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.
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
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.
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
She harvests roses,
rivers,
righteousness.
The world watches her sleep.
Birds peer through her window
like so many anxious dignitaries in a
court of intrigue.
She wears the scent of sun
in a vial around her neck.
He will hunt her better nature.
color his prayers with her name.
This is yearning –
to be jealous of the air
because it can touch her everywhere at once.
In his suit of wool and guilt
he watches her pick bouquets of breeze,
spinning in a plain of demolished satisfaction.
At night, he whittles mathematics down
to an immaculate paste of 2
and rubs it over his body
Tomorrow he will wait by the light
and draw her in with his want song.
7 is in love with 0.
0 is lovely,
has the DNA for heaven and Earth
and whatever the Hell my old job was.
7 is proud and strong and knows he is luckier than 6
or his ex girlfriend 8.
But he roams into the rafters of primacy,
of sharp eyed division,
and the comfort of 0 –
the way she gives of herself
and doesn’t exist,
is missed by him,
who can see only her perfection on the page
her gift for making others greater.
But beneath the tired eyes of mathematics
.000001 is also in love with her,
and is much more in reach
and glad to be.
Ok, so the dream is dead,
or not dead really,
but dying
under this beautiful house that loves me,
with her feet sticking out of the crawl space.
She was from the East,
and wanted to go further,
to every palace and battleground in Europe,
to be hunted by crocodiles and lions in Africa,
to waddle with penguins in Antarctica.
So what if things did not go as planned,
if the mice cry in their nests?
Who cares as long as the man is good,
the mind has its medicine?
And, anyway, someone else will have the chance
to slurp up the Earth’s beauty,
when Terra Firma
is older and even more graceful;
she will have my place when she is older
and more graceful.
Miniature Moon 