We’re off to New Haven - hurry, hurry -
we’re jammin, crammin, slappin'
and slammin' everything into our bags.

“Fifteen minutes to take-off,”
Michael announced, “the chopper's waiting.”
with hugs all around we separated.

Our roommates too, are all catching flights
vectoring in from various sites -
our motley group will reassemble tonight.

Pew rated Yale one of the hardest universities
to get into in '23 - so is it really a certainty
that our cardkeys will let us into our residency?

Fall grades came out yesterday - Lisa and I are all grins
- we’ll have thirteen days to visit and settle in
and reorganize things before Spring semester begins.

I hope that your vacations were as fun as ours
but the New Year’s begun and in a matter of hours
we’ll resume the school grind, our holidays devoured.

fireworks
******* fireworks
happy new year then
i suppose

sun    dial back the hour
cared over by petrified habit
couple clusped    our gelid tumour
dare drained from our relation
                                   sapless

scavenger bride,
she counted periods
before the children came along,
but never suspected
eyes like bottles
beginning to blue,
a tangle of scars
hermetically sealed,
the new order of
a broken romance,
dead love cassettes
in the glove compartment,

her cold and empty
constellations,
like cold breath
passing through a beam of sunlight,
grid of points, pendulums,
the ratio of freckles to stars,
no subtle countenance,
martinis and bikinis,
soft ******* and ice cream,
slight, elusive things, on a beach
with no more meaning,

the repeating pattern of
her mistakes and reliefs,
a preservation of decay,
sustained by the tiny
human fault line
in that oneiric hinterland,
between dreaming and waking,

she draws around the noise
and the clearings,
she creates within that sightline
the way her sadness can feel
comfortable,
an extension of loss that turns
her ruins into a home.

Golden skies and grass greens,
ribbons and threads and legacies,
heavens and harlots, power and age.
It's all flames in the end, isn't it?
All words, all swords, fall so, perfectly.

And like a cancer, you can eat the cigarettes' so sweetly,
all the champagne flowing so freely,
And when we wait for our Paris.

Life makes you intoa a creatures below, surprisingly like mosquito in summer
eating in the garden of fire, to live happily.

It's all smokes and shadows tomorrow,
and it falls like a cold shaped drink, like a dollar
swinging, settling, hoping to be taller, but falling
in our hangover and faded like-memories
in the black morning, of anxiety and sorrow.

Just eating in the garden of fire,
dragons, vampires, pirates and scabies.
All from a broken shaped bottle with ***** like choices,
liars of empires, sweats of angels and children,
it all flames in the end, in the garden of fire, isn't it?

But when the wind turns north,
will you turn and know, when the rich
and the wicked find no more?

If we slowly find the money isn't the answer to all things,
and the battles, bills, and blessings don't become our idols
maybe eternity, will overflow, we can lie down in grass so green,
and like mountains, like kings, we will find happiness so free.

Surely in meadows and forests, witches and wickedness,
anger and bitterness, will be song so forgotten once we are so free.

We will eat the richest cheese, running into homes of orphans,
we can cause them to be such kings, alive and well and so happy.

Before the end truly comes, in time and reason, a new healing,
king and throne, with eyes so weary, knees and backs so heavy,
we will remember, like a song so catchy, a life set free.

~
gone to earth

left for dead

everything is tickety-boo

forget your iron-on measures

and scuttled installation

your life is a bakery

that cake is like your head

bittersweet

and full of regret

what am I reading these days?

a book across the stars

where dreams in the throes

of giddy aerosol cans

**** the passersby

and sleep against

the exit sign
~

Intimate tables. White linen coverings. The room, a checkerboard against the mahogany floor. Cozy nooks for two sit poised for the evening crowd, set against the wainscoting of one wall, a length of crystalline windows above.

A place setting removed, she sits alone, the amber light of her wine an imposter for the last shards of daylight that poke from behind a ridge.

She swirls her wine clockwise. Something to do with progress, he said. Or she read that somewhere. She can't remember which.

She finishes and turns the stem of her glass slowly hoping to leave an impression in the cloth, when a voice says, "May I join you?"

always feels like
the end

-em vidar