My fingers never touched it,
save for the tv screen.
Mama told me to not touch the screen with my unclean hands.
Sometimes when she wasn’t looking, I did anyway,
and felt crackling beneath my fingertips,
miniature lighting storms,
ravaging the faces of the young, famous, and beautiful.

but i never touched the undesirables,
never laid holy lightning on the exposed war-bones
escaping at 90 degrees from charred, living corpses.

i never held the dying children,
coffee-cup weight in my palms,
colder still,
and forgotten after the end of the episode.

and i still felt nothing
when i should have smelled ash.

i can’t imagine, or i can,
what happens on our interior planets,
during the four seconds before impact.
are they blissfuly going about routines?
are the markets full, only a few dissenters
crying “end is nigh” ?

they won’t even feel it.

They tell me it's all going to be over soon, that everything we know and love, everyone we can fathom who fits into either of those two categories, the tiny thoughts that greet you at the dawn of the waking hours to the grandest of social constructs, regardless of size, shape or architecture, will soon fall, brick by brick into the sea.


A hundred years ago, I imagine a scaly sea bass fell from the heavens into the hands of a fisherman. He saw it as a sign of something so unholy and profane, he tossed it, almost dislocating his shoulder, into the sea, mumbling "back to god, you go."



and back to god we go.



how will you greet it.

who will you be with, that's more important.



Whose eyes are you going to stare into as some named storm churns up the country side, the cities, rivers and villages, making sweet love to the stone and steel we thought would always stand, east-coast-solid in the face of holy wrath.



the whole of our world will undulate, as if dancing as we will tonight, in a new year's celebration unlike any other.



5, 4, 3, 2,

and countless, so countless,

because numbers won't exists,

nor clocks,

or clothing,

or divisions.



after it is all gone, there will be nothing to separate us from what we desire so deeply, nothing to bind us in servitude to a world that made no sense, nothing to make sense of,



and that's when we'll know freedom,



the morning after the end of the world,



when we wake up in each others arms,

quietly humming,

sleeping in a few extra minutes before we rebuild ourselves again.

I.

something within me,
maybe its my amigdala,
misses the oven-turned-gentrified clot,
that great collection of want,
of transient soles-souls.

I miss how we’re piled three stories high,
so close to each others’ mouths that we must
burrow in criss crossed, colliding tunnels
to our point b’s, our job sites,
our lovers’ houses.

maybe it is indeed part of our un-nature to do this,
to cling to one another even
as our unforgiving sungod bakes us whole,
cornish game hens on the el train,
hurdling 40 mph, to and from
our personal hovels, heavens
and bedsheets,
tethered to this place, possibly indentured,
definitely flawed,
where we revel under roofs to prove incredibleness
an virility.

II.

our eyes are not closed today.
they may not blink in unison
as mannequin lids do,
so effortlessly, plastic and mechanical,
but those, we are thankfully not.
for we are flesh,
and air, and miles of gastrointestinal turnpike, if unpinned,
would stretch from here to panama.

we are each of us
a viscous mound called
Sally, Bertram and Queen Mary.

We are the collision of milk flowing, divine,
a whirling dervish
in scalding darjeeling.
we are air,
gliding over enamel into the collective breath
to be devoured so sweetly by others,
as saintly man-scripted gelato,
dribbling down our chins in piazzas.
la dolce ******* vita.

III.

that’s the funny thing about living
in this size 2 world,
the ability to appear anywhere upon its face at a moment’s notice,
to be in front of any face when desired,
to live sans toll booth or customs desk,
to simply dust off our ability to fly
and tumble icarus-adolescent into the collision
between the two blue planes called sea and sky

I am seated, legs crossed Jackie O style,
hands quietly, and eternally resting on fatless thighs,
my god, they are so cold today.

and it appears
that i am waiting for forever, Forever, sweet Forever,
but Forever will not come.

Whether his train has departed,
I will not have known.
I will not have known the robust, mathematical eyes
that scoured the horizon from the seventh car from the rear.
I will not have known what they have seen, the halves of sheep that were black, the other halves of sheep assumed to be another thing entirely...

It falls now, on me.
Like many shredded pieces of ticker tape,
My god, it is here, singular and lovely.
god-like in its beauty,
gray and divine,
how IT falls.

yes,
you did fly out of that window.
everything that has followed,
the days and years that came,
nieces and nephews’ birthdays at your brother’s house,
the long drives in late afternoon,
your hair, finally white, blowing to the east
at the gray water’s edge as it did when it was jet black.
the valleys and peaks
of one’s life lived,

All happened,
but in your widening
aperture irises
in the three seconds it took
for you to kiss pavement
that for some reason
is as soft as your lover’s lips.

it, the only naturally graceful moment of your life,
comes from the italian defenestre,
meaning “of the window,”
meaning “you,”
dancing in midair,
either your voice
or the air whirling past your body hums that melody
from your favorite twilight zone episode,

did you come wander with me?

Once, before all of this,
it was february and
we were midconversation on a street corner
by the liberty bell,
and your eyes wandered somewhere else,
and i asked what you were thinking,
and you casually asked, 
“what would happen if I grabbed your hand
and we ran onto that bus,
and just rode it wherever it went?”

i cleanse myself of your two-legged ills,
cool as my breath upon a thousand dry necks,
freeze, and regard
death-rattle-arias
to be found by turistas come morning.

you are not my children,
my first world, private school informed angels,
yet you were my tartan,
counterfeit and used to wrap
your pulsating lesions.

cough, and curl up, as you did in mother’s womb,
left arm, turned to sponge
absorbing the penetrations of a thousand needles.
eyes, gold-crusted as sunset on the tundra-rough plateau.

i am not your home,
take thee back upon slave ships,
to be buried and shackled somewhere else in the empire.

I.

my sleeping is condensed this spring
such that two or three hours
at most will suffice for one evening.

my body is awake,
yet the wandering back alleys
behind my irises are weary,
and on the cusp of gentrification.

I see faces where there should be none

II.

and I’ve seen the lines again,
though they come far less frequently
than when I had to reach up
to grasp the doorknob.

yet they are as vivid
and bursting with clarity
as the first summer I witnessed them.

they arrive unannounced
single-hair-thick,
rotating on invisible axes,
changing color and length
within equally slim fragments of time
too small to measure in our dimension.

one summer, i recorded how often they visited
but could find no logical frequency to their appearances.

no one has ever known of them but me,
and that woman just picked up a cigarette **** to light her own.

III.

they came again yesterday,
as always, in midafternoon
at 3 o’clock, when christ died.
and i thought, not of him,
but of the time, and how
twelve hours earlier is apparently the devil’s time
a time-piece-turned inverted cross.

IV.

so, I remembered,
how at devils’ time last night,
i was adrift,
sans-sails down brick alleys
thinking not of lines,
of gods or devils and their time,
but of those pan flute notes
and how i can’t wait to hear them again.