Turt

There is a way to be curt with a field. The runnels of self-pity, the sludge of preponderance. I don’t use words aright, alway. I am dumb as a post. I mean dead as  a post.  A goat cast asunder a ship. The sounds come out wooden. This must be the sea left over. I went where the sea met the mud, the slag of the alluvial guts of some dragon-sing, the earth’s spit and image. So I am curt with the field, a-winter the shelved bark I gnaw like a scarab come home. And that is me protesting love. I mean into you a field of sound. Green as.

The Sun Says

The sun says
I get high
and suddenly I am a poet.
There is thinking.
There is the algal mind
of Monet’s paintings.
The moon says
I get high
as an avocation
and can stop
anytime I want. Its nose
grows long as its centuries.

Tic for Tac

Isn’t it funny how the same X’s and O’s
we use for hugs and kisses
we also use in a strategic game of war
with a wholly finite outcome?
There’s eventually a loser or a draw.
Then they just become exes and ohs.

 

 

If You Die Outside the Box

When you die
you are not dust
you are humus
you are humors
of the earth
You are still
quite wet
still a busybody
getting into everything
still say
Use me
or let me
use you

 

Dear Nathanael

You have broken my heart. You were not at the agreed upon place where we were to meet. Am I using too many words in a sentence? I know that is a symptom of a larger problem. “Where we were to meet.” I am eating craisins from a small foil package to assuage my nervousness. Admittedly, this is not an attractive sight. But I cannot see myself externally, except in sentences. There is nothing here. A frozen lake….or pond. Whatever. And a telephone pole. Are you going to murder me? Should I run before you get here? Or will you never get here? I saw headlights but it was a mirage.

Dear Nathanael,

You have broken my liver.

The Bed

I saw you die into my life
like a bird sucked into a wind tunnel

you try not to laugh
when it is a cartoon death

maybe they all are
ours too

So you would rise every day
as if from a grave with candles around your body

a map of the otherworld
that is all your body was anymore

our bedroom I called Haiti
I would blow out the candles, muss your hair

But one day I covered the bed in bread
slices of white bread

they touched shoulder to shoulder
and we lay down on them

and came into each other’s arms
I needed you to feel it

the springiness of bread

what it is to be alive

Sometimes

Sometimes I fall asleep
with my keys in my hand.

I’m that close
to the door.

Skylarking

The morning abacus of rain on a wire
The wren watching it
Aches with a small intelligence
Which makes its wings dear to those who love the vulnerable
Jack-in-the-box of consciousness
In all its animal forms
One drop sliding down into another
In all its siren forms
As a frog eating a bubble of a smaller frog
Not yet born, maybe within a gelatin
Things get carved as gods
Things get starved
The abacus slides on
As numbers try to catch their siblings
On the arrowed line
The headlights of eggy cars slice through this our foggy scene
The mind is opened as the late century’s cans are opened
Clumsily, by hand
Commuters off to work
Starve on
Don’t think about existing
As, Or, For
The energy in a paper clip
Dropped on the sidewalk
Waits its musical coils of cheap metal
Clef of the organized thoughts
Slapping the jive
Paragraphs like butterflies
Chaos goes through a moth confused that it’s a butterfly
Oh Dear God, Dear Social Media
It’s okay to let a thought just die
Even the bluest ones
Those militant skies
Atoms are goofing off inside molecules
Physics tells them to behave
Reins them in like a mother
But it’s no use crying
That sparrow comes out of a cinematic fog right at your face
It couldn’t be any funnier if it was a pub’s dart
A pop tart
But evolution changes its mind at the last moment
And we are here, humming our inability to fly
Right this moment
Grounded
Mofo
It’s cold out there
Ima go outside
Right now and
Pity every
goddamn bird

Taken From You

Even Pan
That is a god to the senses
Can be forgiven.

Falmouth

How final frozen cabbages seem
In the garden behind the station house abandoned
There is no goal of nourishment
When the eleventh month comes
It carpetbags even the stars
We bury an old dog behind the house
His bones are rolled up
In a carpet remembering when love was new
Its threads of gold busily undoing
The muddy paws across dank November
Muddy marge of the creek
Where the orange grievance of leaves curdles

A dog stops at the end of the river and turns
A sky is frittering away light and gold
It must be a different beast
How final a man eating alone    before the weird window
Heat of the noodles that come to his mouth
His entire childhood     his mother       his lover
In each gesture as he eats    alone in a window
Steaming and patience
There is a pause in a wheel
The moment before it turns against itself
To finally leave this rusting place