the night swoons like a bitter lover, half drunk and restless, roaming and kicking up dirt with shoes scuffed from a day’s shuffle of clouds and children. we were all meant to be like this: desperate and angry, having lost tin cans draped over telephone wire, laces tied behind our backs, and a tuft of hair tucked behind our ears. feathers locked within the links of a steely fence and we pine the folds between the neck and the collarbone. how grand the pock marked moon scratched atop trees with fingers withered empty.
Category Archives: frags
abandoned pieces, fragments, scraps
my mind always goes
my mind always goes straight to mayhem
hold ’em
and every person becomes a game of poker
you take your chances with each hand
just before it touches your own,
weighing the possibilities of each face
card before you and how much you can invest.
you wait for the flop, always wondering
what the burn cards you’ve never seen were
and who was lost there. just as the cards hit the felt
comes another round of betting and upping the stakes,
you take your chances with each breath
that your hand is good, it will bring no harm
to you. then comes the turn, it either strengthens
or weakens you, a matter of positioning, who’s on top
of whom, who suddenly has the edge. and the river
then floods in, where boats sink and pocket rockets
crash miserably, where a set of eyes meet your own
and you stare facing the enormity of everything
in the pot and the plays everyone else has made.
you take your chances and go all in.
do we ever make it to the end of november?
he asks, “do we ever make it to the end of november?”
and i said, no, we do not make these things, they just happen upon us, like bird shit on our sleeve. suddenly and without excuse. and everyone is embarrassed for us and they giggle but do nothing about it. and we do nothing about it but we cannot giggle. what choice do we have but to get our hands dirty and we stand there like the statues we admire in museums but not as pale and certainly not feeling as foolish.
blunt piece of metal
the day ends with a soft chill that traces its way up my leg and stops short. in the middle of the night i heard a thump and i snapped out of bed grabbing a leftover tool with a metal edge whose name i didn’t know. i prowl around peering into mirrors, waiting to confront some one, any one, to put these goosebumps across my skin at ease. i work through hallways the way a mouse burrows within the veins of a corpse. hungry and sterile, blurry eyed and angry. hundreds of times i’ve done this and it never wears out the tread. alone with a blunt piece of metal in the dark, waiting for an excuse.
spectacular car crash
sometimes i wish
for that spectacular car crash
-the happenstance of metal
& horrific force-
to put me out
of everyone’s misery
dreamt of snow and worms
i dreamt of snow and worms squirming to the surface finding only cold light and a bitter wind as my face cracked the ice i felt my lips harden and my teeth go numb and the worms dig their way back through the corners of my eyes frozen open
breast stones
my daughter collects stones and fits them into my breast
pocket, such weight to unburden me
the design of bark
she asks, “have you exhausted it all?”
and i stretch over firmly, the design of bark
tightly held, edges crumble
as ants slide underneath, the niggle
of not yet being trapped between
suffocating and a hard place
scrambling
scrambling like eggs across a hot black skillet, the sizzle of finding purchase, the flesh of bacon scorched, i grip the edge of some other new thing, bursting the yoke, somehow suddenly free, everything turns hard before burning, solidifies under extreme heat, turning over a new question, when to let go before your fingers turn to ash.