It was in a musky instrument shop
that I found myself hungry, so hungry.
I didn't know any Russian.

I told the old cashier,
a small woman with a brown bun-top,
that I'd really like some food.

She cocked her head,
shook off the dust, and jarbled back at me.
"Please," said I, as dough-eyed as one could muster.

She pointed to the door.
My belly grumbled.
I fell away sideways, walking out all lowly-like.

I began through the doorway
and the shopkeeper woman screeched.
I heard a moan come from above me.

There stood a 9-foot-tall, Slavic boy,
plagued with acne, hooked nose, and sallow cheeks,
with a metal clamp around his neck, right next to the door frame.

I thought he was drapes, ragged window drapes,
but he existed there and then with hands the size of cantaloupes.
The shop keeper whined and pointed at the boy.

I looked up at him,
and he, down at me.
She spat into a tissue and then shooed me again.

I grabbed his chain off its hook
and stoically proceeded out the door.
The boy dragged his feet behind me, begging and crying.

A cliff of weathered stone and moss
with tamped dirt approaching edge
smiles down on cool sea below.

Sun rising on the eastern coast
wears shoes for diving,
a gainer off into the light breeze.

She stands with arms through her coat sleeves
watching with one open hand inviting Fate.
Photography is the death of living the moment.

Sun nimbly on the trapeze,
lose trust and surely
she will be thrown.

Dance, my Sun,
bliss will come
to those who run.

Embrace her fate
or likely it
will dissipate.

There was a Truth
in murk-settled water.
I'll sit at the surface
and remember past wrongs.

Stirred lake was below us,
the eels and a catfish,
but towered above
the sun shone down warm.

A dead masquerade,
you kicked for the surface.
Your body, it rippled
a silhouetted sky.

Dead hum underwater
our eyelids were liquid.
My jellyfish back
absorbed the tanned rays.

Ingest your diffraction,
a hunger astray.
A dry-land discov'ry:
it was my legs aflame.

The murk was in you.
The murk was in you.
Dear God, I was clean.
Dear God, I was clean.

A seat at the table
to pray for the lake.
But what does it matter?
Wash my hands to eat.

There's ***** on the train ride home
and I'm sitting next to it.
It's not on purpose, of course.
Mind you though, I cannot say,
for sure, that it isn't mine.

Putrid, 2am wetness
rises into my nostrils.
From floor, this airborne form
lacks the blacked-out, bile-wine color,
but the stench more than makes up for it.

I'm in and out of consciousness.
"I'm just tired," I swear to the ticket-ticker,
"and my memory mind haunts me."
That's why I truly do not know
whose what this belongs to.

I should bag it and take it home.
With cooled hand on warm, glass cup,
gulp it down and let it simmer.
Chunked broth, swished bitter,
headached pieces puddled on the floor.

I'm not home yet, I've got an hour to go.
Seat reeks, I smell. Hands tremble and a girl laughs.
The train begins moving and I without it.
Can you taste the sickness?
I still do, my mouth fills out with it.

Bare feet chuckle in the snow
crunching around on foliage,
warmed by fire in the chest
but not close enough to deny
the primal image of this hunt.

Silence in the falling,
the action creates sound
and sends prey afoot,
bounding for shelter
beneath the sapped pines.

Dancing alone through gap camouflage
in rhythm with wind that sighs,
watching on in anticipation
for completion of lives
so horribly intertwined.

Summer would hate these winter woods,
freezing in the bones that creak
and whine as if stray dog
gnawed at them tenderly,
savoring every grind and salivation.

So chilled and trembling,
frost on the eyebrows and hooves.
Breath in clouds, solid snot on lip,
aching for sunlight to show
deepening footprints in the snow.

Memory comes quickly and goes faster still.
Childhood blurs and bends from the action
to nostalgia to nothing to a surprise visit
and ultimately, back to nothing.
It's never formal, opting out of knocking
before entering with muddy sneakers
and corn-butter-dribbled chin.
The hues of a late, summer afternoon
filled with fireflies and barbecue smell
connect the doorbell circuit
and make itself at home
before ears or legs can bid welcome.
Smile and greet one another breathless
only to depart at a moment's notice
as if the nomad suddenly realized
that no crop or solace remains.

So distinctly different
than that of a severed relationship,
which typically takes its bitter, sweet time.
For months, that fracture can stay and continue asking
for another Earl Grey and bowlful of discontent,
adding in spurts of lonely self-conversation
every several, silence-ridden hours.
Eventually, ever so carefully and quietly,
it tip-toes away with lip-marked cup and peacoat
at the moment when you've unwillingly returned
from the kitchen to fill pained guest's requests
but the only thing that remains
are indents in the leather armrests
and moisture gone cold.

Flashed across mind's eye and on its way.
The hollow fills itself endlessly with present
and distantly connects with past to find
that neither can be here while the other exists.
Start again and re-ember remembering,
drifted away on a silent plane
of glazed eyes and wide smile.

Dodge the sunlight escaped your fingernails
that claw for chests unlike your own.
Full of pep and beating and turquoise
and leaves in strands of hair
standing upward aft your vessel.
What was it exactly that you mentioned
when we were afloat the houred
current of delirious eye-gazing?
Something of abashed lashes
and nervous cheek twitching.
We had never stared for so long.
We had never conversed with the ferocity
of ten men praying to the floor
on hands and knees with closed eyes
on mat and chest;
a chest so unlike your own.

That sunlight radiates.
No, too common, too Not.
Help me with your interpretation:
It inexplicably adjectives
across the scraps of dregs
and scrapes of rope
tied too tightly to beliefs
that would never sway to connect.
A loss of connection of mind
and body and voice and spirit
and Other,
a parlance in the wind without
ears to receive or understand the call,
call him a headless beggar,
which has that chest,
that chest so unlike your own.