Tell me, enigmatical man, whom do you love the best, your father,
your mother, your sister, or your brother?
I have neither father, nor mother, nor sister, nor brother.
Your friends?
Now you use a word whose meaning I have never known.
Your country?
I do not know under what latitude it lies.
Beauty?
I could indeed love her, Goddess and Immortal.
Gold?
I hate it as as you hate God.
Then, what do you love, extraordinary stranger?
I love the clouds … the clouds that pass … up there …
up there … the wonderful clouds!

- Charles Baudelaire

Lulling a limp relaxing roar
The white-tipped chords cleanse the feet
Of lovers, escaping hand-in-hand
Onto unpaved streets of softened sand

-poem I wrote on the beach Sunday night

cruelty. don’t talk to me about cruelty
or what i am capable of.

when i wanted the roaches dead i wanted them dead
and i killed them. i took a broom to their country

and smashed and sliced without warning
without stopping and i smiled all the time i was doing it.

it was a holocaust of roaches, bodies,
parts of bodies, red all over the ground.

i didn’t ask their names.
they had no names worth knowing.

now i watch myself whenever i enter a room.
i never know what i might do.