I’ve been cleaning my apartment and found this poem that I wrote back when I was writing poetry. I haven’t had much time to do anything creative personally for awhile and with my marginal cultural authority beginning to wane I might as well full and truly indict myself as a dilettante and almost-ran man of occasional letters.

CREPUSCULE

Your room is always cold.

Roll over, dear, give me back my arm.

And some blanket.

Please?

We have written poems of a sort:

there is ink on our fingers,

there are papers on the floor.

We had words

that came to blows

that came to kisses

that came to blows

that came to words.

That is how we make love and poems.

And it is evening, slate grey, again.

Looking over the foot of the bed

there are more cigarettes in the ashtray

than I can count from here:

three empty bottles of wine,

another half-empty,

and one nearly full.

We laughed when the check-out girl

looked at us

with our wine and cigarettes

and our single bag of chips

and said, “Dinner?”

Guess the joke’s on us.