Safe Harbor
(for a painting by the same name)

Divided into two rectangular panels,
it looks like a hundred-year-old photograph,
romantically blurred so that everyone's imagination
has room to roam inside its vast spaces.

I stare at the dark green swirls of the picture
hoping to reach into their faint center to my own destination,
a place that I cannot see but feel
whole-bodied inside the deliberate paint strokes,
warm tones and opaque smudges.

I smile childlike, contented
at the thought of a place where clocks
never stop running
and one can fall asleep in a room with a locked door and never
run out of air.
Where the most satisfying of dreams don't just happen
during the day, with your consent, but too at night
when sobbing and sweaty terror never arrive
to initiate the long tortured night.
Where intestines don't boil
and screams don't run away or hide,
nothing hides.
Where the path trails off in a cozy
blur she must have mixed so thoughtfully
on her palette.

I sit here contemplating my home among the swirls
but away from them, safe in the color of forests,
my surroundings clean and earthy,
simultaneously warm and chill,
like mud packed near the base of a tree.

when alone..lone..lonely..lo..
loneliness echoes, but
a drink or two or more's the salve
i'll have a beer, red wine, spirits to raise the dead
or string me up to the rafters,
i'll take what i can get.
the first cool mouthful incites urgency
down there, a tingling that feels like desire.
Now i write with abandon,
after all i have been abandoned
oh, drink brings out the narcissism best
woe is me, why oh why me oh my
i talk of things that shock and you squirm
i'm that drunk for whom you feel neither pity nor affection -
isn't contempt all we ever have for others,
when not for ourselves?
alone again - still - with a sorry excuse for a friend,
drowning, tiny, swimming, flailing foolishly in the bottle
like a patient whose operation has gone terribly wrong,
screaming, in a tone more muddled than rage,
what is this botched life worth
and why do we hear only our own echoes