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sgail Jun 2022
lately, time's an unremembered ghost
floating thin and haunting me with empty sound
and if I need to yell
to send it back
I'll open my mouth and I'll bring it down

what's been asleep's dissolved into the air
I'm back and the trees are a little fuller,
faces more beaten
time is winning
but if I need to blow it up to clean it,
I will

when I see you, sour light around you
I wonder if it's because you never left
and your eyes do not change
they never did
but I feel you crumbling hiding in the black

I want to wash you up
get you better
get you better
pull the little roots up
get you, better

lately, time's an unfriendly ghost
floating thin and haunting me
with empty sound
and if I need to yell, to send it back
I will open my mouth just to bring it down.
going back home after a year
I wrote this as a song
sgail May 2019
it was a nothing
an afterthought that
got misplaced under that envelope
from that thing

and I was
---going to say---

(the chicken’s burning)
(you’re fixing it)  

that I was thinking of
--not being, what that’d be like--
for a little bit, you know,

figure things out?
sgail May 2019
A word enters my vein,
cornflower-blue and cozied up
to tendons.

A detached one is enough.
Slipped through and careless
it careens and dopamines
a single small heavyweight
that burns low then evaporates
among bronchioles.  

Where you came from, you burn also
and turn over in your sleep as if you know
a word was created and travelled,
and the split-long beam
travels ahead in lurid exposure.

I am waiting for another,
a child
beside all the addicts in the world, in
fiendish camaraderie.
sgail May 2019
Sparkling honey-colored liquid  
waits, a bored date,
a veil of ten thousand beads.

Why not just
stop?
Why not just?
You are not a prisoner.
Can walk away, heels turning up and over stones
without a ****.
Why not?
Why?

You----
variant of swilling ancestry
dug up and replanted 1685 miles
to miss a death, a birth, a marriage or two
still can be seated down
and the similarity is striking
when we hold the glass.

You---
wishing to escape an invisible trap
you maybe knew at one point existed
but drank it in and conquered it
so you thought
why not?
sgail May 2019
weaving
in and out of short pines
a fly travels to the top of a mountain

while I stand in my underwear
and the incandescent

staring into a mirror, into a mirror
and on
as we all have.
sgail May 2019
swelling and leeching
on this street, was once
where I saw them fighting
and where we drank
and sat while others arrested.

To not be here would surely mean
that he’s giving up
in wondering what a city does for us,
flocking to the next big thing to grow
it out of proportion.
sgail May 2019
I am unobserved
allowed to breathe in and out
in solitude as
the babies are centered,
polished dollops of putty
to be observed as if
the greatest mystery of the world
has been solved.

— The End —