I push sky and space away

Rumble  me into landscapes disconnected from my feet
And my head is the only thing with me that had got anything left to do with it now .
Bouncing back and forth on a too-thin neck
Not holding upright
Crumpling in like  . foil
     Like green moss drying in the
     Sun
I learn to be real
Appreciate
     Like how every knocked over telephone pole
     Happened.


If



It will happen still

///////
breath is stopped
and teeth, like glaciers carving scar-like channels  in the earth .
  
With soil.
ringing in the ears,



Swimming in rivers without bottoms.
Cooling me down in a fever, in time

I “I’m”
And I am saying too much

In answering, I hold us up from getting at the meat of it.

Seat of it. Sitting there,stinging me.
Too afraid to get so   clear

a single dog's whisker has been shed
take ten paces
take ten lives
sun is rising . all are fled

My tongue is taken in yours
like an egg
Being dragged down into the lungs
Choking up
Promises,
As a car door slams
Outside;
As a screen door slides out of the way;
As a cloud passes over the yolk of the sun.






Dogs harm the silence, like I, your waist
Gripping too tightly
And letting
Shoes fall to the ground.

White on maple arms
Three black stripes on the side of branded
Synthetic upper
Style.
My hair
In your eyes .
And yours-
Between the gaps in couch
cushions_

,


I tell time no longer on a grand scale
but rather
In
produce
.watching the bowl full of this week’s
bananas
decay a little more each night
Taking a mental snapshot every time
I get
Home from work
Or as home as I’ll ever be

Dawn gurgles past the horizon somewhere
As the sparrow lays dying on the sidewalk
Waiting for the

Neighborhood stray to to find her.

I have seen their eyes :
Dying birds

They watch you

I don’t think it is quite “fear” there .
As death comes, their is a quiet acceptance to the light of dawn
And the promise of warmer pavement on the chilled and broken body
Before
Nothing

[the eyes watch with the same energy
As the sleepy dog curled up in the corner chair when you enter the room.
The eyes open to watch the rusting of bags while you search for lost keys
. But the dog does not stir much. Trusting
you. And being too tired to play
]

It is a casual thing
And nothing much else

That’s how it is with mornings.
The sun warms the pavement
And
Sometimes that’s
    Enough

The clock radio predates my birth by at
Least five years
It must .
Looking like that.
On Sunday morning
The alarm is still set :
And goes off before the sun . Before time
Deserves to exist

Smothered in heaps of (hopefully )clean
Laundry on top of the bureau

The Sunday morning art program slurs
Words between the tangles of sweatpant
Legs
And
Unpaired socks

(Socks I am not responsible for)

/

My mother used to have an old radio in
The bathroom that must have been of a
Similar vintage.
It was a beach radio:black with a brown
Grill - thin red line across the white strip of
The station numbers,

Pushing around the little plastic wheels on the
Side,the red line never lined up quite right .

It hung from a long black drywall *****
From its
Squared off handle on the wallpaper behind the toilet

I think it may have belonged to my
Grandfather
We never took it to the beach,
I’m not sure what he did with it.

He may of just sat out with it on the back fire escape in August.
By the spindly dogwood tree that I remember my nana picking white blossoms from in spring.

The blossoms still come each year , I’m
Sure.
(I don’t know who lives there now)

My radio wakes me up on Sunday
Mornings .
My mother’s radio would play softly at night around the corner from my room.
Sometimes she would shut it off in the early hours of the morning -
When she went to bed.
Other times it would just play



///

“Fuzz fuzz”
The old black sweatshirt
Came out of the donations bag,

At first just to reorganize.

There was a thin scent of the perfume she used to wear in high school.
And That was wild .

I had not thought about it
Much

It was ugly
But was once  comfortable _
It used to be mine
But then was only in my keeping

I can remember
Offering it
Sometimes
On cold summer nights.



The sweatshirt
Went back in the bag after some lint - rolling
And
Other deliberations.

I used to be young.

We were mostly
Happy.