective. How easy to float away as puddles form like flattened kayaks offering to take you away take you away. The poems end and umbrellas fail us, so we put pages in pockets and thrust waterproof protection toward the wind and traffic. Is this love or inebriation from words and rhythm. How lustful is Lorca. How brash is Bukowski. I gather my goods of ink and bloodied notebook, with petals picked from Prospect Park hiding in the middle. Those petals are poems too for the one in need of less paper and more skin.