On the wicked turn, that sour slant angle
Of my face that slipped
Beyond the veil of hair: everything I am.

I fumble, my hands contort, the hinges
Of my fingers know no tandem
They work only to dissolve
The slip into conversation. But
Your gaze moved - just enough.

And all the buzzing hum, you heard too well
And however firm I steer the sea
I cannot stop the sinking
You rush within from the little crack
Perhaps without wanting to, perhaps
Even with pity, and then I am full

Bursting, heavy with intrusion
And all day long, my heart drums itself
And I can sense the strong Incoming,
Slinking through to inspect
What my stubby hands could not correct

Then the night, then the dawn,
And then day day day.
Then something lets loose and
The plank unravels from plank and
Then there is nothing to fear

However stark the spotlight of shame
How sweet it is to have sinned
How sweet to flirt with flaw
And to push it little, little. To push it
Vain and bare, past the edge, down
Through nothing and then

Firework: shards are glittery with grief
The wine stretches its limbs to the world
And the ground drinks it up.

the best time to realize
when
what
causes one to experience
the meaning of to be
deathly afraid
is
exactly
when
you are not


joy purifying
enfolds you, envelops, indeed,
you
are subsumed, a sense of being
secondary
to the unusual flooding of the
dry riverbed in your head that’s
been dry since you can’t remember

when

when you understand
that one cannot truly
write only love poetry
to precise excess
unless
admittedly you love
to excess,
otherwise
you are incapable of making
good
love poems

when

you are not
within that
rare off the beaten yes trackless meniscus curve,
in
country
of first love
  of
only
true love

Short Term Memory Loser
<>
the joke on you,
with foolish hobgoblins hobbled,
them youse~peeps whom to themselves
think “oh, I’ll never forget this precise
precious momentary
fragment”

haha ha on you!

more fragging(1) of our minds
into piecemeal shards

claiming, boasting, that it will
live forever
within this rented
storage unit, leased
& renewed analy,
upkeep-no-needed

haha ha on me,

the ironic ticking pricking of
my brain, when least expected,
in my kitchen sinking awaning,
days, the poem potions potentials,
fly to mind with the fast and furious,
with missile accuracy entering, gleaming,
but explode before I can script the scribble,
and the notional dissipates into ****** ashy,
left with a title, no body, a perma-headless ***
mulish poet hapless, sap~less, sticky stuck
with no idea what my intended writ
was to be it, and I consign that.title
to death by draft, never to be
credited created or crafted,

cause that’s how bad my
short term memory has
devolved

or more dimply put,
slam, bam, thank you man,
the whole blows up faster
than one can utter our
American anthem,

*** IS WRONG
with the Dallas Cowgirls?

i love that word, puttering, my adjective
of early morning rambling, world examining,
in the early AM, treading barefooted
from room to room, a list prestablished,
+ tidy up the prior evening’s laziness,
unload with complete silence the
prior nights dishwasher, homework,
prep the couch back to pre~beat~up presentability,

make the first 16.5 .oz of Blue Mountain
Hawaiian coffee, in my art history
McIntosh mug(1),
prepare the first of the day’s bitesized
edibles,
a:k:a, Kashi crunchies, so the coffee all
falls down  to a well~recv’d internal welcoming

the timing is off, the clock has changed,
it is early but not really, I’m constantly
recalculating ‘real time’ until confused,
substituting the internal locked-in clocking that ultimate divination of right and wrong,
the betting app informs us of the
under/over hours really slept line
set by Las Vegas oddsmakers

but as usual, the digression omens come
fast and furious, up in the sky apartment
is an oasis of cloud quietude,
(where the latitude and longitude
inter-sec, where the cleansed sun softly)

ah quietude, an envelopment noun
favored over the pedestrian quiet,
my ears,
fulfilled by music via noiseless earbuds,
fills the soul, it is the milk in the
morning coffee brew of the
crossover silence, tween the skyed division

check on the woman, deep asleep,
(pronouns: she/her/mine)
her arm thrown across my empty pillow, as if holding my place in line,
like besties in second grade, a warning to other potent interlopers,
so
withdraw silent to finish the routine that
is so comforting, the polit~noise chatter has
not yet invaded, all of its associated
malice’s tumult, kept away at bay
with forethought,
and instead, thus, I, write,

in this quilt of solitude, not alone,
write of this companioned morn~born~rituals that
will be one day,
be renamed,
as a

mourning ritual,

when
when life ruefully states in its
arrogant ~ don’t ~ care, no ways,
now that,

When,
one of us, be
sleeping permanent, and the
silence be reformatted, recalculated,
the coffee will taste different, and
the footfalls no longer unsqueaking,
no need, cause the solitude is just
renamed as loneliness, and though
the tears emanate from same tear ducts,
the causal reasoning is reversed,
no longer
celebratory, and with no one to show it off,
to share,
no punch in the arm gasp
of loving recognition,

I perforce new habit,
will read this puttering,
now stuttering poem

someday as a new summary,
a substitutable morn chore,
absent
a chorus of a
singly
singular
beautiful quiet but only
memorized,
silenced applause