all these with no place to go. an old chemistry set, the wick of a candle that’s been burned off prematurely, a quilt that’s been stretched open like a chain link fence. they leave grooves on the skin when pressed, the stray eye lash that falls in your coffee. a rock that tumbles out of your shoe to alleviate the pain of having crossed over, clean and unblemished. your son wobbles his head as you hold him tightly above you, up and over, erupting with a laughter he has yet to understand. rubbing her eyes in the dark, your daughter asks you to sing a song that you can’t possibly remember until you begin to whisper the words in the dark. the sum of a foreign set of limbs that were once your own curling up for warmth.
tongue fist
you cannot escape the necessity of language to explode tongues into fists. or knives for that matter. fists and knives that bruise and cut, and sometimes cut you open into a whole new kind of thing, be it pain or wonderful. nor can you escape a fistful of words crammed down your throat. stuffed to the point where you cannot breathe, to the gills with guilt or sorrow or happiness. but you can turn your lungs inside out and shock the shit out of everyone, which i do from time to time.
barefoot on slate
i walk barefoot on slate, mice run around about. she sleeps above me, nestled in a odd mix of sadness and delight: she has a son, her husband has betrayed her. it is like walking on ice, feet pressed firmly with toes splayed, the night hints at winter but i am not cold. she wept into my hands and i shivered and shook, cigarette now dangling from dry lips, hearing the distant echo of a car making a tight turn.
from meaner things
where the throat meets the back of the tongue before breathing, the flutter of a hummingbird’s wings, an anxiety that stops all confessions, stops all lies. each lie is a confession from another life, of bricks crumbling away, tired of pressure and time, hard red morsels by our feet. we sit crossed legged in the sun while the wind whips our hair and keeps us from meaner things that gather broken bones and set fire to them. embers jump, carried off into wild sunsets without effort while the crackle of marrow splits the sound of dusk. somewhere in between all of this, dry lips and longing, sand finds its way underneath our fingernails and we close our eyes before they steal everything.
the sum of a tragedy
and these things add up to the sum of a tragedy, a significance of plot and motivation, where the actions of characters mirror some other worldly stage missing floodlights, and the audience holds its breath as protagonist and antagonist meet just before kissing.
dreamt i was missing
i was lost in the city that i used to know so well, around and around the same block, it was getting later and later and a simple cup coffee with old friends turned into some nightmare where i couldn’t find a phone to call you, to tell you i was so lost, walking into the same bodega asking the clerk behind the counter if i could use the cell phone he was talking into, and he kept smiling talking into the phone in his native language while taking condoms, batteries, cigarettes, cheap cigars off hooks from behind him and offering each in turn to me and i wasn’t smiling and he didn’t seem to mind and it was getting impossibly later into the early morning hours, over and over, until the doors of the bogeda were even locked and he no longer paid any attention to me, knocking on the other side of the bullet-proof glass.
tin cans draped
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.
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.