city.

The dawn commute begins its tuneless song--
a plodding cadence played by weary feet,
a rush in veins transcribed onto the street
where caffeine drones alone outpace the throng.

In time with treadmill lives in squares of white,
the world revolves in cycles of extremes.
The dim demands of old, abandoned dreams
become a breath dissolved by subway light.

A bird's lone shadow interrupts the sky,
a colorless flat curtain for the scene.
From street to street, and every block between,
the grim-faced actors pass each other by.

I swipe a card, and turn the stile, and go
To play my faceless part in this tableau.

where.

Whitebeard's tavern was a musty, dark basement, always crowded, thick with humidity and the remnants of thwarted ambitions. The broken jukebox in the corner had long ago surrendered its gaudy prominence for the simpler job of creating atmosphere. Period photographs drooped crookedly in vintage frames and danced an erratic ballet across the walls.

The bar was modern, all chromes and glass and bright lights in edgy combinations, glittering with compassion for the wood panels and cramped booths that had known finer decades. Whitebeard's knew its priorities.

I spotted him right away, with no difficulty at all. A first. And only, I knew, because he wanted me to.

He was glowering at the counter over some bright green concoction. It threw a garish neon reflection across his chest. Artificial lime mingled vividly with the unmistakeable solid reds and whites, alternating horizontal strips that ran circles around his torso as if binding him with 50/50 polyester-cotton blend chains.

I slid into the adjoining barstool. He knew who I was, why I was here. He didn't bother to move or look up.

"Figured you'd buzz," he said, dryly. The words dropped straight into the drink he wasn't drinking.

"You made it easy," I replied. It was the truth. I wasn't too proud to admit he was good. Maybe even the best.

He glanced elsewhere. "How's the wife? Still chuffing the Xanax?"

"Vanessa's just fine," I replied. "I'll let her know you asked. She'll be thrilled."

I ordered a tonic and waited for him to really start talking. Around us, locals chattered about the ordinary problems of ordinary lives.

"It's all over," he said, at last, turning to face me. He looked haggard, like he hadn't seen the sun from the tail end of a dream in some time. The violet crescents cradling his eyes looked twice as deep through the round lenses. I realized this wasn't his first cocktail. "I'm out, bumped. Finished."

I said nothing.

"Sounds stupid, sure," he went on. "But there's just nothing in it for me anymore. Not now that -" He stopped. From anyone else, you might have expected a tear or two. Maybe a dramatic pause for a dramatic catch of an emotional breath. Not him. He looked me square in the eye and knew I could fill in the blanks, that he simply didn't want to.

"She didn't give," I said. "You know that, right?"

"Does it matter?" he asked matter-of-factly, and decided to punctuate the moment with a long sip from his glowing elixir. He grimaced. The stuff was probably as strong as it was green.

I didn't need to explain myself, I thought, but why the hell not? "We had our marching orders to up the ante. You know, stir the pot a little more than we'd been. Ms. Wilkins, see, she's always been a hot topic - nowhere near our Numero Uno. But high enough on the chain. We've had a whole lot of credibility on the line and too many checks bouncing lately." I shrugged. "So we switched sights. Stroke of luck we picked her just when she got soft. She flew first-class into our waiting paws and we did what we do. But she didn't spill a drop, kid. Nothing on you or the Pup."

He traced the rim of his glass with a lazy finger. "Classy chick, that one," he said. "If they dished out ribbons for not screwing up she'd have more yellows than a Chinatown noodle bar. Her twin, though-- Willow? Winnie."

"Wenda," I said.

"Freakin' alliteration," he spat, then frowned, twirling a finger. "They got a ribbon color for participation?"

It was my turn to take a meaningful sip. I set the glass down and folded my hands over it. "So, I'm curious. Why quit? Why now?"

He shrugged. "I'm getting too old for this, Hardy."

"That's my line."

"Get out. How on earth could I tell."

"I'm not getting any younger," I said with meaning.

"Now there's a shocker." He sighed, removing his glasses to scrub the lenses.

The babble and clank blended into one unintelligible hum as he spoke, absently. "I used to get a rush from this, you know. Crazy, right? This whole -- hiding in plain sight. Getting away with murder. I mean, the saying. Never dropped a bird in my life, I swear. I could have. Wanted to, sometimes. Got real close once. Lost my hat. But there's a lullaby for another lonely night at the bar."

He finished scrubbing, replaced the glasses, and stared through them at the ceiling. "It's amazing, man. All it takes is you find a couple tools here and there. The right ones. And suddenly you have the keys to anything you ever wanted. Everything you've ever dreamed of. And then some. Power's overrated, they say, but only because they say a lot about a lot they don't know a lot about."

With a single fluid motion, he tossed off the remaining green liquid and sent the glass sliding a yard down the counter. It stopped at the edge.

"God, man, I'm telling you. Ever had the high of a con gone good? Cracking a safe? Picking a lock with a freaking safety pin? Used to be there was nothing like the feeling of Sultans' rubies jangling in one pocket and some Golden Age auction-fodder rubbing down a couple of seventeenth century Iranian nuggets in the other as you hitched a train for an L.A. premiere to wrangle some fresh, wide-eyed starlet's red-carpet custom Cartier. All in the broadest of broad daylights. Right under every one of your stupid clueless noses. Every single one. Every single time."

"You make it all sound so boring," I said.

"That's the problem. It is." He paused. "I'm being ironic here."

"That makes two of us."

"I can't swing it anymore," he blurted, flinging his hands in the air. The drink was working its magic, clearly. "Plain and simple. It's not a solo game. I'd love to spin it that way. I've tried, I can't. It's gone. All the excitement, all the energy. I'm telling you - she's not the best, sure, not as long as I'm around." Somehow, he'd managed to deliver those words with a straight face. "But she's the best at what she does. It doesn't work without her. Hasn't, and won't." He lowered his hands in fists on the counter. "And don't even think to chalk this up to feelings. Let me assure you, you lose a couple of things to get to where I'm at. Like, say, caring. I have feelings for her like I have feelings for an Allen key on a good day."

"You're wrong," I said.

"You think I stay up nights waiting for her postcards?" He laughed bitterly.

I leaned forward. "I'm thinking you miss more than her postcards."

"I'm a thief and a cad, Joe. Not a killer, not a lover." He smiled without any hint of joy and flexed his thin shoulders. "There's just a whole lot of nothing anymore. The only rush left, I figure, is giving you and your boys a reason to pat yourselves on the back. One last good deed, man. A little morale boost. A little lovin'." He threw in a crude gesture and a grin. "You're welcome, by the way."

I looked at him sadly.

"Oh Joe, Joe, Joe." His sigh was patronizing. His words swam together. "It's killing me, seeing you so glum. I know, I'm sorry. It's not the blaze of glory that's rocked you to sleep for years, is it? No cinematic chase through the mall, no duck-hunting at the airport. But, hey, I mean, it's the next best thing, right? I'm sitting. Right. Here. Practically begging you to slap those handcuffs on me like charm bracelets. Would it kill you to show a little gratitude?"

I said nothing.

We both saw us as we were now, I could tell. Me, the proverbial cat. Old and tired. No longer enamored by the kill. Content to take pity on the worn-out, cornered mouse in skinny jeans and those red and white stripes who'd eluded him for a decade. Content to lend an ear to his brash, boozy squeaks before they triggered the trap.

The mouse knew it was coming. He slapped the countertop with gusto. "Gee, guess that's the closing bell."

We both knew, without turning, that Frank and his partner were coming down the steps behind us. The half-hour of alone time I'd put in a special request for was spent... and here they were, just in time to finish the gig.

The last image I can recall was his final wink at me as Frank's voice and a metallic click of cuffs punctuated the soundtrack at Whitebeard's. A moment and a hand brushing my shoulder later, they were gone.

I swivelled on the stool, alone in a crowd, staring into the neon light of the bar and filtering the grumbles of men who'd never jostled rubies in their pocket.

To this day, I still don't think of that night as the night I finally found Waldo. It's the night I first wondered if Waldo would ever find himself.

future.

anticipation, hope
tremors. hanging
tingling, synapses,
signals, racing,
delicate, wild,
coursing, free
frozen, mouth
dry, drum-
pulsed.

this is it,
or else
this is it.

the sky's edge
beckons
with fleeting glimpses,
the glimmers
of Atlantean riddles,
smiling with
clear-sky promise
and suddenly

everything falls out from under our feet and we are falling like weights with inexpressible freedom within an inescapable pull but the moment is all that we can cling to for everything else falls with us

insatiable.

it's like a kick in the gut,

a taunting hammer to the face,

the pain like a heavy vertigo

from staring down into the valley

of your own inadequacy. 

the goal — if that — is relative,

inherently unreachable:

a finish line that keeps your pace

and runs ahead in time with you

in all your bitter striving;

wasting hours on a hopeless hope,

you'll only trade a treadmill

for a hamster's wheel.

you've forgotten you can only

stare down into a valley

if you're standing somewhere higher

in the first place.

fairness.

Maria won't deny she's wanted to be attractive as much as the next girl — maybe a little bit less, but there is always something about it in the back of her mind.

She's used to it by now, she says, how they always tell her how beautiful she is and how they always tell her it's not beautiful enough. What they profess in profuse, symphonically-underlined commercial words and inspirational scripts, she finds, they undermine — whether consciously or not, it doesn't make much difference — in their blatant prostration before shapelier, skinnier, symmetrical sirens.

Not that she's bitter about the whole thing, she would clarify in a careful, candid manner that belies a deep consideration of the topic. Contrary to the stream of feel-good media maxims that coo sweet nothings and massage at the aches of beauty denied, she considers herself simply not meant to partake in that particular slice of the apocryphal 'good life,' and she's made peace with that.

The consequences of her shape and weight do not escape her. Neither do they imprison her. She will not waste away defiantly, but she has determined not to go desperately out of her way to sculpt herself, chasing a futile attempt to alter her intrinsic value.

Everyone, she reasons, has worth that manifests itself in different ways. The whole spectrum of one's blessings comprises surprising combinations of qualities that are neither mutually exclusive nor inherently bound.

While the world might worship at the feet of its finest physical specimens, Maria remains content to pursue a worthier surrender.

dusk.

A hairbrush with red plastic tips,
dissected by a tire, perhaps,
lies splayed upon a patch of ash
from passing finished cigarettes,
an urchin on the asphalt floor
of summer's seething urban sea.

The tired sun casts feeble lines
in glass and steel, but won't disturb
the heavy, humid lethargy
that swims across the city blocks
unmoved as ancient river rocks.

Electric squares from street to street,
replacing fleeing salmon rays,
illuminate red cardboard trays
that scuttle past on lobster feet.

An empty Pepsi can reclines
against the time-uprooted curb,
where verdant mossy thickets sit
between the tired tumbling bricks
and thrive despite the endless tread
of all the stumbling twilight steps
that join the frantic Friday hunt
for cares and Coors in desperate need
of pouring out and capping off,
while passing sirens drag themselves
across the damp, aware of how
their dire, abrasive, anguished howls
are now their own brash eulogies.
They come and go and leave a trail
of staler silence in their place.

The lurking furnace wind resumes
its tour of open-windowed rooms.

The vagrant night will only pause
to glimpse across a windowpane
some mirror image of itself
inside a gilded wooden frame—

It marvels at the captured lights,
enamored with itself, despite
the ever-present scratch of claws
that scurry down its sewer drains.

cupid.

I sort of imagined that the attraction would be a warm, happy, good-natured feeling. Something that would make me frown a little at myself, probably laugh self-consciously at the betrayal of my own accelerating pulse. Something silly and simple enough to file away under the annals of centuries of poetry and a veritable galaxy of songs. A warm blanket that felt nice, fit well, but could be set aside for more important things.

The truth is, there isn't one way it happens. I'm sure of at least that much. There's a world of difference between the suave chemical allure of charming repartee and a violent physical jolt that fills your veins with a volatile kerosene and turns a stove dial in your arteries.

The first sits, stews, simmers, until your senses register a gradual hot-tub comprehension of enjoyment and you think, gee, I really like where this is going. The other comes crashing in, the emotional equivalent of a hammer annihilating a carnival strength-test lever with enough hurricane force to set off all the blinding lights and shatter the bell with a tremendous peal, leaving you overwhelmed and only aware of a burning deficit in your account.

contrition.

Don't walk down that road

I wish I had said

Instead
I was content with
  the silence
then and
  the sadness afterwards

It was not safe
  going alone
  the way he did

The ground was
  starved and weak

  the holes gaping
and deep

Maybe
thinking back
part of me did
 somehow know
  that was why
  he wanted to go

But another part of me
had the same kind of
  somehow knowing
  that he just as much
  wanted someone
  to
       and I'm sorry I never did
  say

don't walk down that road

friend.

precipitate.

As we piled into the car,
muting the storm, my mind
turned a backward somersault,
running like highway raindrops
racing each other backwards
on our old minivan window,
rewinding to those days packed
away in attic cardboard boxes
filled with plastic photobooks.

Back then, when it rained,
the inkblot reds and greens
like Christmas lights in August
would dance between the wipers'
rhythmic crocodile chomps.
The million-megapixel outside world,
loud with harsh and blaring sounds
and brash interrogation lights,
became a calming blur
behind the glass, the buckled belt,
and the warm, familiar security
of Dad behind the wheel.

fatale.

"Well! Quelle charmante surprise."

Elsa licked her lips and dropped her eyelids just low enough to level Dodge a proper smoky glare. She did not alter the exaggerated pose with which she'd entered the otherwise empty tavern.

She barely moved at all, in fact, which she had long since learned was the ideal course of action when staring down a barrel, any barrel, which definitely included the glittering cobalt barrel of Dodge's custom semi.

"What do you want?" she asked.

They both knew it was rhetorical. Gunpoint conversation was a game of formalities.

Dodge was ice in all the precise ways Elsa was fire. He said:

"'Dull Sphinx, Jove keep thy five wits; thy sight is growing blear.'"

Despite his taut alertness, his cool baritone spilled through the tense, dusty air like a chilled, well-vented wine.

Elsa smiled and shifted her weight, a cautious, calculated motion. Her eyes stayed fixed on the weapon, the magnet that immobilized and held them together.

"I am afraid you have come to the wrong place," she said. "Or, at the very least, the wrong time. An unfortunate coincidence. You see, it was stolen last night."

Dodge made no sound or movement in reply. There was something in her voice that rang deeper than her lilting accent, something that slithered over the bar counter and threatened to ignite his skin beneath the tailored suit.

She began to move a hand upward and marveled at the ever-so-slight tightening of Dodge's tensed knuckles. She laughed.

"You are good, very good to have come this far," Elsa offered. "But think. Why would I lie to you right now? You have every capacity to tear this place to its foundations, and I have no power to stop you." Her mouth slid into a mock frown. "It is gone, M. Dodge. That is the truth. You are only wasting your time here."

As the final word drifted from her lips, Elsa took a single step forward, sending a rigid shock through Dodge's arm.

"Unless," she breathed, "you had some other business in mind."

"Not another step," Dodge said. His gaze and aim never wavered, but there was a thawing in his eyes.

"Why?" Elsa cooed. She tilted her head and looked incredibly concerned. "Does it bother you?"

"I'm warning you, sweetheart."

"Pardieu," Elsa sighed. "A warning from M. Dodge, the Lone Ranger himself!"

Her words sidled up to his cheek from five meters away, stroking the lines of his clenched jaw. "I have heard of him-- always so lonely, so angry, so cold. He comes looking for the treasure. It is not here, I have told him so. He loses time; ah! Even now it flies further away. Yet here still he stands, still so angry, waving his little toy. I think, he must not have come for the treasure; he does not care for it. So what does he really want?" Her eyelids lowered by fractions of seconds as her voice slipped into a velvet stage whisper. "What does a big, lonely man ever want from a poor, lonely girl?"

One stilettoed foot inched itself forward.

A bullet screeched millimeters past her ear and detonated in a shower of decaying wood panels behind her. Elsa was suddenly gripping the floor, a fireball of nerves, screaming with eyes circled wide with terror.

"Strike two," Dodge said. "Let me know when you're ready to start actually saying something, hon, or I'll let my 'little toy' here speak for the both of us."

current.

(or, '2011')

the world shatters a little more today,

falling
one tyrant at a time
against a stark backdrop of the
mobilized masses marching
for bread and bullets and blood,

crumbling
as tremors and typhoon gales
like rib-thin mares devour livelihoods
the tramping of their iron hooves
echoing in the tears that trail behind,

heaving
violently with every battered sign
and bloody silent soldier screaming
"somebody save us from ourselves
and soon,"

and as I watch, I am transfixed
momentarily
gripping tighter

the mocha latte in my hand growing cold as
the apathy of unfamiliarity and
the absence of empathy's smoldering coals
distilling into shrill pinprick scintillations

the images that swim
past the blazing screen.

scatter.

Tether me faster, please.

My thoughts are taking off at an unsettling rate, migrating—where else?—south.

Nothing quite fits; everything's a bulging chrysalis emanating nervous energy.

Stop the presses. Start the war.

Stick me down fast. Glue me like a wrinkled piece of a carefully cut magazine photograph on the foam board of a fifth-grade art project.

I'm a bag of marbles that have lost their boy.

Somebody get in here quickly, if it's all the same to you, and put my chains back on, those little steel ellipses I can't stop cutting through with my own razor-sharp self-loathing.

The whole world gestures with an unquestioning expectancy of sanity, dragging at my feet like a dying magnet.

Something about oysters, and a stage...

It's too late for sweet dreams, though, because I've been completely jigsawed, thanks very much, and I could swear a corner is missing.