The coffee in the waiting room
at the mechanic
is terrible.
They've got this old *** of folgers
with powder creamer.
But with four inches of fresh snow on the ground
on a saturday morning
waiting for nothing special
with nowhere in particular to be
it is very nice and in fact
even refreshing.

Fog lays like a pale figure in an uncomfortable chair
languishing
and I lay too
with a full heart
under a duvet
yet awake in the dark
as the electric fan ticks away in the corner
and on the street there is no one
not delinquent teenagers
not stupefied drunks
not star-crossed lovers in the cold

just the vapor in the air
too lukewarm to form hoarfrost
too cool to disperse

the streetlights are refracted into orbs of blue light
hanging with a soft buzz
over wet asphalt,
beacons for no one,
no thing.

I spied three figures, ebbing in fixed positions on the lake.
Like the freckles on your cheeks when you squint at something distant.
I noticed them only because
as the waves moved beneath them,
as the clouds in the sky passed above them,
as the heavens themselves turned about them,
they sat still
as though their liquid perch
were hard and fast as granite.
They hardly even bobbed, resisting the jostling of the waves.
I watched them a while and decided they were herons at rest.
And then I remembered what I was doing before I stopped to watch them

I turned to leave,
and still they had not moved.

Split the sun
with an ax like velvet.
The braincase open,
the soul drips-
like egg yolk
onto the sandflats
the old blood ants march out
and pile up
into a monolith
sharp enough to scratch the azure off the sky
tall enough to disrupt the horizon
like a blip on your ancient EKG
that peaks like a drop in a pool
then crashes like a kettle drum.

No birds.
Empurpled sand towers darken silently
junipers twitch imperceptably
rattlesnake retreats beneath the dust.
A billion years of breath and tears
grinding the sediment down
a dramatic pull toward the distant sea.

Make sediment of me.

I imagine you
in the slot canyons of valhalla
among rattlesnakes and bighorns
at twilight

I imagine you
running through knee-deep snowdrifts
with icecicles forming on your beard
under a full moon

I imagine you
living after dying,
and it's so hard
to imagine anything else

But you can't move anymore
and if there is a valhalla
no one ever deserved a place in it
like you did-
but that's a fiction

it's my imagination

it's my cowardice
and my inability to accept that anyone
as alive as you could be dead.

You're a nothing now
and the truth is I imagine you alive
because it is so much better
to be a something than a nothing-

which I think you knew all along.

I can feel the quietude of an entire ice age
breaking in upon my weary mind
in this, the witching hour of my life-
where topsy-turvy seconds spill
from mislabeled vases in a haste that bursts spinning, smoking tires,
where treaded water boils,
where the pale face of ignorance smokes a skinny cigarette beneath a naked lightbulb on a bare matress in a quiet studio
in a deafening city-

I can feel my cells collapsing
under the weight of the metal in my blood,
the smog in my lungs,
the grease in the hair on my heavy head-
the fear...
fear of icebergs descending into unimaginable depths
fear like a kite at the end of a piece of taut red yarn
fear that steals my breath from me
that crushes the soul into soundless, whitewashed rooms.

Some caged birds sing.
Some freed birds don't.

Gimme the dregs
the sludge
at the bottom of the coffee ***
in a twelve-ounce paper cup
Give me snowmelt
Give me the bile in the belly of the earth
Give me good, clean american dirt
and half-remembered dreams
and I'll show you what it means
to live honestly.

Gimme the sun
up on high
on the other side of nightfall
to tighten the bags under my eyes
Give me dandelions
Give me a candle for warmth and light
Give me the mist in the sky
and a spoonful of rice
and I'll show you what it feels like
to move a molehill.