Curses and Stickpins

Writing is to speaking
as burnt hair is to lightning;
perhaps this is why
I prefer to draw.

Writing is sandbox to the battlefield,
it is play full grown. To speak is to stage. I find my pleasure
in the press of charcoal to soft, cream paper. I find my pleasure
where I will.

To speak of writing requires something fermented,
sticky and sick and ghastly sweet, left to
congeal in a pickle jar poorly rinsed.
Wouldn't you rather hold that bottle,
tilt it to the side, note the viscosity
then put it back on its homemade wooden shelf,
and back out of the room, and quietly shut the door?

I am concerned mostly with Rube Marquard,
and opal, and a curse:
I have lived in this city for ten
long years, and the traffic reports still sound to me
like spells, powerful hexes
that leave me foreign and affected.

I have flung totems into rivers before, into cold waters,
and it's not such an odd sentiment--if
these were older moments, we might even ask some god
of sweep and dissolution to protect us,
to carry away all poisons. We will lose
games, and pen the articles
of frustration, and later, when everyone else is gone,
we will gather the words unused, and make a little joke
for those that loved us anyway
as if to say "I'm sorry, it was always a third thing."

A Single Honest Thing

You say: I'm not prepared to drive another mile in this dark
with animals crossing the road
the way you stumble through the bedroom:
rubbing sleep from your eyes,
lifting your shirt to clean your glasses,
murmuring something about the library

So we get out and stretch and
I'd like to use a different word, of course, but let us be real
here and now:
those stars are completely
fucking
twinkling

we stretch, and climb some small hill,
a precarious pile of rocks,
and then we sit
a little apart, but near enough to touch
if it comes to that
up here on our mesa
in this non-metaphorical desert,
under these stars

stars shining,
honest to god,
earnestly

we lay flat, and feel the way
a person might feel
while laying flat on their back beneath
an omnipresent sky: vaguely moved,
non-specifically struck,

and there is quiet
and we think, together

with nothing to stop us
but ourselves,
here on this black stone

say to me one
single
honest
thing

and we each say together
nothing could be more difficult
or more beautiful

beautiful is a word I would never use
to describe a notion
back home
in the city

and perhaps then we touched
or perhaps not
but either way, I thought
what
the fuck
has the desert done to us?

Sound/Space/Legume

When you seek space, you are located. It envelops, develops,
presumes, consumes, gently,
so gently, it entombs

Sound/Space/Legume
Stax soul/kitchenette/black beans
with rice, slicing bell peppers and swaying
humming and mumbling, dreaming as small as we dare

those little prayers, whispered between tasks
will find the cracks
the weakened buttresses
the weekend mattresses

what sort of being sets its own
mold? Defines its own parameters? Draws
its own boundaries, in ink,
in a language of
its own devising?

Sound/Space/Legume
birds/bed/coffee
the gentle indentation of
confused giddiness
still, stillness

what sort of being sets its own mold
and is then surprised to see
its final shape?

the deployed plastic
the drained hot metal
loose in your apartment
loosed in your compartments

Sound/Space/Legume
The hiss of a braking train/the snowy station platform/a small hot cup of lentil soup
held tight, in both hands, sipped carefully
waiting for you, to step out, walk back
through the damp weighty air
into home