last night i dreamed my memories
were lined in quills and nettles
soaking in jars of aloe
they played on underdeveloped
film stock, across slabs of barbary fig--
out in the desert
like a burning bush.

i can smell
the liquor
through the phone
while
you
rip
up
all the stitches
you scrambled
to
sew
together.

i don't know why
i keep
wasting
my time.
on these
careless
pursuits.

i cant
tell who
is supposed
to win.

I love the way books cannot be
unread, cannot erase the sweet oils
and thumbprints like black oak tree rings
they are there for all the slivers
of sunlight and literary cafune
soft knuckles pressed into their
spines
they remind me that while I am not new
I can remain unknown, that though
opened by some I am neither novel lying in wait
or closed into his old bookshelves,
a thin draft in a library of what-ifs
he did not get to k e e p you
however you did, you did
found your
way into other hands, without much grace, albeit,
baltering from home to home
a solivigant prose--

this way, and that, small bind
paperback.

there's a stack of
cheap pianos at
lowtide in County Louth,
Ireland

that reminds me of all
the ways music
should be heard

i don't want each month to
become a benchmark
i can already feel
myself like a steel stiletto
scrawling each day off

anxiously waiting for time
to heal when it's only been
the tick of a metronome to
Scriabin's best

holding the slick undone
slivers of myself together
as wet kindling, an offering
that I hardly know how to give.