In the wet grass where you left me I listen to the cars spinning around the park.
Stop sign. Wheels spinning on the straight-away. Stop sign. Wheels spinning.
Cars, and the eucalyptus leaves rustling, high up and quiet,
like someone breathing in another room.
Once your voice drops off and you light a match in the shadows,
I can hear only the cars and the leaves.

Unmoored by the moon, so easy-settled in the black,
and the too-bright distant city, I sit in dewed grass, midnight damp soaking jeans.
Who cares. Not I.
My mouth tastes
like beer and whiskey, like tonight and the night
before, and tomorrow night. Tastes like
you and nights spent wheeling around neighborhoods we hadn’t seen before, seeking
cracked plastic seats and wood-stilted bar stools,
the best Sazerac and the cheapest booze on tap.

Always the same: whiskey and beer, beer and whiskey.
Always the same: your mouth like stale cigarettes and
your bed like a sleeping bag beside a campfire.
My addictions are simple.

Sitting there on the hillside, I remember what I always remember
when I spin your face inside my mind:
the way I felt when you fucked me for the first time,
flipping me on my stomach and pressing me down
with your rough-skinned hands, telling me that maybe I should let you come back for more.

And I’m up and running down the slope,
and we’re a tangle of bourbon and sweat on the sidewalk
with night forms whorling around us,
blurring past our tongues unabashed ready and more than ready,
unhinged and reeling, neon in the city light, white in the taxi glare,
black in bracketed shadows dropping
and lifting in the gloom, hurtling and hungry as we are.