drifting
it is august in earnest.
yesterday was almost
autumn, yet here we are again,
dripping. the sticky blueness
of these last few holdout days
clings to the streets like gauze.
by a series of unfortunate
coincidents, i
am thinking of laboratories,
of thinning lines of blood, of my
mother’s dead white hands.
the walls of her hospital room
were that same sticky un-sterile blue,
like an oil painting of some South sea.
it is not the same blue of puddled
dress they found me
in before they called the paramedics
at summer’s end the year of her death;
no, it is deeper and better
for drowning. most seasons i
don’t believe in faith,
but i thank god on august days
for ambles along the river,
for his rich earthy browns.
This night, there are no stars.
watching sky darken,
we contemplate
words like leaden,
sultry, in-
digo. but leaden
is closer to
the slivered prison
of my rib-cage,
bars behind which
this ache pro-
creates. sultry
means barefoot river
afternoons and indigo
has always been
grotesque, except
on peacocks.
so instead i watch
raindrop veins
on plateglass,
think of melting &
the sublimation
of misted breath,
remember sweat
on glasses,
graveled chaos,
rug-burnt morning
sunlight before
the world changed.
but these windows
will not open and we
feel guilty for
our guilt, wonder
why the stars
stay absent. are
river afternoons so
different, now?
we watch and already
rain is slowing; veins
close & strand drops
in streetlit glass,
almost like star-
light. almost.
untitled
a bone-wrenching hollowness
sucks all coherency from my worlds,
blows through and over me in gravel
on monochrome knees, jags pushing
blood to my palms and fingernails, the color
gone from my heart, my face, cold;
like hers.
awaken
opened eyes
to a blinking cursor,
blank page:
a winding-sheet for my
thoughts, wrapped up in
themselves, leaden;
lacking
inspiration, expired.
they keep carefully to the edges,
tiptoe around the truth
which threatens to hit
them like a gale, knocking the wind
right out of me, tormenting;
it was lack of
breath
that brought us here
in the first place.
