Wrecks And Residuals
Images of soulless streets rub shoulders with abstract thoughts.
After the rain
nary a rainbow
on wet soulless streets.
Hooker telling me
before she gets undressed
I’ll pay for my sins.
Another day
spent drinking into the next
to ask what happened.
Asking someone
who was there
unlike me.
When we kissed
till it was almost real
this feeling of nothing.
Amid displaced residuals
of feelings
in absentia.
Unencumbered to
walk the late night streets
seeking a tour guide
unafraid of death.
But living
the nightmare I sleep
with my eyes open.
Remembering
the last woman I loved
who offered me nothing…
But the same singular place
in my thoughts like
a car after the crash
Police flashlights
look into to survey
damage that unsettles.
Inside This Space
The poet's poems speak of life in contemporary cities of America.
She tells me, she no longer
wants the space
ghosts use
for bloodletting.
The dead dance
with prosthetics.
The broken heal
fed by parasites.
She tells me a vacuum
consumes her.
She’s Dali’s Godiva
traveling in light.
To where Hell’s close
enough to singe.
I repeat I love her
amid the barriers.
Necessary and unavoidable
as death.
As I love others
it isn’t enough.
“Life is..she never finishes
the sentence.
Ellipses dance on her tongue
then tears.
Watch tears divide
parts of her face.
And us, further
and further.
Rp Verlaine lives in New York City. He has an MFA in creative writing from City College. He taught in New York Public schools for many years. His first volume of poetry- Damaged by Dames & Drinking was published in 2017 and another – Femme Fatales, Movie Starlets & Rockers in 2018. A set of three e-books titled Lies from The Autobiography Vol 1-3 were published from 2018 to 2020. His newest book, Imagined Indecencies, was published in February of 2022.