they tell me autumn
is the season of death:
      the leaves dyed red,
      and the quaker graves
where we lost our lung’s
virginity to imported british tar.

but i was alive
when i picked you up
      at seven o’clock,
      for the eight o’clock show.
and i didn’t want to go,
and you didn’t, but we did.

because it had been
one week and humans,
      like us, craved delusions,
      and we deluded more than most,
like that we weren’t alone,
and that no one was getting hurt.

and we laughed with the
old ladies and daughters,
      and their jewish whine,
      at the wrong times,
and cheered when a window spilt
movie glass into a street of extras.

and we left the movie,
lost in the familiar streets,
      until we found,
      a parking lot emptied
of mexicans and ricans and lights-
guarded only by one yellow forklift.

we sat, buckled in,
until you lost your sandal
      in the back of my car,
      and i lost both socks
and the wet slap of sweat pulled
our skin together and made us smile-

a brief interruption-
we were too busy sighing
      and brushing away hair,
      black and blond, to notice
each other. you closed your eyes
in some colored dream, and i saw

some other girl whose name
i can’t pronounce, with dark skin
      and exotic clothes
      and brown, colonized eyes
in the fog-fucked windows sitting above
you like some dumb, dim hurricane.

after, i could only think
about whether the sky was orion,
      or the big dipper,
      and the astronaut
i met when i was nine and wanted
to visit an unfettered dead planet.

and wasn’t that nice
and we smirked and mocked
      some ex- of yours,
      because he was an idiot,
and we weren’t as i drove you back
to a house, both hands on the wheel.

you raised your eyebrows
in some ironic goodbye,
      so i honked twice, dogs
      shrieked down the block
and you flipped me one calloused
finger. you didn’t even have to look.

i drove off while you
crept up rotting stairs,
      went to your art-shrouded
      room where you used
to paint beautiful moments of color,
askew and wrong in so many ways;

and you took one bottle-
they counted, they always do-
      of seconal and sonata
      and played schubert
so you wouldn’t interrupt your
mother’s love affair with a glass,

or your brother’s sleep,
or your grandmother,
      irish and pulling
      the threads of family
as tight as she could convince herself
they were knotted by a dead sailor.

then you died like a horse,
or a cow, or a prisoner
      in california, where
      some brown-eyed girl
still lives. she kept offering me plane
tickets, even on the day of your funeral,

which was held in winter, a gray
season- you died on a solstice, -----.