the first ride since the accident

we promised to meet
on the west most chocolate bridge
I knew you would be there
early
the railway rusting
below;
your hands dry
on the stone parapet
eyeing the flat broken expanse of loss, sundered
via highway

meanwhile
I suffer
the terrible introversion
of slowly turning legs
and grinding cranks
and the kettle whistle of my breath
behind my scarf

followed by
the delicious heaviness
of a bicycle
at the top of a hill.

you look
very much the little sister
that you are
mussed hair
sprawling about
your bruised shoulders
and chipped teeth
and you say

with a fair amount of mystery

you know what there's a lot of?
Music, in my blood

The Plausibility of the Oceanfront

Do you know how to make a s'more?
It goes
graham/chocolate/marshmallow/
mountain/moonlight/
the sand
shifting beneath your thin
blanket/one kiss/
graham.

We scrubbed the smoke from our hair,
and slept the thorough, indexed
sleep of the nomad. 

The cool ocean breeze exhilarated us
nearly as much as saying
"the cool ocean breeze"
but

after two weeks of rural expanse
I was relieved to hear
someone talking
earnestly
about weaponizing crows
while wearing mismatched sneakers
and a kc and the sunshine band t-shirt.

Cities buzz
with the ambient utility of thought
and the accompanying fever
keeps me up nights;
in a good way,
in a good way.

The One is the Good Year Pilot

If I am not awed, I am wrong
or tired
or perhaps a bit peckish;

I have acted as the avatar of wonder
on this plane;
existing primarily as a conduit
of delight.
I've lived among it, or tasted it,
or rubbed it into my cuticles.

There are times when the recipe
for life is three parts luminescent divinity
and one part indivisible hunger

There exists the gnawing angst
that the world is too much an expanse of
joy for one life.

And then, of course, there are the rest of times;
we are matted fur, and fallen crests;
there is a certain Madagascar 3 to it all

when even the once fantastic
invokes the tired whirling lights
of carnival rides;

life is equal parts
stubbed toes
and Cheeto powder.

When you are abandoned thus by the world
I invite you, all but one,
to create a dirigible
in the deepest core of your imagination:
green expanse spools out beneath you,
vast jungles of health and mystery

and then conjure
the wooden helm firm in your
hands, the Aurora
borealis'd
ahead
and your favorite sandwich
wrapped in wax
neatly
within reach.

Loss best reflected nocturnally, in the window of a train car

1. This may sound prescriptive and
authoritarian, but you must trust me:
it comes from a place of loss.
You will give up
what is left of your time
to the methodical process
of unfolding first
your clean linens and lunch
and then afterwards
your interests and such.

There will be time enough later for leaf-eyed
custodial duties.

2. I recognize in reverse order
your uncle Joey, your cousin Sarah,
your nana, Matilda,
and your own little snowflake, Persephone,
in your quiet concentration

If a little nibbling of the lip could be
sturdy and mid-western, well--

3. say:
"A little pretension will not hurt him,"
then
"I taught my son to describe his mood as
mixolydian."
We all suspect that he is very popular in banjo class,
but if he rides that recumbent bicycle to school,
it's all over but the therapy.

4. On the morning of the funeral,
I made a choice
about how I behave at funerals.

I would ask that you read
this eccentricity as vulnerability.

Memory: Atlantis

The first time I went over
my handlebars, I expected
a soggy crunch.

What I got, instead,
was a lifetime of weightless
confusion, followed by the
latticed cuts and green stains
of nettled hedge.

I had been practicing "wheelies,"
I had been trying to "jump the curb."
Now, I find it hard to imagine words
that would feel more foreign
to my tongue.

Where were we, exactly,
when you last put a blade
of grass to your lip
and tried to whistle
around the sour earth?
What of the callus where you gripped
the tree limb?
And what cries out inside you now, when
you remember?

I have long argued,
argued with great spittle-flinging
red faced
unmarked bottle
intensity:

there is
only one disease;
one scourge
that strips and offends our collective conscience:
a sickle-celled ineptitude
of recollection,
thick
and slow
and decadent.

Memory is the lost kingdom
or will be,
in the ragged centrifuge
of the future.

I will fume and spray before it, before
the grandest end of the grandest story:
one human remembers another,
remembers a taste, remembers the
fall that precedes the bush,
until I cannot.
In that moment
when I am torn out of my own life,
when my mind deserts
my friends, my home, and my name

in that moment,
when I am finally and
utterly lost to you, please:
tuck my blankets tight
against the darkness
and define "wheelie".

Shared Space

1
When the breeze slips in the open window
and touches our skin
and we're wearing our softest shirt;
when our homework is already done;
when the coffee has cooled,
and the cats stretch their paws
just so
close our eyes for a moment:
all this is acceptable.

2
We lie as quietly in the dark
as batteries in a drawer.

I hope to never decentralize our shared nervous
systems.
I once thought that looking too closely at the seam,
at the stitches across our veins
could lead to a certain type of death;
on the whole, I prefer not to dwell
on my insides.

Remember: all the times
we saw the whole thing taut,
near torn
and knew that we could destroy
it with a word,
could rip the threads
of history and affection;
leave them for the movers
to discard.

This year, however
I saw romance in the labor,
the patchwork attachment
but I think:
lean close
to let the tension out
and add another stitch. 

3
Inside the first thing
is a fourth thing
and she says
in the interest of fairness, I tell
you this: if you mention pogs
again, I will
leave you.

Spring Poem: When the Geese Return

A goose is a brute
on foot, hungry and violent
and stupid--they stumble
about like little zombies

they hunger for breeeeeeaaaaaaad

Spring obscures us
dying ice cores;

if you stripped me in Winter
for testing
you'd find a miserable huffing
combination of despair and desire
hammered under into a
cold wide anger


I am a different person in warm weather
kinder, eyes wider
slightly thinner
more shallow, more content

I ache less, yearn less
I will take phone calls
I will maintain eye contact
I will smile at your dog
in short, I am less myself
or more, depending

on your opinion
of geese

Au(thorship)

To speak of the office
in my home
is to speak of the laboratory in yours

I've confused often
the click of the door being shut
the handle turned
with the muted peck of a goodnight kiss

Writing is like crying
it demands a pretty basic level of hydration
in its grainy, atomic core

instead:
the liquid-less void
a bleeding, dusty silence
between the desk and
a suddenly vacant door frame.

Cheap gilt rubs right off
beneath your parched and brittle fingers
what you need is a
more thorough entanglement
of the elements involved

Look here:
we are hunched
in crisp white coats
over microscopes and legal pads:
to adjust the height of the eye
is to strip and pare and reveal

at the right degree of magnification
all of us cries out for more of something else

and when we have strained our eyes
to the limits of our artifice
what's left is 
all ache and crunch; a
crystalline futility
and a hunger poorly spent

An Autobiographical Inquiry, in Four Parts

1
Sometimes
when I think I am unwatched
and seated in a friend's car
(I am in the driver's seat; perhaps he is in the bank)
I will press my teeth into the wheel
and, primarily, I will think about texture
about pliancy and grip
rather than the bitter taste of worn rubber
and hands

and what could that possibly
say about me?
And then I write it down;
what of that?

2
As a rule
I must be asked
to fasten my seat belt.
if I were in that person's place,
I think I would interpret this as a sort of test, perhaps
of whether I cared enough
about your life
to insist
but I would be wrong

Rather
I hate the metallic slide
and the tinkerer's click
the sound of false comfort

To be honest, once I am so secured,
I forget it entirely.

3
You are a woman:
when you are fumbling
in the cold and the dark

fingers stiff as pens
stiff as a drink

at a single key
at a single door
with the narrative of warmth:
an implied correlation between entry
and happiness,
comfort, contentment

have you ever thought
that our anatomies
are somehow lacking?
I sometimes think keys and
doors are built for romance
in ways we are not.
I think I could parse that one out,
but I'd prefer to hear your thoughts.

4
Hail stones
gave your car
a quality it lacked

I'd pay perhaps double
for a mode of transport with that kind of
depth

More honestly, though, I'm just jealous;
I wish the dents from storms I've weathered
were visible, in the right light
at the correct angle

I think, maybe
I have answered my second question.

Sterile Foodstuffs

In a supermarket, every
twitch of the eye
is a jarring non sequitur.

Though I once believed I liked bright colors,
the gleam and smear
of commerce
dulled that instinct;
stretched and stamped it thin
like maroon library carpet,
or the seats of a luxury sedan
twenty years on the road;
a tired sigh of a car.
 
I would eat these shapes and hues,
and will, but some days I feel more
or less ready for more geometric shapes

my terrible red car agrees;
together, we have eaten more meals from
gas stations
than we care to admit.
Here: the course bitter center of it, truly:
I am lying
on some level
if I do not share:
I love the senseless peace
of parking on the open, desolate roof
of this grocery store.

The Porch, Late Evening

When I told Roger that I had never loved
a woman
not really, anyway
he wheezed and laughed
and lit a cigarette

and said

"I loved a woman once;
a great grey turret
of a woman
as stiff and thick as a stanchion
with eyes as wide and slow
as pelicans
and shoulders as broken and slumped
as Tennessee."

I remember thinking that, perhaps,
I could love someone
who could love someone like that

I think we liked the end of Inception for very different reasons

The tedium of watching a slow rotation:
the grudging quarter turn of a bolt
while kneeling on the side of a highway,
sweating, while cicadas hum in the scrub
we tighten a stubborn screw in turns.

I'm indebted deeply to spinning
noiselessly in space
it's a function of the universe
that I have always found charming
and perhaps a little
ad hoc

but if
the universe is a perfect
conical construction
spiraling down from the vastness
of infinity to the minutia of elephant
and again from fingernail to ion
if the twist we fail to feel
is in the blueprints
a feat of engineering laid out in advance
then, well, I am surprised

instead:
knowing what I know of delicate work
it seems to me that perhaps the first thing,
whatever item on a great oak desk
signifies the whole
of, well, everything,
was probably set to a ponderous wobble
by the fat flank of a chubby cat in a work space
who believed himself stealthy

thereafter, we have damage control

I find a devious pleasure
in the idea of wild spiraling;
I wish, on dreary Wednesdays, to become
the reckless and gone spin of lost control;
to see the bolt strip, the ridges dull,
to watch a wrench spin free and away
from a tired hand

There is a joyous tension there,
relieved finally when a little top begins
to spin irregularly, to weaken, and fall.

Lunch and Soot and Sail

1.
Lunch and Soot
were my friends
before I learned to use semicolons
before pretension set in
like pneumonia
from exposure
to

all this, I guess

I liked the rattle of school, the
sound of the wheels on the gravel
when it grew intolerably hot
all of your weekends would roll out before you
unfurl like a sail, and we would mark our charts with schemes
ideas about time and ambition, before
the sailcloth would flump to the grass, and we remembered
that we owned no rigging

2.
When I eat macaroni and cheese, I prefer to use a spoon (because
I am a graceless slavering thing, who is primarily concerned
with the transfer of twists from bowl to maw);
I get fuller bites and besides
what did you mean to accomplish
with both a large bowl of macaroni and cheese,
unaccompanied,
and dignity?
I just prefer spoons.

When Soot learned dirty words, he used them like spoons,
on anything they could even conceivably hold.
He would have used two spoons to eat sushi, if he
had been aware of this analogy then,
or of sushi.

he swore with diabolic innocence
a little dictator
a prepubescent nuclear option
and a firm belief in Valhalla

the words themselves could frighten us, could fill us
with dread and life

 3.
You still like toys
and I still like that
but you really ought to remember a simple dentist appointment.

When you wake, or fail to sleep at all

slipping beneath centuries but
asleep in ten minutes
snoring hungrily
in twelve

there is a quality of malice in that specific type of breath
drawn like a bow
poorly
across the rusted strings of a cello

snoring can be adorable exactly once;
after that, it is the sound
of carefully plotted
murder

but:
in the warm light of breakfast
when we can be troubled
for that particular ritual

the dawn gives way to a few seconds
of space, and peace, and ownership

of faculty and forgiveness

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

Let's Make It Instead

It's easy to imagine
myself, unshaven, forgotten
apartment
listings on a sheet
of folded graph paper
creased soft under
my fingers

how's the water pressure
check
are pets allowed
check
where do you get pets
check
and

has it ever been haunted

and the guy laughs
a little and shakes
his head

and I say
I'll fix that

Washout Harvest

Sawed off just a right - for makes alone
mine and me in correct consecutive
Tuesdays, in Nigeria

careful, the downtrodden understand us, warrant a hunger, a trigger, a sneaker. Raspberry
Suede: the letter: happy hiring. Up
one run, the sick stomach drop
boasting is losing season

A hit (ballerina-length)
is a torn hamstring, a congressman, a smattering of appalls. These kids, a composite
loss; they fire loch, they shed plague, they breathe deep graphite

furthermore standing in nylons nevermeans            in socks, in powder blue.
Really, then, it was a date with the Kansas City Royals
that provided the cure.

Mother and Child

the past is a vacuum and

it’s horriblehollow—

the inside is just lint

and shame—

the past is a space where

dirty things are stored—

in the same small,

reusable womb—

most of it is just fluff

from the carpet, the

fabric of living, stirred and soiled

by feet and soda,

unbirthed back inside as

she pushed across the carpet—

I mean she moved across the carpet—

and I fled into the bedroom,

scared of the hollow sound—

the roar of the suction—

I heard the ringing in my ears

of creation

from the kitchen

—your mother is calling—

You think the phone

is ringing but

it’s difficult to say—

the vacuum is so loud—

don’t let the machine get it

pleasedontletthemachinegetit