MILLENNIAL HUSTLER

It's New Year's Eve
and Adam
is at the Paradise
and "he's straight,"
he tells me the businessman
like the moon
isn't out
there's no destiny
at the millennium;
that you are here
with two hundred bucks
to blow
and the candles from the bar
the tinsel from Christmas stockings
shine on your face
and with gay apparel
hung up for another client
you are ready
as always to break into
his heart, house, mind
to leave you and him
more along,
lest old acquaintance be forgot.

FUGITIVE POET

Fugitive, up from New Orleans
like any color blind Rimbaud
with the purity and putrefaction
of a poet without a rebel yell
or a beer belly,
refined with Keats
or Sundays with poet Poe,
your brother sent to Nam
who could not spell it
or find it on the map
until the Pentagon discovered it,
now in the bridal suite
on heroin & hero worship
without a phone number
no one could reach him
except to pin the purple heart
attacked to him, that condition
of being a poet after Rimbaud
and not accepting any jungle rot
new reports of body counts
with your TV dinners
not wanting the 60's back,
only the sporting Southern schools
of Black Mountain or whatever
in insomniac flashbacks
coldly in affirmation
of being human.

CHIAROSCURO

The sky is narcoleptic,
uneven, witless,
it's the Wednesday before last,
you forget your white pills
at the high hat bar
known as the Question Mark
somewhere in Honolulu,
but you are too drunk,
a juiced road runner
resembling Tyrone Power
crossing the street backwards,
becoming overheated and antsy
in the travelling company
of two-bit pushovers and actors,
making me feel sad
yet not wanting the mainland
with the faraway cries
of the eagles.

- B.Z. Niditch