Month: February 2017

An Absence

An Absence

 

Names filled with letters and liquor.

A twist tie twists and I hear Zest taking the

garbage out.

I want a county style day,

where those roads I love

take me from people I don’t.

The places are eager for touch.

My thigh draws his hand closer

our skin fusing under the heat of the windshield.

 

After the detergent is bought,

and the bookstore has pinned us against the wall

and takes our money, we go down the roads again

to laze and lounge

in the house of pasta we built.

 

But now the roads are curled away from me.

His hand has greater work than joy for now,

in places that growl low in the night.

Color

Color is called back

only on loan from light

this whole time.

How will I know my house

without its yellow coat,

my friend without her green soul?

 

The houses and souls are still there,

Sure. Just the pigment is gone.

But now we must converse

with ourselves, ask our feet

Who are you and what do you want?

Because what we are left with is conversation,

Though most have trashed their memory of speech.

 

September Tells a Tale

September tells me a story

of children made only of fog

or of the perfect arrangement of fallen leaves

right before the breeze blows.

 

Some children wanted to sing

and others to shine.

 

But children shimmer

and then are gone –

sear sucker left on the ground rumpled.

 

They grow up,

move into cities of wine,

houses of immaculate deception.

Going With Ghosts

Ghoulish women crowd dark corners.

Light glistens on my breath.

There is an evil menagerie beyond the gate.

I am dancing motionless.

There are many cathedrals waiting

to be unearthed in my garden.

 

I want to remember exhaustion

Sex,

Monday mornings,

Gratitude.

I hate Complacency

and the way he makes everything pale

and organized.

 

I’m packed and ready

to follow the ghosts and learn

what they know,

but I dread the low opacity

the cold

being unchallenged

and unchanging

Designing My Own Destruction From Glitter

The road curls into

a ring I wear on my finger.

The humid spring air squeezes through

my open window,

fat

sweet

and loved.

 

Somewhere out there I am a baby

Writing great epistolaries in brooding vomit.

 

In the center of a field,

I’m ignorant,

sophisticated,

too generous,

my senses plundered

by clouds of venom

 

I can’t go back to the day I left

My universe of birth

and I don’t want to.

I rinsed the dust of it from my hair.

I glow pure yellow into the waking calendar,

designing my own destruction from

glitter.

Economics

The graph is depressed,

its lines dragging down

into the gutter.

Do you hear Wall Street shiver,

Main Street shutter?

 

I feed the red line from my hands.

An IV from me to a neighbor

when I buy a frivolity and they ring me up.

It is not enough;

my fingers are shreds of paper.

Our island is sinking into this sea.

Who can we grab

that we won’t drown

 

alone?

 

Pulling on a gold that won’t come.

 

I have a card.

You have a card.

Our leader has a card.

We have no eyes.

Hear the world run.

 

 

My Disease

A little thunderstorm runs around my feet

Then skitters under the sofa.

He is one of many.

I see them in my cabinets sometimes

and once walked into millions of them in the attic.

They scattered.

 

A feral book leaps off his shelf and

onto the lonely sofa I no longer sit on

because I cannot linger.

My disease watches me all the time,

nestled in my skull.

It will attack me from the side

Rip my smiles open and empty them out.

 

I work all day to stay on the move.

Light is always trying to hide behind the future

so I am constantly pushing millions of beams forward.

The shy scent of water cloaks me

as the desert outside the window searches for me.

More bones are always needed.

 

My disease sings.

My disease plays.

My disease paints the back

Of my eyelids with sand.

 

The thunderstorms feed

on my crumbling tears