Your steel chair is a wheelbarrow
now.
Left out in the yard; lonely like a spotlight.
Winter for hours like water.
Frozen water.
Pipes that burst.
Breath hangs, in front of the face; making steam of a paint swatch.
***** grey/loose white/loose light: carpet samples,
you write your name on the floor.
Feel my whiteness; tremors that shook
soil from roots
and steps from staircases.
Your steel chair is a wheelbarrow,
now you wonder if you can still sit,
wonder what it means to sit;
to let gravity in.
Winter is hours. So many hours
spent ducking in from room
to room. And so many more waiting
for the next room.  

Your wheelbarrow  is a wagon,
if you want it.

There are ghosts everywhere,
I am sure of it,
because they left hand prints
in all my open paint cans
in all my empty rooms  
in all my homes.
I have taken measurements.  
I have photographed everything.
There is no thing I have o'erlooked.

There are ghosts in everything
like in the way sounds in the world
swell, all at once.
Water in a fisherman's net.
Swollen ocean.  Swollen salt deposit.
Pressing out,
against all the other fish pressing out,
all the sounds in the world
until they sound like the wind.

There are ghosts
in the way
we pass out along the roads
whenever death decides to roll on by.

ready the Moon
us, and us first
The Athenians; the watchers
of rock faces
Ancient keepers, we are
horders of tides.
Us, and us
Standing before her, ageless;
pain in the blades; neck-ache
Knowing
that she was angry,
that she had suffered
she benefits, in words,
an evening to say,
“Boy, buy a torch, for the moonlight.”

And she says
you, you do not observe the days,
but confuse them up and down;
that she says they
defrauded, dinner and home,
met with the days you are
inflicting.  

And, while gods fast,
mourn for Memnon or Sarpedon.
Hyperbolus, the lot to be deprived,
make no room for the casket.  
There has never been  a death,
for he
will better spend his days of his life to the Moon.

You can be cloak
or you can be dagger.
You cannot be both;
the actor and the action. The hand, holding the hand? One foot washes the other?
The hand washing the water.
This is what we're headed for.

You want the careful parts
careless. And you want parents to be
their only child. And raise them.
You want madness because you can't
think of an answer, but it's fine because
you have all the time in the world.
Where are you hiding it all?

You say time is a clock
because you're a **** for metaphors
But a clock is just a counter.
Go count the cars that go by outside
and then tell me how many are yours.
Go count the pretty girls in the back of magazines.
Then tell  me what's it's like to not be alone.

There are no rules on this stuff
written inside of stones, like geodes
and hieroglyphs in unsealed tombs.
These are not traditions, handed down so gently
like hairlines,  These are not heirlooms wrapped in fine wax and tissue.
You will not find this in direct-order mailers. There is no slot in the card catalog,
There are no old wives, no urban legends or gossip.
It's not a secret.  It's not a even a thought. It's simple.

You can be the instinct
or you go de-evolve.  
Back to the single cell
back into the primordial, lay around the house
spend all day playing with yourself
Stimulus! Response!
That old hole in the bucket song;
Did you look inside? Did you see change,
or feel it ***?
The world doesn't stay a world because you think
it might collapse.  And life isn't worth living because it's
hard.    

You can be fight
or you can be flight
or you can be
a rabbit hole in the hat.

This need I have
for unidirectional movement
will **** me.
For all the windows to fall shut against the wind in one long line like prttttpptttt.
Cards being shuffled.
Dominos clack’d together on a gray kitchen floor .
This need I have
for hidden meaning of the most obvious kind
will **** my street cred.
A painting of a puzzle piece, a puzzle of a peace sign.  Getting cute
with your words can get you killed out here.  
I am buried under
all the pressure of having blood.  
Of being an body owner. Like here, this is yours now ;
Make a home for the body.
Being born is like having a child
beside yourself, another one inside.
Pushing out, in.
But I need the pressure, baby.  Turn me back into
the shape of a man.
This need I have for object permanence,
is killing the suspense.  What if the ball
doesn’t exist behind the couch?
What if I didn’t have this need for
storytelling voice, telling the story I’m only living.
Because the story needs a teller
like a hat needs a feather.
Like a cat needs another reason to eat..  
This need I have for control
is inoperable cancer.
Gravity in the bones, nothing left for me in the stars,
the unbearable weight of barely anything at all.

Damage done
by the size of her voice;
Hairline fractur'd,
receding bone, drawn away by the weight;
The human dumbwaiter,
a body held together with tension rods;
Veins,
flooded tunnels with blood;
The human dumbwaiter,
built into its own foundation;
That's a load bearing vision,
man
wasn't meant to walk first.

When I am all broken shattered
lying on the couch breathing in
fumes,
she is an engine burning out inside me.
I looked in her mouth and it was like killing yourself
in the garage with a hose.

“I don't have lunches, dinners, go to plays or movies. I don't meditate, escalate, deviate or have affairs. So I have plenty of time.”*
- Robert A. Gottlieb

First, there's a
question, spoken
in a vacuum. No
one else can understand you.

Then there is an
answer to everything
under the sun. No
one else left standing after.

Then there is a
struggle, all the dying
ones pack'd in. Suffocation
be thy country's name.

It's all step up,
step up. One after the
other.  Heel in toe. One
after the other.