Long Beach Island

My stomach’s turning with the changing of tides,
my eyes safe only because they’ve already burned away with salt water and suicide.
This island holds its chest high with hamburgers and sunsets
while dirty orgies of blondes rot the beaches.
Spirits run down my chin, my hair aflame with cigarettes,
and Holocaust survivors are crying at my music,
even the music in our voices,
and the voices in our mouths,
all like pangs of guilt at burning moths.

t.m.r

The fireworks sparkled and died,
and through a potsmoke cloud, my eyes saw opportunity.

Looking back,
I could have been a disappointing phoenix,
Aflame but without cause.
Maybe even running about, engulfed wings outstretched.
If I sat, then I’d be a petty burning protestor, like Buddhist Duc*,
for no cause but careless adolescence.

It’s a shame, really,
that my gasoline fingertips didn’t catch
the lighter’s warm tongue.
Or it just didn’t lap at the vodka
drying on my skin.

I’d have been a bad burning bush, anyway.




*Thich Quang Duc was a Vietnamese Mahayana Buddhist monk who burned himself to death at a busy Saigon road intersection on June 11, 1963.