You give me an honest, non-surge, fair market,
respect-the-customer type of price on the fruit of the valley
and I won’t have to shoplift any vegetables of the field
(allegedly)

Be shamed for locking away baby formula.
Be shamed for hearing hunger and seeing dollar signs.
Need is never a thief, 
Want almost always is.

People seek moments
Safe, self-contained in their cars
Like a treed squirrel 

Once a safe place
To hide out
Your miniature home
The middle of the pandemic

Now people in cars
Everywhere
Talking to a spouse
A girlfriend, a boyfriend
That kid down the block

Safe, when you got no place to go
When you can eat your lunch
Nobody’s bothering you
Isolated, separate

People in cars
Everywhere
How long you been sittin’ in that car?

You arrest me.
Raucous pink buffered by lavender shore–
swimming though your tides I see clouds like fish,
swathed in iridescent scales of coral, gold, cerulean.
Show me the boundary between your depths
and the beyond.  Where does our atmosphere
end and the galaxy begin?
You are an ocean inverted.
There is an infinite reflection of sky and sea, 
the origin of which I cannot fathom.

What concerns me is the visible light spectrum of the spider
climbing my window.  I hope she can see your marvels
and wonder at this margin of waters, this storm
of fire and sea that we simply call the dawn.

not sure what went wrong,
or when
just woke up one day sitting in my office chair

(thought there was more to write, but nah
you get it)

Hit my car
I’ll never cry
Just drive along
Keeping straight tonight

Shoot your gun
I’ll never cry
Pick my poisons
Maybe die tonight

Close your eyes
Tears break mine
Know I’m boring
Forget me tonight

Sleep against the stormy blue

In protest I say the word aubergine.
In protest I say the word gossamer.
Electrify. Soliloquy. There are, always,
a hundred thousand private horrors occurring
at any given second, but in protest
I set them all down, just for now.
For now I am busy loving
the cardinal that flits onto my porch
and shits on it, and the pain in my left knee
that is a real pain, not the ghost of sensation
in a limb that is no longer there.
What I mean is, this is my actual life
in this actual world. So in protest
I say the word filament. Galumphing.
I think abdicate is a beautiful word,
but in protest I do not say it.
There are so many better words
to be said. Like luminous.
Like tenacity. Like love.

I’ll wake when I sense the cold.
Head snaps towards heaven,
dialed in, arms clear as glass.
It’s with urgency, like I’ve left 
the door open. Time is already
missing. Invigorated by a slow
ache, the crystallization of blood.
The vein taps dry of all to give.
Stasis, old news, this familiar story.
Despise reciting my lines again.
Numb, unchanging, the world is
a pre-programmed message made
unintelligible with static. You
don’t need to translate this,
you just need to bear witness,
eyes wide, fizzling quiet. Erasure 
with no base text, just the siphon 
of syllable from thin air, crackling
in and out of ether. I am miniscule, 
insignificant, a single flake of snow
melting on the window of a car
left warm and empty, headlights
running out in the darkness beyond.

Do not change or rearrange
my words please.
Do not realign or reassign
their meaning.
I know I am protective,
but if they are defective,
just let them be.
They came from me, you see,
and my words, like my feelings,
are tender things.

Half a life later I have this green couch, which I lay on alone / belting melodies for my neighbors to hear as though I’m connected / but I’ve never been so disjointed / torn between zip codes and time zones and my body remains but my heart is elsewhere / searching, always yearning to find the way it felt to have your arms around me strumming / and laughing when I got it wrong but sliding closer with hope between us / but our lack of oxygen smothered the fire before it burned / and I smelled the smoke all night

A green velvet chaise
dad’s used guitar in your hands
you laid the blue print