I want October fires,

postscript women from Hardy’s Wessex

building smoke pyres to signal lovers,

escaping burning haybeds,

clutching red checkered shirts

trailing cerulean bandannas

upstairs Scottish lamps.

I want prismatic goldgreen brown Casterbridge scenes

painted by gifted Bathshebas and Eustasias.

I want to break bread with Diggory Venn the Reddleman

riding to Weymouth in his coach with horses,

hearkening to the eternally noble constant Venn,

further brothers fatally humbled in love.

I want hopeless passions,

pastures swallowed by October Fires,

Julie Christies who gaze straight ahead not at me,

no more of afterhours ladies taunting tugging horny woolen scarves,

scorning those hopeful hearts I wear on my arms

stumbling down these freezing gay flashing Village streets.

I want October fires shooting pointblank through my naivete when I am vulnerable,

cap pulled low over my eyes,

poet’s eyes scarred by my desertflower virginity maiden.

I want some truth tell me lies goddammit,

want paradoxes only in words,

words do not penetrate rivers,

for those inhabiting this island

have not visited these waters.

I want to enlist at some school

where toothless sunglassed earmuffed students

remain busy fingering each other’s notebooked daisy chain cut outs.

I want to return to my own nonexistent house,

make wall paintings with fire torch and oils,

scribble out cryptic poems on the floors,

soak another alto saxophone reed in golden-brown Courvoisier,

and sit still inside the silence inhaling the darkness.

I want to grow sick of compromising

sharing taxi rides in rented cars,

dodging Cubano refugee doormen

busy peering over their hockshopped watches downtown 9thstreet

expecting some Rock Hudson to visit their Israeli artist tenants.

I want choices this time,

permission to experience loss

not compelled by visions or jealousy

or pathetic senses of humor.

I want to shoplift unzipped bulletproof vests

shades of maple leaves,

want to thaw out my honky-tonk piano sinking in Mississippi River mud,

its will of tears my rite of passage.

and I want to sidestep this night,

eliminating whatever whoever gets close to me,

learn better signals other than busy phone numbers.

let me dam up these constant rivers of words,

misbehave myself at all night movies,

24 hour drugstores,

invite sweet mothers and pregnant daughters out for Chinese food.

let me marry a Louisiana waitress,

leave $50 breakfast tips for a cup of tea and drive off,

Zorro masked and invisible.

let me purge Port Authority bathrooms,

drink some serious cowboy coffee at Bickford’s,

sleep in a bed of leaves in Sherman Square,

waking up to hourly to downshift dreams

considering failed experiments of others' lives, deaths.

and please allow me this first dance just once,

leave the dark dancehall morning arm and arm with the bouncer,

allow me the choice to want even more next go-around without caring to want,

simply step off the curb

shaking the snow from these feathers,

my body well saturated from those hastily runaway colors

gathered from faraway warmer climes.

NYC, 1983