*Merry Christmas*

tonight's first toke tastes of turpentine
self deception and long untended brushes

of late
a water soluble sanguine
and a tome of Da Vinci's drawings
given me by a sometimes good friend
to cancel a week's board overdue:

I will never know oils or Dostoevsky
as I would
but at least I am not so cultured
as to tell good wine from bad
or the indifference of refined sentiment
deferring to poises of middle class silence
lights half strung between hangovers and highs
the crisp white cold fading fast on the asphalt

from a commonplace sorrow
to call mine
and they that would know
me as I would be known

this year's obligatory drunk email
is to you
please ignore
things are going well for me, readingwise
(which is all I ask of life, really)
((good dictionaries, mostly))
and I have no doubt your subdued abudance
has found good company

happy holidays & new year, auld lang syne, &c,
raise a glass to Keats with me
or Marx or Sade
whomsoever or none you prefer
I petition not forgone nights their forward forfeited hopes

only I waver along my brink now
like a passenger window
unrolled south and a heavy stroke
refracted

evening set
underbrush strangers coatsleeves lake
as once a poet said
I wish we'd never met

but that might seem to mean to mean too much
or unwarrentedly meanspirited
it's just the holidays talking, like singing at the table,
and I of all of us the last to know our songs

Anyways: Merry Christmas