"I am, in my condition, a prince"
-The Tempest, Act III, scene i

Hushed, hunched night -
with wet beaks of yellow,
cars cut cancerous flowers
into glass-skinned stores -

pornographic eyes spill and wave
from rolled faces rioting free
of the short-hour restaurants,
into leaves green as billiard felt.

The self-poisoners are out tonight,
their shouts like jaundiced fireworks.
A moon-breast hangs heavily
in a night thin as gauze.

Up on my mazurka hill,
far above the blistered river,
I consider my options.
I'm deep in the dying, but -

despite my condition -
a prince of bottle and verse.
Black gears, tongue-and-groove,
force the night forward.

Reader - I'm alone tonight -
consider this an open invitation.
The secret knock is this:
Three, then one, then two -

by this will I know it's you,
come to talk poetry long
into the whaling hours,
debating the merits of it all.

Bring nothing but your thoughts,
I have wine enough for us all,
& if the wine fails, I have scotch.
The words will carry us to morning.

A silver lake of fog
rests by the ten oaks.

Smoke shivers too,
thin as a wafer.

Against the clouds
is a mirage of small birds.

Massless morning,
scalloped rain,

long as Sunday,
old as poison.

Slouch the rounds
of doctor
and therapist,
hands on my knees
in waiting room
chairs. My eyes
have trouble
meeting their eyes
and I become
an expert
in rugs and corners,
in traffic patterns.

A new drug comes,
and I take it
like communion,
holy water
from the tap,
wafer in
a blister pack.
It takes a week
to crenelate
the blood, until
the smoking mirror
in my mind
is cleared.
I exorcise
the patterns
of night thought
with bell book
and candle
that come
thirty to a bottle.

Every night
St George and
his red cross flag
wields a lance
of lithium salt
against a
perpetual shadow,
a piece of my brain
that flickers
and hisses
like the dead
channels that lay
between the shows
on my childhood
television.

New dose
switches on
around 2 pm.

My mind shrugs
off the shape
of the shadow.

Anxiety's buried
under confident
emerald obelisks.

The day is given
back to me,
engraved.

The slipping sun
is silver,
far away,

& the gloam
is a table
of wet glass.

Red lucent smears
of black bird night
on flat water shine,
everything doubled
by the canal.

Sleep in beer,
old gold light
played over pine
& I'm troubled
by old rationales.

An image appears:
the same sleight
of heart, same shrine
made of rubble,
same blinded chorale.

Your echoes
swim inside
me for hours.
Every shallow
shadow is forced
to eat your light.

Still, these cruel
miles stretch
like tendons.

For you,
I will fill the
catacombs of
night with
peaches
& music,
I will recklessly
drink a kick
of sun as it pours.

But to touch you...
It hurts to see
a sunset dying,
last gasps
of little coral,
and feel air
in the palm
of my hand.

Still: April denies
what May will grant.

Thick-lidded Argus
peers across the rain passage:
dozens of glazed, framed eyes
congeal until split with a smoky flick,
tumbling their beige gazes
down onto the spitted walk.

Behind one eye, a woman
cooks her midnight meal:
instant soup in bleachboard
emerges from the microwave throat.

Behind another, a light screams
from a fluorescent hip, ramming itself
into the bruised wall color
before dying in a waving pool
of yellow-milk curtains.

I open the maple door and hunt
for the sweet wax-wet relief,
the glass-arch scythe: Scotch.

Grass castles spring
from the cindered lawn,
the Argus-faced building fades
into rectangles of dulled evening,
& cross-hatched breezes launch themselves
at a ****-haired moon fracture.

Happiness is a quay across the sea.
In this uncaring world, she is a gold reef
in the earth's slow stone:
my failed escape, an inaccessible chance,
a remedy for the thin blood
in the blue universe of the middle-aged vein.

Beer, wine, scotch,
it all goes to the same place -
I have lost patience
with this unsolved heart.
The trees tremble with shadow-spoons
under the Argus building's corpse-pale
fearful installations. Terrible shrieks for help
balloon obscenely into laughter, before
they are gobbled roughly into silence.

I am somewhere between
your waiting eye and
the slatish sky that
breaks away easy from
the office of rain that
withholds half a world.

I am something between
the passion of Yeats and
your passionate wait,
given to me across
the five hour sea,
full of firsts.

Aşkım
ben her zaman seninim.
Bu yarım şiir
sizin dilinizde
asla yeterli olamaz
duygularımı ifade etmek.
Çok bağlıyız,
Anladığını biliyorum.


"My love,
I'm always yours.
This half poem
in your language
could never be enough
to express my feelings.
We are so connected,
I know you understand."

A mouse broke its bones
on my neighbor's floor;
I was called in mercy,
as the angel of slaughter.
My heart was the water
in which it drowned.
Days later, the wound
closed when I met Circe:
my silverish lion's stony
fringe burned away in smolder.
I left her starry thigh,
her eyes like cask strength rye;
They live, we sleep - No,
we're awake, and the night is slow.

The fog has an edge today,
gashing buildings in two,
beheading the tree line,
dispersing the relays.
The sun dies in the east,
throttled by an accumulating
grayness that chews.
Watch the rain approach
on its blacked skate,
drowning the ironbound
fence-work that skirts
the blustered apartments.
This neighborhood
is lost to me -
it chokes and retches
under a slip of sick.
The moon is just
a drain plug.
Wherever I go next,
I will paper with you,
your ink-sugar eye,
the unconscious throne of hair
that throws me over.

This is
a blank
diary
day, a
day to
refuse
history,
a day
to buy
the sun
on credit.

There is
a vagrant
flower
in the
fragrant
bower
below
a dappled
maple
that
reminds
me of
you -
a traveler,
beautiful
wherever
it posts
its blossom.

A day
where
Lorca's spell
unfurls:
"Green, I want you green,
green wind, green branch”

The sky is
casually
tossed
into a
patch
of wild
spearmint -
this is
a day
where
we join
the high
things.

This is
a day
for a
child's
lace
dress,
a day
when
the bricks
sigh with
their
architecture.

This,
this is
a day
for coins
of clouds
to pay our
admission
fee to
heaven.

Plastic sarcophagus aspect
of the breathing machine -
feed it broken foam
to make me free.
Paper sound lung,
a landscape of coral,  
tape the needle down -
we don't get many kids here.
My blood wandered
to another face -
my chest a kennel.
What's yours is
never wholly yours.

It was like when you breathe
snow in your lung, gasping
into that ****** plastic mask,
hooked to the machine the
doctors sent home with me,
feeding it the foaming medicine
that was supposed to free me.

One doctor let me listen to my
own chest with his stethoscope,
& I heard a landscape of old
paper, parading. That's you,
he said, that's you.

Another time I sat and watched
as they pierced my hand for
blood, to find how much oxygen
my lung was passing on. That
doctor taped the needle down,
apologized, We don't get many
kids, he said as my blood
wandered into another machine,
& my lung smothering in its cage.

I grew out of it, eventually.
I hit eighteen, could run
without hissing, without pain.  
The long nights under the blanket,
struggling for breath, I forgot all
about them as I discovered *****.
But I never quite forgot that feeling
of being at war with your own body,
trying to pacify it, trying to beat it
back, trying to trick it, trying to
drown it out like dead television.
What's yours is never wholly yours.

See-saw thunder dives in the eaves,
whipping rain snaps and jaws,
lightning wrinkles the pale cheek
of the sub-city in the distance:
lit windows are yellowed eyes
in a ashen face dotting the fat flat edifice
across the road. Steam-oars extend
from a pinnace-cloud that races
across the flooded jowls of the evening.
I offer these things to you, sweet reader,
because she is not here. Join me
in this storm as it evaporates upward
into the strange and blankly lidded salt of moon.

Your
light-
headed
morning
leaves me
anxious:
the mist
in the
air seems
impenetrable,
& the
sun is
forgotten
in a gray
pocket.

Getting
out, you're
searching
for baby's
building,
lace dress
in box's
paper
nestle.
You send
a picture
and I'm
liquid as
a tea light.

My
thoughts
follow
you,
step for
step.

A long
night of
mixing
memories
with
high-test
beer
fades me.
In the morning
the nephew
builds a fort,
abandons it
to run a
railway.
In an
act of god,
the rails
are crushed
with laughter.

I'd give
anything
to rise
from the
bottom of
this sea
of boxes
and take
your
temperature
with the
back of
my hand
against
your brow.

Night, craftsman of lies,
crazy, imaginative, chimerical,
what do you show to the one
     who conquers the good in you?
the flat mountains and dry seas;

inhabitant of empty brains,
mechanic, philosopher, alchemist,
vile concealer, blind lynx,
afraid of your own echoes:

the shadow, the fear,
     the evil you are known by,
caring, poetic, sick, cold,
brave hands and fleeing feet.

Awake or asleep,
     half of my life belongs to you:
awake, I pay you with the day,
asleep, I don't feel what I live.

The early blurry dark tar drape,
the annihilating television sky -
under it, we're drifting floes

in a snow-veined river as winter
shadows slum through a beetle-browed
rowhouse valley, all the stars frozen

& ****** away by slow and humid glow.
Tomorrow's rain belongs to tomorrow -
tonight's pattern is hot and pink,

like something simmering just underneath
tautly-sheeted strokes of skin.
Must all our poisons be so sweet?

The olive dusk tents overheard,
pleated, wavering, starless,

ghostly, embossed with moon,
scratched with street light.

Cars hunt across a new ice blanket,
casting tambourine shakes

onto the pavement as they brake
in cherry arrays. Tonight I watch

my neighbors in their curious coves,
each jaundiced room a flat Argus eye,

as they bed down, break off
the lamp network, pull blinds down

over myriad invisible couplings.
I have hesitations in the dark.

I see the neon-breasted giants
towering towards midnight

in this aching pavilion.
Like prisoners we send messages

with our mirrors.
At the Christmas market,

an etched man sells fake Egyptian
canoptic jars. "Viscera," he says,

"it holds your heart after you die."
The jar looks like it was carved

last week by a bored child.
Even if our hearts shrunk

to apricot pits, abandoned,
betrayed, disappointed, this jar

couldn't hold even one.
Still, I consider it for a moment.

But the olive tent is waving to me:
no sale, no sale, no sale.

Talk to you
soon, by the river;
forgive me.

Or don't -
either way the children
will carry cheap burning sticks
around the August night.

The tower climbs
in periodic orange,
lung-like patterns
above the slate run,
casting evening in
long frequencies as
I run the face of
century rows.
A hilted moon cuts
swaths through
clouds of interior
peach, piercing a
gin-muted sky.

Blocks of night
advance across
the blue golf course
& empty highball
glasses clink like
bells in the porch
dark. Broad curves
of street rise in
the humid trees,
then sweep and
glitter toward
the hospital.

Four and a half
miles bring me
to the train station,
under the black
water circuitry.
You arrive in your
night-soaked dress,
walking me home.
The streetlamps
are aching yellow.
Rain never comes.
As a we drift home
I feel so lucky that
all my runs carry
me home to you.
I draw a shower,
& a charcoal horizon
tilts, tilts, tilts.

Blue-bruise gore slips
down the slick mirror face
of the lithe knife that skips
between the ribs - I've looked
at our old photos again.
Rotting ash knots choke the slow
red rhythm of the blood.

A bird dies against the window pane,
just a small thump in rain.

A ghost-head cinder
leaps from a white stalk
thrown to the gritted curb -
the moon is a wrecking ball.

It's a night to fold away
my thoughts like old sheets.
I let my submerged face swim
like a black-scaled fish in my glass,
before raising it to my lip slash.

The roof tiles peel away.
Bellies of shadow perish
in the autumnal cascade.

This grief settles in the grave-gully
of the pillow. Crooked queasy dreams
rise like foxglove from the sheets.
A thick paste fills my mouth: sleep.

Battle day,
bottle night,

shrug the pills,
eat the light,

wrist of stars,
dripping yellow,

garbled sway,
muting fight,

madeira rill,
salt pier height,

wet ring bar,
moon's bellow.

Poetry is seeking the answer
Joy is in knowing the answer
Death is knowing the answer
-Gregory Corso


"Fall is here." She yawns
under ruptured sun & brief,
timid cloud; helm of elm leaf
stung to beaten bronze
and sleeves of copper - the bill
of age is paid in change of gold.
The slacking breeze slugs to cold,
slumping toward the thinning rill
whose runny fingers read my palm.
She walks into an afternoon;
I lay in morning's greening dune,
writing a city's sonnet-psalm.
In this bower hours are years,
years are lives, and lives veneers.

Drunk because
you're not here.
Gin and *****
drop into glass.

Drunk because
I don't know how
to tell you I want
to make you mine.

Drunk because
creme de violette
speaks purple
for both of us.

Drunk because
the Casino soothes
me with maraschino -
so let's go to Rome.

Drunk because
you left me that
pink silk thing.
It haunts me.

Drunk because
you're not here.
Gin and *****
drop into glass.

There is something coming
out of the summer fog.

It abrades the full bellies
of ill clouds which burst

into sloughing rain slices
that slush and slide in soft slips

& slurs as it slouches
through the soak and sinks

sodden and silent and spent
to the wet-stunned cement stub.

Then, a pause - and it is already gone:
a visitation from an unwanted memory.

Shadows rise and suddenly fall
from slick brick gibbets:

cars throw stray starry bars
of slim dim shine from their teeth.

A palace of broken fog
escapes into the east,

leaving a black tabletop stain
fading slowly on the brain.

Go for a walk
in the unbroken
Saturday, the trees
sling themselves
at the upper blue,
the ash wall rustles
and the russet fawn noses
the cherry branch snarl.

A stillness about the hands,
near where the wasp
was singing. A stillness
on your side of the world,
where the new stars
are out roaming again.
A stillness broken when
the wind strums us
with its wild comb of fingers.

I hold out my face
to the society of her gaze,
while a dusk erupts
to a three day blow,
& chapels of snow
jilt into soot knots
beneath a cruel
broadcloth dune.
I hold out my face -
but now to an absence.
Thousands of miles
sway in the poplars
before flying away,
away from me.

Green wine in the afternoon...
I am flaking thru another Saturday:

a year ago I found you after years
in the milestone courtyard,

you bought me coffee and we compared notes
on the carousel of inadequate lovers

who had betrayed us and vanished,
but never quite vanished enough.

One night, late, I came by
& admired your house.

Then the waters slowly closed in
over me and my mouth crept away.

Now, you cut thru the ether
to recover the string of thought

that passed between us.
Thank you for that -

you have been a spray of stars.
I am the empty space in between.

With irises black as limousines
you entered the grounds
without pronouncement.
You were like Baba Yaga,
cruel in your accidental truth.
Your achtung heart curled inward,
like a tar block, or amber.
With a pestle of love,
you ground me away.

You punctured my heart
   with your name -
      you had my full attention.

With irises black and sleek
   as limousines you passed
      my soul's guardhouse
         & entered the grounds
             unannounced.

But you were like Baba Yaga,
   cruel almost by accident,
      tongue of threat and spell,
          your achtung heart
              curling inward,
                 filled with teeth.

With a pestle of words
   you ground me away.

Here, under a
dead dream,
slurred men
coagulate under
a chord of cloud
that late was
lanced by stone.

Their tongues
cluck with new
noise. Anxious
alphabets rise
in the dust.

Was the tower
a plea? A yearning
to return to God?
Or something
defiant, an arm
extended in theft?

The division of
language is
the birth of
the shibboleth.

The girl from Dublin
comes to me here
under the the summer sun.

   Her beauty is soft
   as the day-ghosted moon,
   & never outdone.

She drinks her new city
a cup at a time,
until her coffee is done.

   Her beauty is soft
   as the day-ghosted moon,
   & never outdone.

I love her early
in the curtain of morning,
where the red trains run.

   Her beauty is soft
   as the day-ghosted moon,
   & never outdone.

She has wild light
under her step
when she walks or she runs.

   Her beauty is soft
   as the day-ghosted moon,
   & never outdone.

I wait each day
in an old black chair
until we can be one.

   Her beauty is soft
   as the day-ghosted moon,
   & never outdone.

The girl from Dublin
waits for me here
under the summing sun.

   Her beauty is soft
   as the day-ghosted moon,
   & never outdone.

Her beauty is soft
as the day-ghosted moon,
& never outdone.

I was young, my hair
    covered my forehead.
I picked flowers,
    played by the door.

You were riding
    a bamboo horse,
jousting with plums
    among the benches.

We lived in Changgan,
    without dislike or suspicion.
I became your wife at 14,
    I was shy and unsmiling,

I felt walled-in, and I refused
    every one of your calls.
But at 15, I found myself laughing.
    I even willed our ashes together.

Now I was drowning, even
    as I threw my eyes to you.
By 16, you had traveled
    through gorges filled with rivers.

I heard nothing for five months,
    and monkeys cried from the sky.
Your footsteps by the door
    slowly filled with moss

too thick to sweep, and leaves
    dash away in autumn winds.
In August, yellowed butterflies
    arrive in pairs to the salt grass.

It hurts my heart to watch it.
    I can feel myself aging.
But sooner or later you must descend
    back through the river gorge.

Please write before you do -
    I will come and meet you
all the way by
    Long Wind Beach.

for Lori


Foaming Pacific ovals
sweep cold over nephew's knees -

his laughter breaches sandy mount,
from flashing white crescent

of pepperminted mouth.
Palms above the char pit

chaperone my brother-in-law
as he hisses open enameled cans

of sweet seltzer. My sister
trades antique desert stories

with my aunt. Someone slings
Monopoly hotels back into the box.

August is climbing eastwards,
bringing a fog bank

that won't stop arriving,
arriving, always arriving.

The left-hand
shadow of
the ocean
curdles in
the small of
the back,
& legs ache
down dune
lanes, dawn-
marbled
sand squares,
pine-pitted,
while lungs rub
the court of ribs.

I'm looking
for anything
that resembles
a memory
of my father.

Salting sun,
mezcal splash,
spiced crab -
hints of him
here and there.

I carry him
in a cradle
of tattoos
across my
arms but
it's not
the same.

So I run
the beaches,
recalling
the time we
stopped at
a flooded
road on the
way into
the city and
Dad thought
for five solid
minutes about
whether we might
make it across
the dark water.

You sleep in the beer garden,
while I find a choir
in a blooded cup.
Clouds interlock,
unearthly pinnacles.
You find bread, alka seltzer.
We compare fifteen year plans,
smiling shyly.

Let's get it out of the way:
The solstice tomorrow
gathers shadows
in the blond alley,
building a translucency
until a black flood
of night shapes
soaks across the walk,
empty since it's a ghost town
this close to Christmas,
and metro is empty
but for us lovely few
who need the paycheck,
and this winter is too warm,
it's unsettling,
and a little grinding sleet
wouldn't be unwelcome.

I find myself
with a date tomorrow,
despite convincing myself
that I should really be alone.
I always choose this
immediate connection
and that has to change.
I can't follow the flaking flame
into another courtroom,
I can't dive into another
sly, wild eye that I box up
and store away for when
it's all come down,
and I'm too alone by half.

Tomorrow the air
brights with
spark shapes
as sky fumes.

Beneath the
fire point pattern
my mind will be
elsewhere, pooling

across highways to the
airport where she'll
step from the plane
the day after.

Once the thousands
have decamped
from the green basins,
I will reclaim

the soft galleons
of lawn with her,
the grand marble
systems, rectangle

lullabies, and gallery
gardens, a new life.
And I'll tell her
about how I watched

all the new lush stars
that lived syllables
before collapsing
into pops of ash.

Clouds in ginger
crowd the skin
& months grow out
while I become
an eschewing hermit
who rerolls nights.
Over in your
farther morning,
flight TK 1977
is sleeking to Dublin
on the same
bronzy sun that
sings in brick.

I've felt far
from you, lately -
distance deepens
in the swaying spaces
between your words.
Splitting goodnights
with a lonely axe,
I let my mind
run away with me.
Please, be here soon -
the moon is but
a sobbing blotch,
& the grass is dying
in its bed.

This is my left hand in the mirror,
twinned and pinned to the glass,
hanging in the black valley while a song
rips me along the old perforations,
& the whole moment splits -
the light wavers over the mantle,
a ball of ghost, a past thing,
memories sold away in ingots.

This sordid exorcism hinges
on night pictures that I can't shake:
a backward lens, a frozen belt-step,
a long lawn with green marrow.
No, that dream is just watery pulp,
like when you squeeze a plum too hard
& the juice sticks and stains
in the white noise web of your fingers.

Ochre chaperones
watch stolidly
as I bawl
into floorboards.
But I hold on
to my hopes -  
"best vibes forever,"
I promised that,
& I'll keep it.
Amber eye
on the pole,
please don't tell on me,
let me sink to
the laminate tonight,
choking on name.

Out with my ex wife
almost in the old haunts
like the bar where we saw
the Hungarian jazz band
with the wild accordion man,
the same bar where she first said
it was over, all cards were dealt
& it was a losing hand.

Bringing her there,
more angry now
but less burdened,
clearer in that way,
as she coaxes me out
from the silent shell
I wear as habitually
as the old houndstooth coat.

Drink after drink -
coffee, coffee-flavored beer,
just beer by the end -
felt like old times.
Walking the miles,
the benighted embassies,
trying to guess them by flag.
Seeing us, you might almost
believe the night didn't come
& chill us to the bone.

As you speak Turkish
to your sleeping hand
the sun raises pink
frequencies in
tremendous arches
through radioactive
lozenge clouds.
I adore you
helplessly as we
split circles of grace.
Citrus banners
break in the distance.
The lawn is forever.

This is our
first meeting.
In the impossible
whiteness of
the airport, you
appeared in my
arms, six hundred
pages of waiting
come blinking
to life. I have
discovered I cannot
ever kiss you
enough - the
fallow hush
of sky urges me
to drink you.

So I do.
My life opens
for you, deep
green slices.
You are the
same, and
this is our way.
Words silver
the citizen air.
Heat drips
down our
backs. Hearts
are crisp with
truth.

The bartender says my moon's in Pisces,
Leo ascendent, sun in Aries.

The room loses its light, turns
the blued complexion of an oven

cooling off as the meat rests.
Elbows like tent poles

sunk into pocked bar top.
Thinking about all the Pisces

I have known, so many.
Maybe there's something in this?

Then I think about K----,
who went Chicago to Berlin.

When was her birthday again?
A dalliance in slips and slices,

two marriages on the skids,
hearts pushed through a sieve

across 700 miles. Was she a Pisces?
I remember she didn't want more kids,

& my world hardened.
I guess I'm to blame there.

When she evaporated, post-Berlin,
where did she end up?

Moon in Pisces, moon in Pisces...
lonely in my cylinders of beer,

the memory pares me down
until I'm just nerves fanning out

like the naked head of the tree
brushing up into brown eaves.

Watching a **** elm tree
on your birthday,
as it bends and whistles
to inaugurate the afternoon.
The grasses bend south,
& birds make silent shadows
up and down the street.

Restless, I stand up,
roam around the apartment:
your birthday carries the odor
of fig soap, or maybe it's plums -
I can't recall. I pick up books
of poetry, put them down,
pick them up again,
turn on the stove, make coffee,
and wave it at the naked elm
to salute you on this day of yours.

This day - so clear,
so empty: you must fill it.

Her eyes, posts
of bare hazel clique,
survey me in this chair.
Her hair gathers in rude
thunderheads by the ear,
black about the field.
Her engraved mouth
is crowded with oblivion
and serendipity, beckons
a foreshortened hand
that warbles with filaments
of anticipation.
The aspect of her neck
brims with motion -
a swan on flat water
chases the smeared
crumbs of evening.
The beach of her *******,
her cheek, her blush bough brow,
Her knee, in repose,
sustains a milk leg - 
Her face, gathered 
to watercolor thought -
And behind it all, a mind
rejoicing in the sun-
O portrait, be glad
you have no memories -
with every new pair of eyes
you have a new lover,
a new lover, a new lover.

I was born
in the hammer-house,
where the nurse
pulled me blue
into the panic.

In hospital halls
the needle crawls
all the way to maternity.
I laid alone in the crib
like a wet seed.

I was born
in the hammer-house,
where my name
was a black impression,
like a coffee-ring on a table.

It's a fundamental law:
all matter emits radiation
(all of us even you right now)

& the energy level depends
on the temperature of the object
(inversely related to intensity).

This is black body radiation.
Here, in our meager summer rooms,
we have long infrared auras

(only lizards see them);
our atoms are gracefully aching away,
smeary leaking daubs in halo.

The hotter something is
(like that fling of sun up there)
the more energy it heaves away.

That molten starry tussle
is 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit
(& so we see it yellow-white) -

"But," you say, "what if something
is hotter than a star, what then?"
Something, you mean,

like the strange chemistry that burns
burns burns burns burns burns
in my brain on a Tuesday night

when remembering an autumn day
in a cemetery in Paris so many years back
(Chopin Morrison Abelard Heloise Wilde Piaf &c)

it was such a perfect day with her
(the synapses and relays are all
clicking clicking clicking clicking

with wild remembrance)...
Well, then (in theory)
I should be giving off ultraviolet light

at an almost infinite rate (wouldn't I?).
I don't know what it means
that I am here in the plush dark

quiet and quelled by thought
(except perhaps the catastrophic energy
is scrawling and etching me into oblivion).

Black crash
pillow's face,
twilled to
the old nightmare.

Ironic that
the child who
spent years
fighting
the father
who left,
the mother
who curled,
ended up
divorcing
year after year.

This night
shone with
shedded
skin. I
walked away.
The moon
was pregnant
with an
airless sea.

I woke from
all of this
feeling like
a wreck
that might
be saved
by you,

but the miles
between us
argue so
persuasively.