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.