If Someone Had

Your eyes carve space
to make a place for blooming
purple volume – the shadows
of Manhattan buildings
are as dark and violet to you
as lust: appearances
come first – they have a sexy
knack for slaking thirst:

what you’d like to think is
always what you’d rather drink.
You are, in fact, the literary
and pontificating drunk
too smart to crawl out from
your rich embroidered funk –
you know about the swooning
blue romance of heroin –

and gasp the quickened breaths
of endlessly explicative
didactic crystal meth: you are
the death of you but also
mark the glimmer of a yearning
for a life: you will not
cease until you’ve made a halo
of your strife, and painted

your ungainly saintliness all
over every wall. You are
the record of your rise and fall.
No one asked you if you
wanted to be born. You wonder
if that’s good or bad.
You wonder what you might
have said if someone had.



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