I have been heedless
reckless in my need
for perpetual motion.

Hours, a blurred periphery
promises like blades
pointed down

in case I stumbled.

The girl in the checkout line
ahead of me is dangerously gorgeous.
In the way of the very young,
she insouciantly wears next to nothing.

I imagine myself twenty-one.
I would finagle a way to meet her.
We would fall in love.
We would make love. We would make
even more love and so on.
I would buy her a house, appliances,
a minivan. We would have two
teenaged daughters who would loathe me.
I would take out a second mortgage
to pay for their braces, clothes,
educations and weddings and divorces.
They would move away and rarely see me.

I would come to rest in some
******* of a nursing home wondering
who I am and what the hell happened.

Then she turns and walks out of my life.

I pay for my frozen pizza and cigarettes
smiling about just how lucky I am.

  ~mce

A form of alchemy
By which
Emotional pain
Is transmuted
Into verbal pleasure.

4
Through pinpricks
In the vault of night,
The desires of sleeping souls
Seep upward into a second sky
Where they flare into infinitude
Like our longing for God.

At night rise, to the buzz of my son’s blood,
I wake and blow aboriginal dust from my lungs,
Get up and take a turn around the house.

The place has gotten cold.
This ****-eyed family – good God, they are helpless.
I tried to help by leaving things behind,
Like this prayer on the wall
About the timelessness of beauty.
And did you find the poem
About Freud and mountain climbing?
All they do is wail privately
And try to pass it off as singing.

My son sleeps like a chessmaster,
Shocked into resignation.
He dreams about me,
And his dreams are riddled with light
And longing for the past.
Such nocturnal naiveté.

But he knows the stars
And because, like the ancient Greeks,
He can follow them home,
He will leave this place before it leaves him.

This house gets smaller all the time.
Still, the furniture breathes quietly,
And the dancers in the tapestry sway
Though faded by the sun.

The dust from my breath settles down in layers.
Pale light silvers the living room mirror.
My steps leave footprints before each foot falls.
The footprints lead back to my door.

It is time to lie down.
Soon my son will wake up,
And shake off the ashes of sleep.
I don't live here any more.
My death will begin again.

“We make our meek adjustments,
    Contented with such random consolations
    As the wind deposits in slithered and too ample pockets.”

               Hart Crane, “Chaplinesque”

A footstool in the desert.
A napkin in the netherworld.
A coffee stain in the margin.
Perfumed remains.
Systematic garnish.
Dorothy Stratten climbing Mt. Suribachi.
My late father’s toenail clippers.
Pale clouds over Slauson Avenue on the day after the L.A. riots.
A rhetoric of purpose.
A philosophy of decay.
A poem written to an audience of one.

©David Adamson 2015