shut door when done
remember when it was more than this.
remember the hiss of snow on the lake,
the feel of fire in its place.
remember the forgetting.
remember what truth was, its high-flung pain.
remember the next night.
remember the taste of never,
the perfection of a kiss in the sun.
remember the last time you felt safe.
remember that you are more than (t)his.
remember the dregs and the puddles.
remember these words: concave, blue, gravel, catatonic.
remember the walk barefoot, cobbled in rain.
remember the screams.
remember the hand that picked you back up.
remember why.
remember how it ended, and where it began.
remember that which it is needful to remember,
the song you never meant to hear.
remember that dreams, too, are sometimes prophetic.
Consider
consider this
the heartbeat of twenty-
seven stolen seconds, dead
reckonings in
bitter January birth-
pangs; consider
this the end
of beginnings, letters
upside down
on an unfinished
page written by one
who breathes the last
gypsied breath
of penance wearing
chipped midnight
on her toes, walks
the iron-dark canals
like some soulless
wild thing, all the while dis-
(re)-membering:
once upon a
time, i knew
how to write
love songs.
brief empirical note on rigid body dynamics
The refraction of one-way windows
into remorseless blue-
puddle pasts full
of breaking
glass and sad Sunday
mornings angles
incidentally with the co-
efficient of sweet f(r)iction that
beads sweat on rivergrass
in December sunlight.
(Their shattering is
a thing beyond
the imperfect forces that pull
bodies & universes
together.)
Your Metaphor
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
These days weather
changes overnight.
Smoke filters sunlight;
embers burn all
the more brightly
for the silenced
desire. Yellow
maple sky, old
cracked oak
carpet over grass
that hasn’t even
yet been born.
Dewed frost gilds
homecoming
mornings,
words like
“hunker”
sprouting in
untried accents,
“distrust” burying
its lips in glowing
ash. A hand
can be a hard
thing to hold
in such climes;
fingers all too
easily balled in
anger. Memory
just won’t burn
as quickly as leaf-fall
and faithlessness
doesn’t pass
with the dew.
Re-Drawing a Portrait Once Painted on Plywood
A lone housefly myopically crawls
up pale-peeling kitchen walls, entropy
in quotidian microcosms that
screams of a stiletto- hardness
tattooed in both prismic eyes. It
belays the soundful softness
of rounded thighs and arms
of the woman at the table,
the smoke of her solitary
cigarette winding like
lust toward the fluorescence
overhead. There is sex
in this as in everything.
Even death. An unwinding
of flesh into the universe
that birthed it, entropy
again. Or perhaps simply
childhood timelines
tangled with tangential
tomorrows and the
exorcism-autopsy
of memory, a stillframe
of this solitary instant, yellow
and blue, aborted phosphorescent
remembering.
untame, still
Her eyes
are like young mares,
dashing wildly for some escape
to the chains her body has thrown round
tomorrow, tying it down
to this sad bed, these muted
walls.
It wasn’t like this,
once.
There was a house with a garden
and a man who tended it.
He planted figs in the side yard
and brought home fried chicken for lunch on Sundays.
Together, they sat by the lake
and in the summer, the kids would
feed bits of stale bread to the ducks and turtles,
or string them on the old cane lines
to catch little sunfish.
There was no pain.
No drifting off into morphine clouds where
maybe, she still dreams of these things,
of painlessness.
Can she smell summer in her sleep?
Taste blackberries? See the walk
lined with purple flowers, hear
the wind over the water?
She scratches at the oxygen lines
as if at mosquito bites, moans.
Her eyes, underneath
pale lids, are like young mares
searching for some lost meadow.
Can she hold my hand
and remember
him?
it’s a process
head tipped back and lens out of focus
i sip the last dregs of sunlight
from a summer fast fading,
etching her colors black-inked into tomorrow,
tracing my words into the wet cement of eternity.
my steps quicken to match the fall
of the leaves over old brick in the city’s
East end, my footfalls small
miracles of blurry substance in a brittle
dream.
but the words
just won’t flow like
they’re supposed; they start and they
stutter over roots in the sidewalk, getting lost in the
mutter of leaves and passing traffic and sometimes
when the light recalls just perfectly
the way it used to fall
through your bedroom blinds in
September’s late mornings, then
the muscles at the top of my throat
close up and in the sudden rush of air
that i swallow to
push the memories back
down into oblivion, they
vanish altogether,
leaving my shadow to
walk alone through the early October
sunset.
searching
She sips cold coffee
late on a Sunday
waiting for the week to
overtake her, ennui
and uncombed hair
pushed back from her face
by images burned like whiskey
into the clenched confines of her gut:
housekeys abandoned to
dewed grass one summer’s
violet ending; dying flowers
of a spring flung out wide
over barren shoulders;
the roughened heels
of her soul’s master
pacing always
three steps ahead.
Brushing back strands
and consciousness
an unmoved midnight
passes hollowly
and she swallows,
searching, bitter
all the way down.
sublimation
In a mirror cracked and
framed by hair
unwashed for too many
Sundays was a face long
buried in an eighth circle where
she will be two days and a moth-eaten
aquamarine sea away
by the time you wake and find
she wasn’t the answer
to the longing left
over in the bottom of your eyes.
Busy turning over new leaves,
you will have by then forgotten
the dirt under your fingernails,
and she won’t remember the sound
of your voice singing as
you fed her cereal with a
borrowed spoon the day before
she left. Ten years from now on
winter nights when even
the cold tastes bitter on
unpracticed lips, you’ll fall silent
and wonder as stiff-backed she
traces your name in silence
with her tongue, paints it
carelessly in invisible words
for all to see who can.
tunnel vision
i have buried my secrets
far underground, left
their evidence in the same
dark corner where i
abandoned my day clothes,
my pretenses and my decency, but
i keep my virtue wound
close and tight, a thread threatening
the circulation round my left wrist,
reminding me of a lost autumn air
or a late summer’s mourning rain,
soul myopic in the dawn-light of
memory, unwilling to forget;
unwary of its step;
hardly daring to breathe.
glancing over my shoulder
there’s a small blonde girl
sitting in the window
on the third story, her legs
kicking the old brick
haphazardly as they dangle.
*
from here
she looks insignificant,
an oversized old grey
sweatshirt all but swallowing
everything but the randomness
and those legs.
*
maybe she’s thinking of jumping,
headfirst onto pavement;
sure it’d be a clean dive
if angled properly.
maybe because she was dying
already, from the stale haste
of her daily perceptions,
flat-lined perspectives
and want of fresh air.
*
or,
maybe, from above,
just sitting on the edge could be,
would have to be,
enough.
open windows
down a winding upward path, flung
into fate’s maw, seeking.
maybe there was meaning
deeper than the thoughts of you, lost,
the bloom of hibiscus
and imagined jasmine; forget justice,
price of too few, perfect minutes
singing against a wind that twisted:
around us, the hillsides, my inhibitions,
pressed me deep into your pockets
playing viscerally with
all i had left of high ground.
metaphor
yesterday is burning.
not cleanly, but like an oil fire with
lots of dark smoke and haze;
it’s not clear anymore what
lies on the other side.
i should try and save
what i can, i suppose,
sort through mouldering triumphs
before all is ash, but
the acridness singes the hairs inside my nose,
makes me want to squint my eyes and duck my head,
forget it ever happened.
nostalgia
summer never smelled so good
as from the bottom rung of the ladder,
like sweet hot orange kool-aid
clinging and intense,
the nights stuck to your palms
and were hard to pry apart;
you could smile without asking and
it was just so much easier to look up.
