I want to leave. You
are not what I want
to go. Listen, or wait,
whichever your ears will let of me.
Wallpaper has music.
My walls are empty. My eyes are
walls. Your eyes are
--well, you know how letters combine
to make all sorts of things? You will never expect
them. Sometimes the letters will make new
things. New things will be
spoken. New things will
exist. Like this. My walls are empty. My eyes are
walls. I want to leave
you as the ringing after a person shouts in an ear. Because of how long
ago, your voice.

My feet smell the deliciousness of long Thanksgiving. O! plain footsoles
wandering about carpet-jailed stairs like violin strings'
gravity encircling a soul. Hum a-long enough and you can conjure whole
oceans in my eyes, whole masses of water that don't exist
where we were born (hey, landlocked love). Outside in New England it
sometimes snows.
Today it rains.
Anyway, I am a magician. Look here. Can you see
our landlocked love from the shore it does not
have? Like the Pilgrims
finding Indians not from India,
I find me
not from me but from these smiles, our people, these feet,
sinking and stinking of some small peace and walking sockless
up and down a small warm home. And tomorrow,
Harvard again, and someone has snapped my wand
and killed the sparkling airs of incantations I had.
But wait! Isn't this proof of a person who was once
something not transplanted, but rooted earthily into a couch
as brown dancer? I'm waiting for movies
and the seizures of memory there as our minds' own lenses,
and that empty feeling here remembered as good enough reason
to greet us, draw further breaths, comb curls, chew and walk and talk
of the cold outside (waiting endlessly for the landlocked sun), and talk
of the bitter pinpricks of our still-life skin.

Bishop described lichens as "still explosions" and am I
to continue to try my mouth around her, or this, or you?
Call sometime.

When she left again I touched you between your legs because you
kept me. I wanted to make you feel good. It was a hot day
by shrub grass and wire fence and orange dirt. When
did her airplane leave again? We were
at the edge of the school. When she first left, you
and I had exams. We did well in them. When she flew
back in to visit, you and I were finding each other's mouths
again. My first time at her house
when the power went out--the power always goes out
at home-- I tried to find her with my arms. She did
not let me. You said yes. Some other day you were happy
about how smooth your legs were. I asked did it hurt.
Bodies were so new then. When we were born we first found
ourselves with hands before words. Hands inside legs now. You
kept me. I'm sorry. You waxed your legs
and you were happy. So you loved me. I loved you,
your mouth, your legs. I wished my face
could make you feel good. I hate my face. My hands
were a short time, and then new, and you were also new,
and afterwards, class. Why did you keep me. I think of you
as air, as sky. As earth. As ghost, as person.

Oh yes, but this song is for empathy. For the grasses'
leaves' greens being yellowed. For when winter  
says, "Hello": A song as this might add to its start with an opening
chord or two. Oh (yes), but this song is for me: Hello.
A greeting is an affirmation of one thinking thing
to another. I greet stones. Tie them to my feet when
I jump into my own blood. Drown for a bit. Wait
for a response. The stones don't say anything. Flowers
do sometimes, inspiring a heart to do a little lilt
within itself. So much to speak of about flowers: Thick yellow grasses
swirling around like the sounds swirling within a severed ear.
That's a good painting.
But that painting is yellow. Blood is red. Water is
blue, or the sky is
blue, or our minds make them
blue, so where should I jump? Upwards towards the birds
or downwards towards the fish? If human embryos look like fish
then wombs might be oceans, but amnion fluid is yellow: Like
sunflowers. Was Van Gogh a yellow man if he had a gun? And am I
blue because words
sometimes sing?

Southern hospitality. Biscuits. The delicious
slur of various r's
into meandering sense-making
when mouths open, blonde-wide and
future-fat heavy. I love this. Then
all of a sudden in some history the r
goes hard, ******.

Less the collapsed wound in the chest and
more of coffee, pen-flickering some things
achieved in a college library. A hope
of a future as endless learner. Online laments
that universities are now nothing more
than degree mills: notice the rising tide of shadows
in students' minds as they seem to notice this
sort of doom as noose as tie at middle-age. But for now,
before that moment returns where sleep is preferred
so much so to waking, where anything is preferred
to waking (but the thought of that final jump
off the corporate tower
is yet to find you)-- some slight work here
in this library like a normal person
with normal fears. An uncollapsed chest
like a star within its lifetime, swallowing nothing and
twirling planets all around itself, long long
before it swallows itself
and its own light.