Sometimes I lay in bed and try to feel my body pulsing.
I open my teeth very slightly so the blood
pushes them together in rhythmic muted clicks.

I count the time between the staccato drum in my chest
and the drum in my toes.

Playful interactions, minute reminders
that the body regulates and lives.
As though around us and with us,
out of sight.

Like lighting and stage prop crews just behind the curtain,
poised with tables and a wall on wheels,
integral to the next act, the inevitable kiss scene,
the tragic and inevitable death.

The body toiling and being biological while we take care of everything else.
The body thinking about itself in the dark
while it works on itself in the dark.

---

This will be the smallest, most insignificant, most trivial,
And most forgettable poetic parable anyone has ever written
Because for once I’ve been wrung of all my deep evocations
I’ve been whittled of my angular description of the commonplace
Of verbose, grandiose trajectories mapped out
By minds I will never exist alongside but I will sure emulate

I have sat down and asked myself, innumerable times,
“Okay, so how will I describe the sunrise now?”
And more importantly, perhaps more existentially:
“What about the sunset?”
What colors haven’t I used, what other comparable thing
Haven’t I eluded those colors to,
And what kind of uncharted, beautiful, spiritually-boggling human emotion
Hasn’t been tapped by this setting star until right now,
Right as I string together letters like they’ve
Never been strung before?

There’s the endless wellspring of my poetic—
Oh, look, there I go, visualizing thoughts and feelings
As a mystical, water-associated apparatus
(It’s my go-to)
For a time more innumerable than the sunrise.

I’m getting tired of it,
And I can’t imagine how mind-blowingly dull it must be for you
So I’m going to try it like this:
I see the sunset again, and tonight it’s very pretty.

But, poet, this kind of routine, boring description
Doesn’t do much for me.
I know what a sunset is, I’ve seen it
My three year old can probably
Get a pretty accurate crayon drawing penned out in a few seconds
And that will hardly distinguish itself from
What you’ve made the sunset out to be

But, poet, from all across the world, from their unique angles
All the aspiring poets gaze toward the same sun,
Whether in setting, whether rising, or hung there in the sky
And describe it as a tantalizing metaphor

And then relate that sun
To a deep, embedding, defining emotion or craving for human connection
As if to say,
Yes
I see the sun that way too
I feel that way too

And then those poets submit their poems to publishing
And watch the sunset as any normal person would
Once they’re out of the mode.
In fact, what’s on television? / Shut the blinds, Dylan,
There’s a glare on the screen.

“Okay”

This poem hasn’t brought itself out there, out to you
As a grand accomplishment of absolute detachment
As a way to try to break the barrier of poetry once again,
To define itself as a new genre, or an edgy statement the author
Very desperately intends his audience ‘gets’
Or even to prove an angle nobody has ever seen or attempted before
Because how I am supposed to know how you think?
Or what you see, and how you see it?

This poem is a message of the ordinary,
That it’s okay, it’s absolutely fine, to remove the mysticism from the mundane
And understand the world as a beauty in itself,
One that doesn’t need the aloof, grand, mystical verbosity of poetry
To be felt as something poetic

In fact, I won’t even leave you to ponder the greater meaning of it,
Of this line, or that line. I will say it here,
At the end, at the climactic and awesome point of emotional delivery
That all poetry intends:
I see the sunset again, and tonight it’s very pretty.



---

It’s a simple, mundane day, yet busy with an absolute slew of schoolwork
I take up a table in the library, high up on the 4th floor, overlooking
The shapes below with different work in the same time and place
There’s a large model airplane, an early model,
Suspended by cables that attach themselves to the far walls,
Yielding the illusion of mid-flight

It appears I wasn’t the only one with the idea to seclude myself this high;
Around me are the detached murmurs of still more students, bent
On the conclusion of their labors, some more eager than I, some less so
And closer to me, on a juxtaposed table, is another student, about my age
Shuffling through what looks like math
But I don’t pride myself much on intrusion, so I let him be

For hours we all toiled, us in the 4th floor and us down below
The music of light concentration, fluttering pages, a utensil,
Swathing through those immobile wings and dwindling on the propeller
The time is rapidly becoming the enemy in all our bingo books
And of the books stacked in the cluster of cases, some of which will no doubt remind one
Of the timeless saying that ‘time waits for no one’

The student of the table next to me is still at work, and I’m still at work
And people file in and out of the door which leads downstairs,
Faces going in with indignance and a foreknowledge of what they’re to do
Faces leaving triumphant, secured in another day’s duty crossed off
I steal a look at the student close to me
I see him pass a tired hand over his eyes
(I agree with his plight)

By now we’ve been swarmed with a million like us
Jumping from table to table to seat to seat, in groups or in respectable solitude
A veritable mosaic of people, a timelapse in ironic real-time, elapsed second onto second
The darkness crowds the unlucky surfaces of the windows, tries to push in
And like lichen stuck to sea rocks amid a terrible tidal storm we remain
Jaded and mentally broken down, but finally we see each other

He looks at me dully, I return it with a shrug and the slightest smirk
And I think we both understand it
Though no words needed to pass through the air, nor signals of the eyebrows,
The hand, the heavy persistent  sigh
We’ve seen the lapse, just us and the jetstream of the world unending
And he looks away, and I look away at the suspended plane, still as it ever was

Doubled back on Becks you serenade the *** and spit
A flash like love, the sternum above and puzzling the puzzle
To which ribs fit
And O to Adam, to the man who knew it first.
Then to plumb sleep between the purples
Where the counting is the worst

It's rounding three-forty in the morning
And my reason for sleep is tugging at me like
Gravity to everything

Or a late-night host absolutely convinced
His guest is wittier than himself
And pulling the curtains as if to say "I've failed you"

Really, the only continuity here is the drumming purr,
Outsourced by the shuffling footsteps opposite my door
Of which I am deathly afraid

If they knew what I really did in here
And at this time of night?
Can't even think about it

"Probably *******" they would chortle
Shaking their heads in disappointment over my
Weakness of mind and overall
Failure to hide the sound of skin

But there are better things to do, are being done
Like paper poetry, terrible fortune cookie words
Stitched blindly so to sound nice
To feign significance
But there are better things to do

She watered the fichus and festoons
And far away, they somewhat bloom
The leaves a breadth between, the air
Nested as I am, and stare

From the frond, below the wings
Watching humans, poignant things
Scaring birds to rustle trees
A lingered hand, those nails, the breeze

She looked to me and ****'t the space
Which separates a race from race
To finger full a garnered seed
A palm that greets, a dying ****

Festoons awash from laden rain
Next day came, and there remains
My crumpled arm, less safe than torn
To watch again a careful storm

Outlined in clouds my brother call'd
I turn the arm, and yet it stall'd
This universe that clung here, floored
Cannot simply be ignored

If you keep calling when its clear
If you keep gathering them here
The subtle way you water fronds
Our subtle breath dilutes, absconds

We could stare out the window all day
Cradled into the socket of the mountain range
Shaped into a waiting line that never moves

We could tie strings to each other
(Cheat just a little) and
Fly stratosphere kites; watch an astronaut
Follow his own alien discovery to Asia

Could write letters
And the pens would still be chock-full
When finished

And one day we thought we could do it together

Seconds slanted sideways, an eleven begins to look like
The edge of the world

so Cross the universe with one breath
then Feed me an idea from the corners of your mouth
Then I can know it for sure.