you are my second-hand seashell,
lest I not forget.

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.

though said to be golden like that of Eris,
the mores which you so savor are hollow with worms.
your stony statutes, finally crumbling, now
remind me of rose-colored saran wrap:
stretched too thin across the epochs
to bind each lawless Julia at present.
able now to be whole—free from your unadulterated peace,
spun, measured, and cut are your class lines at last.
and so with a sigh of relief so great that it could echo across
all of the Caucasus,
your Ovid, cast away, has returned.

Because you are wonder-bread-woman--
bearer of two and a half children,
five feet and four point six inches
of dapper domestication.
soaring, you are at the peak of the bell curve, and when you slip
it's on spilled milk, never cried for.
wistful, you stand on the edge of the bed and reach,
manicure  outstretched towards plastic glow in the dark stars
upwards of your eight-foot-walls,
because after all,
ceiling's the limit.

If the world was a metaphor,
we would manicure our animosity.
you’d file it down,
and once a week I’d paint it--
that way it’d always be clean.

I remember when you were a dime a dozen--available economy sized.
I remember when I could not touch the ceiling of my debts to you.
I remember when we were not of waning worth.

I am seeking an unspeakable beacon--
that which defies not solely the misty discontents of mine own
but the time-wrought err of man:
a taut reminder to cross the burgeoned  blur of millennia
up and down the current and the tides
of an ocean to quench such fiery dispositions,
inspiring a shanty not for sanctuary
but for the cleansing of such tarnished deposits
clinging steadfast to the side of aching vessels
harboring, hidden, a virtue free of salted regard
and an anchor to an oft ennobled canon.

at dawn, the shoreline:
waxed and waned and always there,
crawling towards the moon

light on the breakers.
a dull roar and sand grains spin
weary, angry foam

until it is gone
and the sun comes out and the
fishers' lines are full.

I was vacant:
dust wafted off the window-sill, swirling in the afternoon sun
when you came, rapping green fists on my empty door
peering into my cloudy windows, glancing at the address
shrugging
and letting yourself in without a key.

You floated across the creaking floorboards of the foyer,
sweeping my cobwebs into a corner.
          Did I forget to leave you the dustpan?
You strode through glass-pained doors into the kitchen,
scrubbing my china with the cold iron-water that poured forth from my pipes.
          Did I neglect to provide you with lye?

After you lumbered up the stairs, coughing on mothballs,
I imagine that you shook your head at the tassels
hung on my fraying valence,
for soon enough you hurried your way
back down the stairs
into the kitchen
through the foyer
and out of my door.
I wonder—

          Was it the dust?
          Was it the dishes?
          Did you ever stop to open my curtains?
          Did you ever peer out the window, and into the gardens below?

Blueprints for bridges, spread out before me
(these are the things that the past has taught us to draw)

Fingers poised over pen
(and so I'm unable to erase)

Ears straining to hear
(these walls, too thick)

A lecture on how to instead build a dam
(and I hope you know I'm listening)

To slow the rush of the river
(you speak of waterfalls and buoyancy)

Of all that is wrong in the world
(so thank goodness I can swim)

When these summer squalls have subsided,
I will reap the kernels of my discontent.
bushel by bushel,
I will harvest my wistful fields
until they are barren of want, and come fall,
I will take my troubles to the mill.
lined-up and counted,
I will bake them in the sun,
and when they are dry,
I will grind them with a stone salvation.
under a December sky,
I will bleach them with a mild amnesia
so they are as white and soft as springtime snow.

Then, baker befriended these kneaded woes will rise--and this time,
I will feast on the bread of my shortcomings.

It was a full on stare
drawing circles in the sand,
cold and dry in the desert.
but it took a plane to the tropics
because the well was  all
dried up.

There is a man at the circus
who draws scarf after scarf from his sleeve.
Fragile cloth, taut in his grip,
bends around his fingers as he pulls,
willing reluctant
strips of color from some hidden place
until they are waving overhead, casting shadows,
catching wind, and catching eye,
as onlookers lose sight
in the glare of  spotlight and color,
he himself squinting.
So you are with my words--
drawing, bending, and smiling blind
at whatever it is you grab and sift
through, like the scarf man must
as he wanders the empty stadium
when the crowds have gone away,
kicking cans and picking up dimes
as he pushes the scarves back
up his sleeves until tomorrow.

you gave me sand beneath my feet,
and let me sink into this sanity.
falling down, hands on knees,
on ice, you let me slip.

the tip of my tongue was tied,
head turned the other direction
until the whiplash came to me,
snapping
in an instant, my neck
back into place.

i thought it cruel
(and i also thought i was wise)
but before the screeching stopped,
i thanked you.

what the label doesn’t mention is that
with rouge comes bone-white knuckles and a strangled reality:
saran-wrap and powdered lemonade,  
and bleach white soles shining through closed blinds
and closed doors that meant nothing until we begged of the key
and found the rooms to be empty--lit by only the fluorescents
and also the ceilings with the stars which I know now are made of plastic
dreams that dangle above
too many heads who have not shaken,
too many fingers glued together,
too many arms anchored
by all the silly things i should’ve buried along with
my listless apathy.

sweet sleep, I know you
the way that a blind man is
said to know the moon.

Keep in mind that when Russula,
humble, dewy and smelling of musk and rain,
Is brushed off by some unknowing passerby
Or grows thirsty in the sunlight,
It still leaves a silky fingerprint in the soil.

pockets of paper
and prosthetic  posture:
and
it
all
fell
down.

"Yellow lines brighter than the sun,
red stop-signs more vibrant than adam's apple,
grass green across all sides of the fence."

You were white vinyl  and opposite asphalt.
a cardboard cutout
is no place to live.

One of mine,
wanting it all to have been a metaphor,
has only fallen listless--
O, to be caught in the middle of the bell curve:
it's smoke and trepidation
in my head.

because
maybe it's

not such




a small world
















afterall.

The world writes its words on its doors,
not on its walls
so swing open wide, mason:
this is ephemeral
and this is young.
and this is written in water, because
anything is always an over-estimation.

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.

After Magritte*

Maybe that man in the painting,
Grey, upright, unfeeling,
really is the Son of Man—
Divine: of the father and of the son,
And of the holy ghost.

How did he spend his Christmas mornings as a child?

If he is mortal after all—
the kind who strolls along with an Eve at dusk:
Who is his Gabriel?

Did he ever place an offering on the desk of a Teacher?

Whoever he is, does he wash them all away,
Or rather hide behind his sins?

And is that really even an apple?

Facade is but reflection deep,
and restless water ripples.

I did not bring flowers
when I came to your empty home,
a house filled, a cacophony, a tray of hot food
to accompany us on the couch
as we marveled at your mother's trip to Italy,
the ice-cream cones in London,
a tarnished ring.

Driving away, she and the fog hung
low, in the yellow 9 o' clock sky--
over streetlights
shopping malls
and the rest of us.

A million salty sentiments have built up on my bow,
but that adds only to my air of unadulterated honesty.
hands outstretched at odd angles, fists and fingers yawning,
unable to comprehend things like tides and currents,
those are the ones that find me.
but by you, I'm never sure if I'm seen,
for dark glasses have replaced your messy intrigue--
seemingly satisfied, your feet are
grounded. you don’t feel
the waves if you always
tie your sails down
in the evening.

please remember the rain-sweet smell of almost-ripened heath,
slashing at our ankles and tangling our words.
a slurry of language—
tumbling down the blue ***** like rocks kicked loose from the earth,
gathering speed, and crashing around in the hollows
down from the ridges where you sat, back against the air
as we plucked at the scrub pines and marveled at their twisted needles
because it felt like there were several forevers between us and tomorrow.

I used to know you through more than our fiber optic nothings:
As wild hair and ****** knees, a moleskin and a fountain pen,
A teeming scowl and harrowing slur of a laugh, seeing every word spoken.
As children on the cusp of something in the stick of June, I knew you—
Strong and blinding, you reside in a dark and colorful maze.
Lost or found, I imagine that you are sending cigarette smoke signals
Wafting up, indistinguishable through the city smog,
Out the window of an apartment in which you do not reside
Or snaking through the metro, slouched over in a grey haze, unaware
That you can still stand taller than the rest of us.

Your eyes are fixed on the western horizon--
a gaze set towards the sunset on the golden coast, that
does know not that this midas mirage
is feather-light and diffracted,  scattered
like the morning paper
after your father finishes his coffee, and rises
knees creaking louder
than his chair, crooked
tie and all sloughing off
in the morning light, squinting
because it isn't evening yet.

we always wet our
lawns with store-bought rain and we
don't even know why.

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.

Your class-line caricatures
are more sour
than the merum
of Trimalchio.

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.

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.

the axis of this wobbly planet is
predisposed to too many tilts to tell
when this apeirogon answer will show.

Some might say that the three sisters
weaving the threads of our existence
measuring out our tribulations
and cutting us loose to god knows where
have taken to knitting,
but I believe that this has been the year of pieces--
discarded and colorful like a Pompeiian mosaic.
dusty and thrilling, ancient and newfound
we have been shattered and glued and arranged
and it is not the stars, but ourselves that have been
lined up so that we can make sense
of something in the lot we have.

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 think my
expectations of being
human are too high.

Inevitably we will erode,
but for now, smooth and unfeeling
you lie beneath my feet
as I rock-hop across rapids
and the current threatens to
topple me into icy riffles.
you sit with a thousand of your brethren,
who though now solid
will soon enough return to sand,
and I will wade away,
forgetting I ever felt you on my heels.

do you think
that Beethoven
would have wanted
to wear
a hearing aid?

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.

Flying high our years, our senses of Self, stitched with dermis,
are a fabric of synapses— electric,
flapping in the August wind  like our shirts and the loose
upholstery of your passenger seat.
Full speed at eighty in a sixty
under gauzy clouds and a waning moon,
my fingers feel the air like water
and we are empty, wafting
above the warm earth before us  and
grasping at what we have and have not.
As the sky begins to lighten,
and another day, another dose of entropy
adds to the wear on our threadbare lives,
I try to remember our molecules—an ocean
that knows not of time, but only of perpetual motion.