Once the calenders are up and slow January has melted through to July,
we will be the ribbon in the clearance bin at a craft store after Easter.
You and I and everyone, we are the sky-blue silk that,
having finished doughnuts and lemonade
I'd run my sticky fingers through, slipping under cellophane wrappings and unraveling rolls as my mother pulled me through to the felt.
Cut straight we fray, taken to flame we change,
and on an oak table in the kitchen of some suburban household,
we will succumb. By the hands of a grade-schooler, our God,
we will harden to plastic and by candlelight, our means and ends
will unravel no longer.

I belong to the Church of Goethe,
where on the sabbath we
remove our nitrile gloves
and ****** up our means and trends and hypothesis
to rinse them with metaphor.
coming always hungry,  we feast on leavened conclusions
and look to the sky through many a lens--
having traded brushes for pens, pens for brushes
to paint and compute a new sort of hymn
and not in unison, but in harmony
sing: this is religion.

Phrasing, you say
Is imperative—
Parse, perfect, punctuate.
Language, you say
Should be philharmonic—
Finessed, finished.
Speaking, you say
Should be lucid—
Listen.
Silence, you say
is a run-on sentence
and should never be
left in the air because it's
not comfortable when
you can hear the clang
of the heating vents and
the click of you there
third row playing with
pens and the tick of the
clock as nearer grows
a time when the gates
of this false laboratory
will whoosh open to a
windy world and the
hush in your head and of
cinderblock, whitewashed
will be no more.

Sometimes I want to live in molasses, to sleep cryogenically
with a broken watch around my wrist
and a crampon in my back pocket as icy insurance,
but then I remember the way that the cold makes my fingers feel,
stiff, shaken, and stuck to the inside of my pockets  
as I kick at charcoal, greying what is left of last December's beautiful snow, resolving at last that this year will soon melt through
me, around slowly dying embers, wide awake and warm.

Maybe it's just because the color of these hillsides
is a shade or two darker than the sky,
but I am unwittingly content with these fiddle strings,
nodding on the porch, under Christmas lights
on a rainy July evening, peppered with the scent
of apple cake and something smoky
while our bare feet are stomping to my grandfather's lullaby--
a familiar melody that I've never really known,
plucked and bowed, more sentient that I'll ever be.

Up to my knees in the Atlantic,
I am a hemisphere-long
chain of molecules
away from your wintry world.
as I float in melatonin,
your feet are on ground
that I cannot touch, and
as the hourglass sands shift beneath me,
as once-weld rocks carry themselves in the current,
I wonder if our feet
will ever be on the same sort of solid ground.

Sometimes in the summer,
I walk down to the empty part of
my neighborhood at dawn.
there, vacant lots stretch their dry-grass-legs
and recline on the hillsides, napping.
they, the part of the American dream
that you always forget about when you finally wake up,
are the unwanted kin of proud homes.
by a storm drainage lake, brown with algae,
I take a seat on a rusted guardrail
and as I look across the water, hypoxic and still
for a moment transforming into fool's
gold before my eyes, as if Midas has crested the horizon,
I feel the gaze of my transcendental father,
and wonder why I'm able to feel at peace.