Looking through old photographs
gives me a glimpse into
your blue-eyed lens,
your frame,
your perspective,
your angle,
your essence.
Chills travel
down my spine
as I spend a moment
with you one more time.
gives me a glimpse into
your blue-eyed lens,
your frame,
your perspective,
your angle,
your essence.
Chills travel
down my spine
as I spend a moment
with you one more time.
I wake up bleary and bleeding from my open heart. It’s another morning–the body craves water and cigarette and salt, the connection with another person. I ignore the latter for the former: the smoke and gasp, the paper cup emptied. On the window blind, big as Christmas, a harvestman beckons spiders to his pencil throat, legs planted. If I could call someone to move him… Stuck in the middle of the room, I regard the furrowed dot of his body. Bugs are unwelcome in my home, another interloper to my solitude. There is an internal fight–to save or squish the unwanted thing dead. I grab a tissue and pause, spot the ceramic pot, and sweep the gentleman into his jail. After I whisk him into morning concrete, the granddaddy long-legs scurries away when I release him from the jar. I still surprise myself when I choose grace.
–
Bleary and bleeding, the body craves
cigarette and salt, the smoke and gasp.
A harvestman stuck in the middle of the room,
unwelcome, another interloper.
My solitude is an internal fight. The unwanted thing–
I pause, whisk him into the morning.
Daddy long-legs scurries away–I choose grace.
–
Packed up
clothes, washed
dried & folded.
Going to rehab.
Want a ride?
I will enjoy the walk,
I need to do this my way.
Choking back,
swallowing hard,
I want to howl.
It’s hard. She said.
I want to go,
want to get my teeth fixed.
I’m lisping now.
thought there was another cause
when I heard others lisp.
Now I know,
it’s from the loss of teeth.
Now I know.
Be safe, be strong, be brave.
She didn’t go.
i shouldn’t have drank that warm pbr
i think i’m gonna throw up down the side of the car
when i pull out an american spirit
i know it’s bad for me but i don’t wanna hear it
i’m gonna cut my lip on a chipped shot glass some day
it’s my favorite so i use it anyway
i’m sharing the men’s bathroom stall with my best friend, breaking the seal
even though i know that’s not really real
i’m gonna throw up my pabts blue ribbon
sometimes i want an eating disorder again
“Do you believe in God?”
Today was not the day to ask me.
I continued walking past the makeshift
homeless looking missionary. The sun
scorched my back. Nothing prepares
a child for the day she’ll grab
her wallet and roller blades, and take
the next bus downtown.
I worried for my brother. I left him at home
with a dead best friend and two parents. I
assumed, though, he made it to his middle
school friend’s house across the road.
I bought a hotdog from a food card
because chewing when anxious
never hurts, and often helps.
I wolfed it down and strapped on my
blades and rolled as fast as I could.
They took the baby from its mother
down the frigid hall of glaring lights
the beeping corridor washed out
and sterilized by white coat aliens.
Time out of mind they probed her
about passing secret diseases.
You have my blood, she said, test it
again – they sampled fluid and bone
looking for a problem to solve
and finding none, kept looking while
she sang hymns in the baby’s ear
to block the noise and held him
to block the cold until finally a new doctor
came to supervise the NICU and said why
is this healthy baby here? She threw off
the hazmat suit, left it in shreds
by the plastic crib and brought home
her baby in a car seat and her anger
inside her chest, in a fireproof box
roughly the shape of a teaching hospital.
–
Mountains are made of time
and trial. Slabs of rock pushing
against each other, refusing to break.
Not all mountains become volcanoes
but these days if someone says they
know better what’s best for her own child
she remembers that she is rock solid,
opens her chest, and fans the flame.
The handyman said he was going to Tampa
to hear a speaker. I heard excitement
in his voice. What kind of speaker I asked.
Conservative, he said. I read “red meat” rally.
I veered away, didn’t ignite that flame.
His hail-fellow-well met exterior hides
beneath the surface something
I don’t want to meet. I’ll put space
between me and that volcano.
The junior prosecutor left at lunch.
I step in to finish up the trial.
That’s when I discover a problem:
we can’t prove murder without a body.
The Bureau wouldn’t sign a receipt for
John Doe because he was missing a toe.
It’s just a toe, but we can’t find it, so
technically, the “corpse” is body parts.
The jury will see it our way, I say
We have most of it, they can just round up.
But the defense holds an ace in the hole.
To show the whole you must produce the soul.
This acquits the defendant every time —
murder not charged as a property crime.
The eerie allure of
hunchbacked birches and
sycamores whistling, lips
of a thwarted limb
grown into an awkward
eye, the ashes and oaks
left guiding the gliding gaze
across fractured faces and
frames,
those mullioned bones
of stained glass windows
filliped and stripped by a
dulcetly wistful
whimper—
I stood where I, years ago,
spoke with a stuttering veteran,
perched upon trellising limestone; his neck brace
gleamed like an orrery circling
birds had picked of its drupelet planets, a mobile
plucked of the dandling plush which once some
cherub had dreamed of chewing to ruin, and
there,
by the bearded seal I’d never know,
by the fish tank doubled, the Bronco—
Granddad’d dubbed it the Bronco,
where he’d sneak bulleits
the depth of six airplane shots
and, whispering, flaunt and applaud
a portion of pot packed tight as a shark’s tooth.
He’d an elaborate test for anyone interested,
things like,
Should you see a key in the road,
should you retrieve or leave it?
If you’d left the key, he’d
as per his father’s instructions,
politely refuse you.
A few of them seemed but innocuous nudging
(albeit he’d glaringly bony elbows),
What’s your ideal home?
What form of water would it reside beside?
What kind of trees, if any, would be there?
He’d then decrypt your answers,
wise and wry as a toothless, gin-soaked psychic.
Sycamores! Everywhere sycamores!
Stocks swoln piebald, bay, and pearled above
vibrantly peeling bark, and their limbs like
tuning forks struck to a thewsome clew of
contortionists spluttering moves of an alien cancan.
Real weird fucking serpentine, fish-scaled trees,
with seeds like inchoate clown ruffs
nosing luridly red and inedible berries, seemed
my stock response.
The types of trees portended, apparently,
kinds of friends you’d wished to keep.
Should one have said, None,
I’m unsure of just what he’d have done.
—we all had a death wish once,
and here among plangent wells,
the umber of plundered pennies
one combs from a crapulent grease trap,
dreams began boring bruising fruit
in palavering latin,
in Panx and Boone, the pips, some
leather-tongued termagant licked
to still-snickering insoles
slung from a burned-out Yugo Ciao.
I was between two twisted stints
at the Orphanage, years now
over-done-and-dead as a
possum drawn along wriggling wires,
a long-garroted-carotid-nerve or a
quietly karmic crutch requiring,
glibly, that I serve some sordid
purpose polishing
plates and pans.
Between two twisted stents I stirred
and heard through the whittling nibble of engines,
Goldwyn! Goldwyn!
clung like a bur along languid lobes,
like dangling emeralds opening
osseous holes
she once was known for— Goldwyn.
His hair was longer, maybe
his spectacles tinged to a urionous tortoiseshell, maybe
an errant edge grown just a touch gruffer, or maybe
no more than a moth preserved
on a pincushion pitted midst
murmurous mushrooms.
Astride a Honda Gyro,
one of but five in these United States,
he rolled beside a For Rent sign, I,
as a favor, transcribed upon pilfered paper.
He’d moved to the river, the dark one,
cellophane-sticky and green as forgotten meat,
to better observe his friendships,
burnish the carnival chrome of a
hundred sundry purring contraptions,
squat in a shack amidst rats the size
of your foot, he’d said, the Ferrule House;
to be with a girl they’d named
for a cotton-eyed yam,
who’d ditched him, got into realty maybe,
real sobriety, really adult-like things. He
told me, in line at McDougal’s, cars ahead,
two people were shot between drive-through
windows, one where you pay and one
where you’re meant to receive your imperiling
victuals; that one of the shooters
had, in their ascent among moldering shotguns,
looked to him, leering.
Somebody else was slain but a
block away as he turned his change into beer cans.
He couldn’t remember the name of the store, though.
At the Orphanage, ever, albeit
unwritten, the dish dog (they
who chipped cheese from plates),
controlled what could come in the way of
music. When he’d churned water greasy grey,
he’d summoned the sound of bawdily howling wolves,
and not some snarky reflection on Redford’s take,
no,
strictly howling wolves
where others might muddle their maundering metal.
He’d sneak things into communal meals,
like plastic packets of sallowing condiments
snugly curled in a pinguid pie
or squeezed through a bloated stromboli’s bulging something.
He’d say, commonly, wildly reeling things
and chuckle abruptly at any disfiguring strangeness,
any old novelty taken as glaringly natural,
any most earthly, albeit, plainly alien sentiment stretched
like nails grown long as a carton of cigarettes
wattle-and-daubed from end to end,
wanned butts of a giggling friendship
clung around gravelly teeth of the cigarette garden,
there in the shoals of Broken Porcelain App Boat Reef,
with the glass and the bottle caps suckling nascent tomatoes.
(Hennisen’d nicked a fountain feigning
children muddling hands in a bird bath.
They’d turned it into an ashtray,
just to keep
the cigarette garden at bay.)
He recalled that restaurant
Waits had enshrined in Nirvana,
those crazy things that a line cook cried
that made me smile and, wildly, cry, and, still,
wring treacly weeping—
He recalled those reasons I’d stayed there, daily. Now,
whenever
I’m scouring souring
cheese from skillets with bristling steel,
I hear but baying hounds worn down to a whisper—
