Lusinghiero (Revision of "A Bookshelf's Sudden Truth")

You find me sunless and too eager
For horizon, for release from the cryptics
of your mouth which, keyless,
stoppers any sound I might wish to make.

You always dodge
Or deflect gently my syntactic arrows
and they pass their target,
Left to weave aimlessly down
With a careful once-upon-a-time
Gravity into the physics
that litters the paper
I wear in my dreams
and burn in yours.

Our dawns cracked
and splintered off
Like crisp shards of rainbow sherbet,
Like the lashes of the eyes that never
Thought to open,
never sought
To play dew-ruined prisms
for these sky births.

This is when we forgot
that suns set,
missing the way they pour red
Through the last chance cracks
of doors like the blood we keep
in plastic sacks cold, magnolia-limp,
and hideous as the flushless palms
in which you hold them.

Sharp hip against the wall
In this ever-widening room we’ll never leave,
Under the clouds that never
leave us, you could cry but don’t.
The carpet is too rough against your soles.

Before we drown in waves of old
I’ll ask a favor of your
face and reach to curve
the bridge of our several absences
Catching in the notch
beneath my smallest fingernail
the puddle you’ll build out of need.

Sine Curves (Revision)

Slammed out flat in the shade beneath the tree of firsts
That bends at its creaking waist to draw forth a lazy retort
From the river lying summery and fallow in its concrete,
I twist a little to the left; my toes shuffle themselves.

This year the word ‘blitzkrieg’ has become a casual element
Of my vocabulary; I use it often. I can spend minutes
At a time rearranging a die-rattle’s worth of words,
And the neat round ink of punctuation always
In my eyes dimples sweetly.

Yesterday I walked through the glass in the garage
Like a tottering, milk-plumped fakir when they’d just said not to,
Bit red twin wings into my thumb to keep from yelling
Loud as the exit door of a nightmare as the shards clinked
Arctic and lovely into the bloody measuring cup.

‘Forever’ as a concept only grew more palpable the less pleasant
The prospect became. Before the years of looking back in hallways
And mad pre-curfew tuxedoed dashes, perhaps hot breakfast
Would have been enough, or afternoon naps.

One night when the wind is wedged up against the white house
Like a self-defense instructor pushing fifty and desperate
To prove something, I’ll sit all knees and elbows and teeth
Centered on the flat blue expanse of temporary bed playing sentinel
Over the little city of cups on the carpet trapping spiders
I don’t have the heart to kill, and wait for company.

Every newness blends together now, primary-colored dye
Staining my life in swirls with ne’er a freeze frame. Todays
Blanch greyer than clouds too pregnant to break their waters,
And I drift a little more.

When the kindergarten teacher with her brown shield of hair and a message
Told us to go through the classroom and find something
Worth as much as we were and come back to show
Everyone, I brought back the coloring books and wished
I’d been as clever as the kid with the basket of pennies.

Sometimes I can feel the wet stasis of chlorinated pools
Sitting still between my ears, sometimes feel that my ribs
Have become a cage for caves.

Counting Backwards

When I could hardly move for heat
And explained I was trapped in the room
Like butter in a skillet garlic-ready
Because I’d caught a wasp between
The window and the screen, which was hiding
But would strike if freed, you talked
About ladybugs for fifteen minutes, hunters
Of the crunchy insect kingdom, told me
They bleed from their knees when startled.

At noon when lunch broke we hid
between the library shelves,
trading crackers.

You long for purpose.
Everything in your life traces back to death;
You hear its black rattle in every summer sweat.
When I asked for lilies you strung purple flowers
Through my hair, your Ariel, your Polaris,
We crash together like badly-timed tides,
Like the silver balls of tabletop physics toys;
Your whines fit my clock as a second-hand
Annually, bi-monthly, thrice nightly ticking.

Maybe I trip on every stair now
because you no longer watch
me climb them.

When I feel I have at last begun to live
Your voice kills me, and I remember the absences,
Bury slow fingers into the nap of tiled hallways,
Phone calls that traipse into the next afternoon
With batteries playing substitute for the scissors of Atropos.
Your scared shoulders and ever-presence flavor the coffee
I still won’t drink, bring it to a boil that fogs
A morning steam to replace my pillowed brain.
I rub the muddy grit into my already caffeinated eyes.

Parkour

He’s a walking expiration date.
He leaps loose-limbed parabolas
Across the courtyard,
Sends his body like a yo-yo to skate
Free along the gravity of walls
Before he goes flying,
Half-way up a flagpole before I shout
“Impossible,”
He only trips a little,
Brief points like pins in the wind,
And I’m afraid of heights.

Yesterday when he was in the tree
Playing Babel with his bluffing brother,
The leaves shook and broken branches
Smashed up through my chicken feathers
To nestle there,
Chiseled bamboo rods in the blankets
Of my isolation, and I saw all the prepositions
Woven like hay into his hair.

Sometimes when the blood makes beads
Like garnets in the craggy fault lines of his scrapes
And they’re safe to touch,
I sit and watch the pride brown his skin,
See recklessness unfurl across his forehead
Just beyond my reach.

Empty Tip Jars (Revision)

Her hands, empty tip jars, curve to cup the Pacific
At her hips settles the silt of another salt-rimed day;
The words she wears drop to the sand limp and less specific.

When the curtain fell,
Fireflies charged the stage
Light-frenzied and shrouded in wings.

The clouds crowd her ears and she drowns their traffic,
Stringing shells in the cave of her skull—
Her hands, empty tip jars, curve to cup the Pacific.

Like lace cages,
There was a grace in her fingers;
They littered the black panels.

Bleaching in the evenings, her legs snap and bend white as candlewicks,
And her hourglass knees crush the rocks as if she means to pray:
The words she wears drop to the sand limp and less specific.

By then, sirens in the night
Had lost the shock of train whistles,
And only soothed the city deeper into its midnight mire.

The blue burns a bridge across her nose redder than forgotten brick;
She pauses in the afternoons, her lungs breathe hot delay.
Her hands, empty tip jars, curve to cup the Pacific.

They say when you’re gone
Your air goes with you,
Your body blowing its landlord temper.

Lost in a coastless nightmare she swims miles to kick
Wet and grasping from her ankles like seaweed from the bay,
The words she wears drop to the sand limp and less specific

I’ve heard some people throw clods of earth
At the box, muddy between the hymn lines.
They say it’s for the living.

Around her eyes the past creases dark and fish-quick,
Its clam edges burrowed sharp as oysters into the clay;
Her hands, empty tip jars, curve to cup the Pacific.
The words she wears drop to the sand limp and less specific.

Sine Curves Immemorial

Slammed out flat in the shade beneath the tree of firsts
That bends at its creaking waist to draw forth a lazy retort
From the river lying summery and fallow in its concrete,
She twists a little to the left; her toes shuffle themselves.

Yesterday she walked through the glass in the garage
Like a tottering, milk-plumped fakir when they’d just said not to,
Bit red twin wings into her thumb to keep from yelling
Loud as the exit door of a nightmare as the shards clinked
Arctic and lovely into the bloody measuring cup.

One night when the wind is wedged up against the white house
Like a self-defense instructor pushing fifty and desperate
To prove something, she’ll sit all knees and elbows
And teeth in the center of the temporary bed playing insomniac sentinel
Over the little city of cups on the carpet trapping spiders
She doesn’t have the heart to kill, and wait for company.

When the kindergarten teacher with her brown shield of hair and a message
Told them to go through the classroom and find something
Worth as much as they were and come back to show
Everyone, she brought back the coloring books and wished
She’d been as clever as the kid with the basket of pennies.

Because the bedroom fort never brings his amusement to a bore,
She plucks alliterative picnics from the sleeping bag’s acrylic weave
With pinched fingers as if they were dining on imaginary nits
And pulls his four years and hoarse giggles into the warmer shadows.

Empty as Tip Jars

Her hands, empty as tip jars, curve glassy to cup the Pacific
And at her salt-rimed hips settles the silt of another sundried day.
The words she wears drop to the sand limp and less specific.

When the clouds crowd her ears she drowns their traffic,
Stringing shells in the cave of her skull that deafeningly sway;
Her hands, empty as tip jars, curve glassy to cup the Pacific.

Bleaching in the evenings, her legs snap and bend white as candlewicks
And her hourglass knees crush the rocks as if she meant to pray:
The words she wears drop to the sand limp and less specific.

Heaven burns a bridge across her nose redder than forgotten brick;
When she pauses in the afternoons, her lungs breathe hot delay.
Her hands, empty as tip jars, curve glassy to cup the Pacific.

Long gone, lost in a coastless nightmare she’s swum miles to kick
Wet and grasping from her ankles like seaweed from the bay,
The words she wears drop to the sand limp and less specific

When around her eyes the past creases dark and fish-quick,
Its clam edges burrow sharp as oysters deeper into the clay;
Her hands, empty as tip jars, curve glassy to cup the Pacific.
The words she wears drop to the sand limp and less specific.

Hadassah

Prayer swelled my stomach, a white smoke
Charring wide chalk satiety over the walls
Of my larynx, a graffiti dessert,
And I walked in thirst. The women
That I’d gathered as empty pottery,
Vessels around a droughted well
Never rose, the yeast impetus of their souls
Dormant, hungering. Our mouths
All dangled gaping from a single golden stick,
Felt the metal pry our teeth loose
As the day warmed and waned
And the gold became meat became corn.

We lost our tongues in the sand
Felt scorpion stings pierce our tonsils
And string them up as pearls
Around a dying neck, fingered their curves
To keep conscious of our belly walnuts
Hardening in the sun behind the silk
Falling like tropics bridges
Between asymmetrical monolith knees.

When the water came, I felt it harden
Pink and selfish between my earthbound eyes,
And in my throat steamed a wet suspicion
Quiet and wholly unholy.

Trees

She’d dance for children
Hiding from their parents men
From their wives women
Young and hopeful from their fathers who
Had come just the night before to see her
Become a tambourine enflame the evening
Shoot her sparks
Like wayward bullets to a moon
That only barely gave her sight
And used the coins to buy a knife
She’d carve the trees
Slice clean through the bark
That slowly gave
Rimmed her fingernails with dirt-flecked
Sap whose smell never left
The rags of her everyday dress
Over a body only half earthly and cut
To cut for cutting leaving
Messages almost dry and freshly
Piney for him she built
Their trysts out of leaves
Rolled crutch twigs between their bodies
And wrapped her songs
In wood she felt every branch
Smash up through her ribs
Bamboo torture and swallowed the sting
As if it were syrup she began
To cry in resin alone
And the yellow tracks down her cheeks
Browned by blood and shadowed sun
Would make a map for him to find her in the dark
Beneath the trees when the world shattered down into
The clay of four greedy hands she
Wrestled thinking he’d build a home beneath
The shelter of her diaphragm
But kept the knife for when he left
And when he did she threw her
Hair out over the sky a last canopy
And severed all her roots to keep
From wondering whether their lights
Were worth a shovel.

(Gap-in-the-story poem about a character in Everything is Illuminated, by Jonathan Safran Foer.)

Salem (Second Attempt)

It was the screaming that drew me
ripping raw as sex up the trumpet of my throat
and I tucked my innocence like wax to cradle into white forsaken
crescents behind my ears that have never felt the yellow heat
of sky even for a moment, because I could scream


In the night when I had again pledged my soul like trousseau linen
in a word basket to our lord and savior amen I used to dream
I could scream and my hands would rake the air like ploughs
like a kitten at a curtain just at dawn but what is a scream to
ears unbaptized by any more than decibel docility


I sprouted hips when I learned what it was to be witch and bled sounds
I’d only ever read, a whole new vocabulary flowering red in my
limbs flailing I knew suddenly rave and dance and fury
expelled every last vowel of restraint to lodge the new
elliptical breath of rage, I found craze and swallowed her whole


When the fire comes I’ll let him have his turn, burn mortality
soot onto their spectacle-smooth browskin as they watch
me drown in ways they never will because they will not learn to swim,
have lost liquidity to their iron bones shelved tight into a Bible
that knows no breezes, freezes faster than I could confess.

Carousel Somnambulist

Dark from beneath eyelids black milk pause seeps as the first
Hint of alarm, smoking, and turns this carousel midnight.

Or flying, running godhelpusall for the nearest feathers but the bullet
Comes, flashes blind, arms tied tight with ticketing tape plastic sunshine.

Cotton candy leers most dimly in open eyes, irises empty carousels
Their bulbs all fizzled, power plug sparking in a pool of popcorn grease.

Sneaker rubber skidding into white powder, fingernail chalk
Through the wind tunnel umbilical cords ears wrap tight, fetal.

Shoe planes air-wearied, hours of graphite becomes its own cellophane horror,
There are screams, blankets the most shackled prisons presently constructible.

Knees folded into amnesia nocturnes, and hair creaks stubborn,
Tangled carousel bars splayed out damp on pillow carnivals.

Myelin sheathing REM cycles like cheap taffeta after the
Dancer has tripped from her house and gone home, broken.

Not enough chainlink gripped with enough fervor to sit still
Skulls so full of ticket stubs, the world’s best forest firefighters.

A body flat in the streets like oil, black water rivuletting on either side
Streetlamps lining its breathy sleep like goosebumps after a drizzle.

The indigo taste of bowls of sleep spilt candy corn
In the dirt under feet ever-correct, forever deciding.

Death between every stall’s hocking when the doors close
When the story ends in a gasp and sheets wet their pants.

Blush grits between toes that have forgotten slippers to crunch,
Mallets, into jars of pennies hungering for a public square.

Library

I don’t know what I’d do—

The burn in my thighs from too many stairs
Banana espionage and a wood grain that sands
My ears, befuddled mind-trumpets,
When fluorescents become prisms
Become more familiar than the sun,

When all these shelves shelf me
Into filing cabinet sections that will never
Even skim the lates and the greats;

The heat slows my pen and fogs grey,
Shimmering and solid between my paper
And the words I haven’t snatched yet,
Tugging my attention to the infinite piping
That sheaths a certain wired electricity
I wish my ink would conduct—

Formica permits no love to splash
Purple and unbidden like kool-aid
Onto its has-been television snow horizontals,
Will only sip history’s solace
With iced mint leaves drained of their curtseys
And flirtation, like metal bookends.

List Poem, or, I Do Want Something After All

I want banana pancakes at midnight,
Apple rings like donut islands in the syrup
Boston with its bright lights and pea coats
The same just-waking hands every morning
Paint slathered thick and hard across a canvas without worrying that I’ve wasted another one
Chairs that don’t bite back
Sand that doesn’t stick
Ceilings that don’t negate the sky
Clean showers and doors that don’t jam
Milk cool as a ghost at every thirsty turn
Boys who leave when they’re gone
Fingers in the brownie batter dripping salmonella
Sharp corners like creased paper
Pools that end sooner and numbers that drop faster
Freckles to number like cancerous stars
Oranges that burst, not shrivel
Old ladies in Brooklyn lawn chairs gushing Russian to a nod
Wrists on fire and knees that chatter late into the trembling afternoon
Beds that make themselves
Mistakes with erasers color-coordinated and attached
Justice, and fun that doesn’t come in bottles
To melt like peanut butter on toast
Freedom, and to make decisions faster than I pick ice cream flavors
A dust-free present tense
Flip flops all over the tile,
An end to hallway boots
Birds in every tree and trees in every room
More smiles and fewer Office episodes
Death as motivational speaker
The guts to cross more stages
A whiter mind

To Trip Over Carpet (Expanded)

Caught mid-slide against a notch in the thread
Strung oily from thunder to sludge,
Between a grunt and your claim of cry,
This glass bead only cracks,
Never sighs, dust facet finality,

I remember your nerve endings—
Charred, yearning. I wrapped their vines
Tight as twine around my throat trunk,
Let them burn the space between my fingers,
The smooth desperate hills of my diaphragm

But your groaning couldn’t feel how it frayed
My taut pleadful wire of an ear,
Or left my eyes cold as the fish I formed
Lying chilled and bleary on the bathroom floor
Macbeth phone hard beneath my too-slack cheek

You’ll imbibe it—us, me, and you did,
Gulping down the fruity smoke like the child
I knew you are, and choked nimble as the candlestick
I snuffed when you dropped to the ground
In that field whose wet disrupted grass I hope to never smell;

I’ll know you in the tile glimmer
Of my failure, your hand grabbing firm
The unyielding small of my back
When we dance, we’ll dance, we danced
Our tenses always and never changed—

I’ll live forever the night of my still, unbroken pride,
Flipping through the domino pages of cabinet doors
Looking for more tears, the hook of your need
Eroding my last unsevered vertebra
Like cheese, my every frozen reach.

Proximity Politics

You dance and there is that in me
Which wants to stem your steps, I’m sorry
That your legs never find the roots they seek
Stretched out on the carpet like your spine
Won’t speak to them anymore—
Perhaps the blankets you fold between the floor
And your tiny cotton shorts block the water
They need to grow, like the body you won’t feed,

And perhaps I only liked your music for a day
Or two, but I’ll mute
And you’ll blare
And we won’t apologize.

I’ve stolen your pen.

I’ll keep draining your detergent
Into the clothes that I never quite get
All folded, politely stacked,

And you read my books
Without asking, leaving them
Splayed on the rugs you hate
Or comrades sentinel
Behind the mess on my desk.

When I spoke to you of Jesus, sleeping,
I wonder what you said.

I wonder also what you’re running from
On a Wednesday morning at three
With your blankets flat

But you’re not sorry,

And I only asked once,

And we won’t apologize.

A Bookshelf's Sudden Truth

Our dawns cracked
and splintered off
Like the lashes of the eyes that never
Thought to open,
never sought
To play dew-ruined prisms
for these sky births
Or day deaths, missing
the way they pour red
Through the last chance cracks
of doors like the blood we keep
in plastic sacks

Cold, limp and hideous as
the magnolia flush of the palms
in which you hold them,
Sharp hip against the wall
Ever-widening
In this room we’ll never leave,
Under the clouds that never
leave us and you could but don’t,
The carpet too rough
against your soles

You find my eyes sunless
and too eager
For horizon, for release from the lock
Of your mouth which,
keyless, stoppers any sound
I might wish to make

My arrows always
pass their targets,
If there are any, and go
floundering down
With a careful once-upon-a-time
Gravity into the physics
that litters the paper
I wear in my dreams
and burn in yours

Before we drown
in waves of old
I’ll ask a favor of your
face and reach to curve
the bridge of our several absences
Catching in the notch
beneath my smallest
fingernail the puddle you’ll
build out of need.

This October Breeze

We’ve killed it,
Having lost what it was to be twelve—
That terror,
When your red plaid shirt was…
My lungs would prefer to deflate
But this October breeze makes a vegetable out of me
My body a player piano beside the bulk of you
The final offering
You the dream fallen farthest from the truth,
You too hard too big too blank in my head
Dead air hard and narcotic against my desperate ear
A child’s need, its idiot’s offering
Pop-tart thoughts and nail polish insecurity
All the poetry we’ve wasted,
And there are still words we’ll never use
We know that we should, I know that I would
But we never changed faces
Why are you practicing, what are you practicing
My arms useless and embarrassing
The way our tracks never crossed, our every train derailed
Your hand cold on my back
I guess you’re not the only one
A tired wind through the sand of a listless desert
Our hearts sleep when we can’t
Enthusiastic air conditioning finishing for us
Everything our past had not
Nothing sparks
Even your silence won’t touch me
The hair on all of your audience toes
Your hatchet face
Your glow dust-encrusted
Its splinters littering the floor of my mind
Weightless, over
I wondered whether your eyes ever light
A sleep dance, machine exchange
I could cry as easily as kiss
This horrible, inevitable
Our ashes dissolved into the skin I already cannot feel
No space left in it for shame
I watch you sleeping for any flash of prone
Your lips a bruise I cannot feel
Most alone in that moment of most close
Two dying flames clawing into each other for the last match
More alone with you than without you
Our string too taut, without the energy to snap
Apathy, humility
We’ve killed it

Boston

The trees skid in reverse
When it’s dark, when it’s cold—
Every face, every syllable the same;

Snow, cinnamon in my cocoa,
This communion of souls:
I want it, with its lights and pea coats.

Perhaps this is the boredom they really talk about,
When the marrow penetrates you—
I want to make holes in my skin,
Peaceful and bewildered

I can read his code.
I hope all those songs hurt,
My always refrain,
That steady silence of hours, eternal.

My eyes burned the sky
Blue velvet violet viridian vibrant,
Taking up my morning in sheets.

Why am I here, where am I going?

I really seem to like it fresher,
That slick cool slide of squish,
Of nothing, and everything is right;
The wind still soars like needles.

2/17/09

To Trip Over Carpet

Caught midslide against a notch in the thread
Strung oily from thunder to sludge,
Between a grunt and your claim of cry,
This glass bead only cracks,
Never sighs; dust facet finality,

I remember your nerve endings—
Charred, yearning. I wrapped their vines
Tight as twine around my throat trunk,
Let them burn the space between my fingers,
The smooth desperate hills of my diaphragm;

The night my only still unbroken pride,
I flipped through the domino pages of cabinet doors
Looking for more tears, the hook of your need
Eroding my last unsevered vertebra
Like cheese.

2/17/09

Our Grey Tongues Tired

I’d fall into this like leaves
Sleeping long against the slick glass of windows
Down to the ledges, their happy cemeteries,
But do it with more smiles
And fewer arthritic wrinkles.

No one really flies anymore
We birds scream into the wind all night
And begin again at dawn,
Our beaks cracking at their edges,
Our grey tongues tired of too many seeds.

The snow drops a shell of silence
Over that one last perfect swansong
We spend our whole lives not singing,
Blocks that one last jab at infinity
From our dying lungs.

Bees who have lost all their yellow sit quiet
Whistling cold down my phoenix fingers;
Slowly we dive into the wings
We never thought we’d want,
And they fit.

2/06/09

One

To live for ashes, the gold
Ferris wheel inevitability of phoenix feathers
Glittering red from any least
Curl of the toe, every progressively
Less significant thought
She’s ever had, will ever have,
And yet to live.

For some there is no present.
Her library of faces, built to bend
Around a cross whose arms go nowhere
Squared, shelved to the absence
Of a breaking point with books meticulous,
No back covers, no conclusion—age,
The yellow of their oft-thumbed pages, the way
One story blends and echoes
With another until all are simply smaller
Pockets in the cloth of a single tale
Tucked into the cracks of a world
Only her owl-necked mind can create—

Every face for her distinct, yet
All gleaming with the same iron scaffolding
Shine of fairy tale she has burnt
With desperation into every chalk facet
Of every torquing cheekbone,
Whispered like horror into the basin shallows
Of each leant temple in turn;
She writes the stories,
And they become one in a way
That she will never be.

Here is madness,
Every moment perfect
And alone, crystallized
Into rock candy fire
Obsession; to dwell, to return,
To move always in reverse.
In this there is no forward march.

2/03/09

Sweet Stasis

There is a harsh magnolia hush
Between the branches of these trees
I haven't heard before,
A shiver in the silence
I wear around my shoulders--
A pearling scarf to block that wintry chill,
That frost that is continuation.

It has become the time for
A strict transparency of fingertips,
A trembling of long-bitten tongues
Beneath eyes thrown wide at the corners
Of rooms never visited
Behind glass never seen.

Cherry Chapstick

You have a certain
Bubblegum nailpolish dandelion stem aspect
About you, a hint of the wind and white
Of tomorrow night in every shift of glance;
With every focus switch there falls again
Another drift of snow over your each surprised swallow.

Your next boxy flick of the apple juice tongue
Nestles sharp against the inky edge of delusion;
Tempted into dreaming a palm's incoherent fantasy,
You stand like you sit, dwindling through millenia
Drawn like a moth to the water of salvation,
Wings wet, eyes sour, your shoulders cold.

This is the dawn of dearth for you
Your private sun bronzing silent coastal curves
Ankles dancing to replace the pale blue space of yesterday,
You trip like chocolate into today's bucket of rain
One arm caught in the ivy net of self-protection
Before your every clock begins to chime Cinderella.

6/18/08

Playing Defense

The sudden helpless impact
Of knees on tile,
Mind twisted into two clasped hands
Of ask,
Is to a heart
More used to flying golden,
To tasting the glitter of life
In the curves of creviced hope,
A crash to crumble the foundations
Of every crash that has come before.
Finally
The translation of need
Made visible:
The physicality
Of I want
Of please
Presented in pixelated,
Anatomical clarity of grasp
Under the sterile apathy of fluorescence
For an audience of one.

6/15/08

String Theory

With this thin unsure renouncement of link
I hold myself suspended, vigilant of shift
Words stopped preformed in the sharp suppressant
Agar of too soft, too reaching, unmirrored,
My very speech a solicitation, a supplication
That goes too timidly unheard. I hurt
In silence, for to voice this pull is to announce
Its seeming continuation into a void of nonresponse,
Of echoes unfamiliar, auditory collisions against the spheres
And filed bounds of space, of a nothingness
That fills me, in its insipient nonexistence,
With the urging inability to hold, my hands
Rivalling only the desperate emptiness of eyes
(, lips, time, arms, confidence in the reciprocation of need).

Left to hold frozen everything that beats within me
As immobilizing compensation for that which I once found
In a steadying reliance on the comforts of an infinity revoked,
I fear only this descent into cloistered camaraderie
With the amber drip of negation
Crystallized in prefix.

6/15/08

Empty Apartment

Confusion
In a bubble bath
My answer to boredom,
Intensity, chill--
Transience in soap,
Eternal discontent
Willing victims to no silent
Grabs for cover
Peace, distraction,
Pearlescence,
Insufficient perquisites
Leaving wet unseemly
Skin racing mind
Poetry
Balanced precarious
On slipsliding knees
And thought,
The inescapable
Censure of self.

6/12/08