I think I'd like to write something once
that isn't bent and weighed down
with sand.
See where it sits and pours,
over and upward and outward
away from me.
A career of sand.
The grains sit and fill-in
spaces between the keys,
eating up the page
and the words, and the years,
and the tips of callous fingers:
all of it sand.


Textures sift between hands,
a warm roughness beneath
un-blanketed backs.
Turn it over in the picture frame.
A memory that won’t part from
the foreground,
won’t erase itself from the
desert it mires in.

The shower-head of time
refusing to scour the hands,
backs, fingertips, a keyboard
against an empty page.
All of it sand–
lone and level,
far as the eye can see.