We peel back skin’s layers
as if caressing a book’s
tissue thin pages,
each bit of viscera
detailed.
I tell a story
to make myself whole—
so many revisions to go.
In corners,
the old murmur softly,
placing the past
back into an order
extent only in dream,
which none of the young
care to hear.
(May 8, 2018)
Repetition runs counter to chaos.
The steady tap-tap declares one
to be; it belies the random
scratch upon the prison wall.
Only for a moment one rises
above the skitter of rat’s feet
through dry straw to say it
again: I am here, I am here.
Too often ritual’s condemned
as too difficult a constraint
to work within. Yet, there is no
freedom in the sun’s fire and fusion.
Freedom’s found in the patterned
improvisation of predictability.
(May 7, 2018)
by
You were a dream, as was she,
but neither of you were the dream.
She kept shifting from dark to light.
Both of you were, simultaneously
light and dark, entwined like lovers
tangled in a kiss. He watched, intrigued
and somewhat guilty, as if a voyeur
peering through bedroom blinds.
The dream kept returning to you
and her together, but not together;
separate in your costumes and colors:
red and black lace against warm skin;
a part of the ambient background
reasserting itself again into day.
He woke often, then returned to you,
in the dream, with her. The dream
turned the morning back into itself,
until where each of them left off vanished,
like promises which were never made.
(May 7, 2018)
by
“. . . . . . . . . . I want in the heaps of rubble
at last to hear my voice again
which was a howling from the very start”
–Ranier Marie Rilke
The flailing screams
have been left behind;
most days now, I speak
with a calm bitterness.
My anger’s directed inward
toward my personal failings
more than to worldly disdain.
No longer like the nascent shock
of a newborn’s confrontation
with the air, I write now
in a desperate determination
to witness the insidious lies
I tell myself to survive
the language of the ruins.
(May 3, 2018)
by
She infused your words with hers
as you did not say what she intended.
The words in the letter in the dream
swirled and slipped across the page.
You began to read like a film voiceover,
then her voice became stronger erasing
your words as she spoke your confession.
You knew she knew you knew she wrote
to you she thought; but was unsure
the letter, your letter, her words said
as much. If only she did not know
the letter, as her desire, was a dream;
and no amount of bland exposition
could explain away her obsessions.
(May 2, 2018)
by
A deep resonance in waves
flows through my walls
as if they did not exist;
and, I am set atremble
like the wings of a butterfly
on a bit of Queen Anne’s Lace.
Thus fear inculcates the normal
day to day rituals, casually,
like friends meeting for lunch.
I cannot control my shaking.
I have become thin glass
singing in harmony
with the tremulous cacophony;
until I shatter like ice.
(April 29 2018)
by
As years
of protective layers
ignited, then fell
away into ash,
the first
puff of air
from your lips
slipped through
my divisions
like water spilling
over earthen levees,
until I drowned.
(April 29, 2018)
by
embers, embedded
beneath the snowy ash, burn
slowly, secretly.
(April 29, 2018)
by
I stand beneath layers
of my sedimentation,
as if the very air
has turned to silt
settling to the sea floor.
I know no tendency
toward an escape
beyond a calm acceptance
of the fossil formed
from what used to be me.
A configuration shaped
to a shell implies a notion
of what it once meant to be
a creature alive in the sea.
(April 25, 2018)
“Nearby, in the gutter,
common wisdoms
still wriggling.”
–Paul Celan
The remains of old ideas,
ripe with anger, are
so deeply embedded
one breaks bones
only to find dust,
instead of marrow.
They raise their heads,
and laugh righteously
at their bitter lies.
Always, they wait nearby—
truncheons polished,
jackboots shined;
While common wisdoms
smile like the recent dead.
(April 24, 2018)
My hands are my mother’s;
the veins, like earthworms,
roll beneath thin skin.
As if wringing rags in worry,
I massage the arthritis
burrowing at my wrists.
The ache wears me—
like a sand gnaws
old granite blocks,
until I, too, become sand,
indistinguishable
from the storm’s
final dry heavings.
(April 21, 2018)
by
“without—the power to die”
–Emily Dickinson
An ephemera scattered
like thoughts in dreams;
I am no longer subject.
I am object,
acted upon— chaff
allowed to fall,
disregarded,
indistinguishable from dust.
Yet, I must respond,
must go on.
Despite dysfunction,
despite predicate’s lack,
I stand here
to mark an empty space.
by
Time undoes itself
like an old man
who struggles to recall
why he left the house,
so he returns home
baffled and incomplete.
Each moment contains
its own distractions—
a turning away,
as if embarrassed
to be recognized
as someone else.
There is no time
to recoup, other
than what remains:
a gathering, like lovers
holding each other
against the dark
longing not to be alone.
(April 16, 2018)
by
she knew he thought she hinted
the words he wrote were heard
she knew he thought she wanted
him to speak them to her
he knew she thought he hinted
the words she wrote were heard
he knew she thought he wanted
her to speak them to him
they knew they thought they hinted
the words they wrote were heard
they knew they thought they wanted
each other to speak true
yet secrets left unsaid
are best left to the dead
(April 15, 2018)
1
Between the wild flowers
which have yet to bloom,
the orange tabby stalks through
the light of a spring afternoon.
2
Too cynical to listen to the gods—
I am not a Moses tending sheep; yet
flowers still enflame the yellow
rose bush with celestial light.
(April 15, 2018)
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