She steals steam after the summer rain,
rolling it off the asphalt as a carpet
she will lay in her den.
She was named by the tesseract
snarling in the backyard.
Instead of her period each month,
she turns blue
and Inspiration knows she is fertile.
You are so cuttingly engineered,
designed with impure
perpetual function in mind.
What does it mean that your gears shudder
torturously
at the turbid passion chewing a gash across her left hip?
She is a reluctant dreamer,
afraid of who she’ll see tonight
beneath her eyelids.
Outside you wait with muscles and wolves,
and a knife that only turns in the dark.
Your name is on a sealed record somewhere playing over and over.
Your hand is a voodoo doll.
Watch her bend when you close your fingers.
In the water.
Back out.
Control scraping itself on the rocky banks.
Itches attack,
discomfort with myself and with you.
You a drafty accordion with dirt in the grooves.
The water never ambushes me because I smell it near.
My feet tingle when it runs through the reservoir beneath me.
Umbrellas call one another collect
through clouds of curious rain drops
on so much ambition and ecstasy it hurts.
My ideas are drunk in the corner.
I lack spirit.
I have spirits.
Paris write me telling me to come
when love is nothing.
I will be held in my city,
and I will wait
between the lovers wrapped in their coats like gifts.
Absolved of my needs
I am free to make wishes in the lab
behind my house.
I will give one to a neighbor,
one to a frenemy,
one billion to the child in his cradle
listening to his box being built
You, baby, need a wish from each of us
to buy the days needed to learn to spell your name.
I will make you premium wishes
in the truest shades of purple,
with gossamer threads of longing
unraveled from rainbows.
I will seal each wish with the cool light that shines off
the stones in the brook.
Each wish can purchase a minute or a moment.
I will package them in pods of 9.
Sister Mercy be kind.
The room at the end of the hall with the sealed window
Wild light through a red Pepsi glass
On the sealed window ledge
In the blue room.
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.
Miniature Moon 