I'll be posting some of my NaPoWriMo poems here this month. All poems are dedicated to Frank O'Hara. Here is one:

Mouse

Under the fridge hum

I hear its scratchy life

and jump. I stop all

thinking so I can feel it

breathing there. Downstairs

Richard helps the tenants

bring in the old stove, so I

hear also their floored-over

voices with the wind outside

which is blowing much too

hard and cold for April.

In the face of neighborly

pity, I admit I am a

curmudgeon, childless

while other houses explode

with infants, flowers. And

yet there’s a saggy wealth

here somewhere: pleasant

doom in the corner

of every drawer, a giddy

displacement, a shaved-

down saving of myself

and with it the memory

of gravestones yesterday

that marked the pulses each

body tried out once. Mouseless,

I swoop inside myself now

in this moment with everything

I can’t see, take one last

flying leap through my lungs,

and land tenderly in a leotard

at my own feet, astonished.