Near the cemetery, Callery pears stink like sex.
How many eccentric bachelors ended a line?
Someday, I will leave in my own lavender suit.
A drum circle pulses by the lake.
An antiseptic moon illuminates
sidewalks filmy with wild rose petals and pulp.
The world smeared pleasantly like a bad Monet
when I used to drink. I wouldn’t have heard
these rustling cypresses making sea-sounds.
For five years I numbed my mind:
gin for anxiety, mornings and afternoons,
nips from a Sprite bottle in bathroom stalls.
“Alcohol can’t produce anything that lasts. It’s just wind,”