She spoke without preface,
as if sh knew him:
each sentence a non-sequitar
even to itself; no beginning
no end, no predicate
to bend into an open heart.
Askew to his position,
she formed a fulcrum
with no place to stand
like surf far out to sea
crashing against itself.
Until in a froth of inaction,
he drowned, swallowing his words,
as if they mattered.
(August 21, 2019)
The lie of my truth
visors the angle
of my descent.
I have no face,
but reflection,
a mirror
to lace assumption’s
discordance.
My flesh contains
shattered selves—
a prismatic array,
where each shard
bends an image
of itself into another.
This truth lies
along an edge
of broken glass;
it slices the air
with ribbons of light,
like tall grass
cuts children’s legs
as they flee through
the last summer fields.
(August 15, 2019)
Yielding more
than simple correspondences,
or letters marked in a ledger,
words bend fields
through which we see
distortions and clarities
reflected like sunlight
in a waterfall’s spume.
they reveal and cloak
certainties in our unease
with what we should believe
as true, and what we know
to be a lie as we speak.
(July 29, 2019)
like pressed flowers
found in an old book
the world grows flat
long passages of white
on white– white sand
below a white sky
holding a white sun
a black line defines
the horizon like a closed eye
there’s no sleep in this noise
no rest from the silent mundane
oozing across a glass pane
the snail’s slow slime
becomes the air we traverse
connecting the featureless day
to the homogeneous night
clouds press low like stones
(July 24, 2019)
each day I revise
and renew the dream
if not into now then
some other when
where I want to be
becomes possible
for the moment
in which I’m in
dream dreams
dreams too until
all the seams
between seem as
if some other were
only what is here
(May 30, 2019)
The labyrinth
bends into itself:
one thought feeds
bits of fear to the next;
until, teeth crack
on broken bone,
and it ends
without a beginning
to begin again.
One’s end’s ambiguous
as one’s beginning.
Indecisive and vague,
the end’s no different
than any contingent.
The end ends
with a flailing
of the mind
through a stark
unawareness
of where we are,
where we have been,
and without a why
to justify
the confusion
of the scattered pages
across the floor,
and the ash in the air.
(May 12, 2019)
Hubris hangs thick
like funerary flowers,
redolent in disregard.
Like burnt yarrow stalks,
the dead know us
for what we are:
inches from the earth,
we gnaw on fear,
only to drown in dust.
(May 1, 2019)
