I remember asking

Can I go to the restroom?

a lot

and getting the same ******* response

I don't know; Can you? as I leave the room

answering myself

with two working legs and a full bladder

returning to a scolding

and everyone watching something

How Ships Sink

I think of some poems of empty people and slouching

and I don't think that I think that

I read it and remembered having read it

somehow

some slip

or conjuring of a movie clip of ships sunk

no

sorry

*Why

I try to lift weights

I guess I don't

pulling not-so-heavy

badly-shaped maybe-steel

from clay ground to beating chest

back and forth

atop a New York skyscraper

pretty boy

she'd recite in building echo

to Paul the parakeet

his feathers slicked like Elvis' helmet hair rustling

in her beating loop

Fall's plucked leaves

his caged mirror spins on strings

in the wind's singing

a pocket watch tick-tocking

from pecked emerald plastic

to the inverted bird

hollow

compare the violet flowers in roadside ditches

to the marks and stitches on your backs

pushed up and through

reminders to and of you

come back to the descending stairwell

the light at its end must be too dim

climb further into the maze

razor-straight at forty-five degrees

where logics die

acquaint with the dark

the night

the bottom that isn't

where time flies into walls

aiming a crooked beak at tomorrow

Midnight silhouetted in working hands

steam rises from the ground three times-trod

corn stalks towering and diving

flat-lining at the first fresh cut lawn

trust the woods stood to hold leaning axes

at ease on the roots of these trees

I hide behind cardboard ceilings

walls and feelings

searing idols collide

find

ask me why

they trust the words we throw

I feel the wood and leaves at my hands and feet

and they are real to me

got the best

and found he who lies

and cover in a soapbox mound

where the standing shout

we watched raccoons eat our piled-up three day old trash

through the rectangular kitchen window above the sink

angled light emptied through the screen

that we thanked God was there

unopened decks of Bicycle playing cards gripped

the dusted counter for fear of flowing

dislocating elbows away from our stomachs

baring four ivory wrists to the photon flood