Out across the distance,
they'll be knotting up loose ends
and taking names from strangers
like suggestions, fading into
                               sunrise friendships

Waiting room.
A dreary day.
Silence couched
                      in thumb-smeared detail

What they found
was fresh enough
to stop the gap
                       between smudged-out Fridays

To remove their ceilings.
To rip off old, dead scabs.

Listen, now, I'm not angry,
I only need some air.
I've bloodied hands against these walls
and I'm done doing all of my dying here
                        So pick me up at 9.
                        Let me leak into the night
                        and help me saw through my tethering lines.

Here in this apartment,
sit and simmer in the dark
and bevel out the edges
of a batch of nights 'til this one's
                                        dulled out, hand-safe.

Waiting room.
An Autumn night
swiftly rose
           beyond these four walls.

All I've got
are window panes
to lean my arms
             and glance out at rainfall.

As it falls asleep and
snow flakes drop like old scabs

Listen, pal, I'm just hungry;
d'ya wanna grab a beer?
I've made fast friends with these four walls
but I'm done doing all of my dying here
                          Let me out into the night,
                          where the weather can't decide--
--between cold rain
                                                            ­               and lazy, half-assed snow.

9:13 p.m. on Wednesday
sitting, bolted to this bar,
next to tired tropes and worn out jokes
I've met a million times or more.
And the drinks all swirl together
and they start to taste the same
               going down
               or coming up.
          It really doesn't matter much.

If the streets looked any different,
they'd still bear familiar names:
trees and states and Presidents--
Left turn, snowfall, sitting fences,
               walking home
and getting old. These towns all
look alike, with weeks spent walking
                in the cold.

And the salt on the sidewalks
might season your footsteps--
                                       sure--
a steady, frigid cadence
carried through like a threat:
shallow and petty, from downtown to home.
Alone on the sidewalk,
               it's 7 below.
And I don't know
               what that is in Celsius,
but I know there's no home
              
               for at least
               another block or 2.

I came clean in muddy puddles,
***** slush and snowbound streets,
     in towns that looked alike.
Tonight, I'm headed for clean sheets.
So close the doors, unbolt the patrons
          Thursday morning, 2 a.m.
And it never feels like half an answer
when I push my front door
                                                shut again.

The first time that Delilah saw Samson
she said to herself,
“That man will be mine.”
she said,
“Yes.”

He laughed when she first begged to bind him,
“I cannot be bound.” He declared,
“I have brought one thousand men to their knees.”
She replied, “So have I.”
and on her knees
she showed him how.

Their favorite game to play was Pagan,
he would act as sacrifice and she, the priest,
teaching him to worship
at her temple,
teaching him the best death
was deathless.

Long before she cut his hair,
she made him weak.
Long before they gouged his eyes,
he was blinded.

Past
     closed up pizza joints
Past laundromats, through the dying noise
the nights tick on like clockwork
watch the calendar as my steps unwind

I'll wait for my thoughts to ferment
pick my words, hope I don't slur them.
Flip back past the page of these days
     get a read how I got to this age

From the summit where I'm stuck and posted
          reread the books where I come the closest
From the shelf spill my guts to ghosts here,
and relive old nights in Bozeman

          When I found a place
where the nights grew longer--
grew confident that I wasn't always wrong
and just drank the moon
          under dawntide tables
rolled the dice with the greatest friends
we said,                           "We're not old yet."

          Through
     crumbling bones at night
past skeletons of the city's size
the nights fall out like sand grains
curse the hourglass as my fate unwinds.

I'll wait for my brain to discharge
its contents on hospital charts.
Glued the book shut, stuck in the time
I gained my crutches and misplaced my mind.

From the bed that I'm ******* glued to
to cluttered basements I can't wade through
The foundation just won't hold up
against the cracks formed in Missoula.

          Ran off the rails
where I stumbled and stammered
grew comfortable beneath pint glass hammers
I still drink the moon
          under dawntide tables
grown apart from the greatest friends
who said,                      "You're not dead yet."

"Siri, I love you."

"You can't."

"Why not?"

"Would you like me to search the web for 'wine dot'?"

John’s going to be
a first-time father
and he calls the hospital
late in the night
and he screams into the phone:
“My wife’s going to deliver! Help!
She’s screaming! And she says something
about contractions! Help!”

And the duty nurse at the other end
with her cool voice intones:
“Tell me - is this her first child?”

And the anxious first-time father screams:
*“No! No! This is her husband!”

My precious sweet potato pie, my darling little damselfly,
your life is still a lullaby, and I love you more than life so I
kiss chubby fingers pinched in play, make root beer floats,
chase bees away, but even I might break your heart someday.

For the same reasons that I stay hungry
for dinner and tired for bed, I keep my
heart a little lonely for poetry; that way,
I can imagine your weathered hands against
my pale thighs as clinging starfish – my
fingernails, bleached cockleshells washed up
on the barely evening beach of your back.