The hole in my heart is emptied out.

He is gone for good,

the one who left so long ago.

Whom I chased through women and success,

lounging like a roman à clef

above this restlessness,

collecting attributes like dried leaves,

phone calls, sugar-covered memories—

it is not the hole that hurts,

but what you put in it, how you fill it,

the grade-school grammar of your loss.

And what is left is a whiff

of emptiness, past tense, italicized,

as irrelevant as that old man on a plane

back to gay Paris. As I, too,

become beside the point to myself, free,

doomed to start again, playing chicken

with oncoming identities,

learning lines, scratching lines to try to make sense

of unmarked ground.

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^{Source: About Time: Poems (Akashik Books 2025)}

What I want to know is

what idiot

gave that fucking blind kid

a bow and arrow?

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^{Source: About Time: Poems (Akashik Books 2025)}

A sound (what is that?) reminds me

of (what? I don’t know). These days

there is so much familiarity with something

I have no experience of. Like the internets or

whatever. As if—

I passed you on 77th and Broadway

decades ago, and you smiled at me

for no (every) reason, laughed even,

then nothing (nothing?)

till now.

Et tu?

The future perfect,

insinuating into our momentarily

narrowed quotidian-like heavenly rust,

or a dumb hunch,

some beautiful-ass nonsense,

or the starting up again

of what has never been.

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^{Source: About Time: Poems (Akashik Books 2025)}