My eyes are clear
Opening my lash-eyelet curtain
A near-perceptible glacier-clean,
--thud-crack of thick ice
Forming two, perfect, transparent, oval shards
Convex bevel edges
Satisfying symmetry.

My brain is quiet
Waiting for the roaring, train engine, kettle-boiling,
punctuated by slight, syncopated,
tap-taps that,
-- so kindly, remind me, my mind be, relying
-- on pulsing blood
Still roarless
Still, roarless
Spline-smoothed
Blood journeys gently, cloud-style
Not muddling, befuddling, nimbostratus
Just happy little cumulus
Soft. Nice.

My shoulders are low
Cage only soundtrack here
Absence of intended sounds
Only the astral smooth void
Flawless, measured, even space
My ears can kiss my shoulders if I feel like it
--but I don’t feel like it
Comfortable.

My breath is even
Jaws are open pliers
Thoughts are photos in ice and midnight blue
-- no rue umber or regret beige
Muscles are liquid-warm wax
Palms are oasis-free deserts
Pupils are obsidian-shined globes
Skin made of moonlight
Heart matching the beat of the universe

I have returned
Back inside myself
I am here.

--iii of cups, reversed--


before i fall asleep
i watch you dance on the ceiling

neon blue and purple skies
silhouetting bodies
growing blurry and distorted by bass and
***** waters flowing out
waterfalls through straws flowing out
through me

crashing into the mattress uneven and seeping
a beat i reluctantly match

raising toasts to nothing
to last nights
and all the nights you’ll spend on airplanes and car rides
to states i’ll never travel

i go to sleep
and i watch you dance on the ceiling

***** waterfalls spilling endlessly from upturned glasses
seeping through my blanket


--the tower--


it’s a sigh when lightning strikes
and neon lights go out

it's easy
to light all my candles
and flicker east toward the window
curled and waved and cresting and silent
a thousand miles away from you

i never met my grandfather till today--

he dies in 1975
and today he was born
at the bottom of a drawer in the kitchen,
his coffin and crib:
he is swaddled in moth-eaten dishtowels
by a nameless undertaker
or perhaps the autophagic author himself

his crib and coffin:
he was buried a lifetime,
deaf to my own cacophonous et cetera

amidst cardboard boxes
he arises, stretches
and sits on our couch, transparent and whispering
his earliest recollections in ink from distant trenches:
he eats sliced-up milky way bars,
listens to little orphan annie and the manhattan rainstorms
as they flood his empty pillowcase;

my earliest recollection is a blank notebook,
never happened,
didn’t fall from the sky till three-quarters of a century later
in drops of impossible invisible ink

in 1934 i smell decades-old storms
and tobacco smoked by children;
today he tastes dough
from hands of women he could have loved

we break toys, apologize to our ghosts
listen to drops on macadam phantoms.

we think tonight was cloudy.

we left identical sleigh tracks in identical snow
laughed identical laughs whose echoes and imprints
are separated only by city and by many, many newspapers.

we remembered the same sun,
the same rain and lightning

and we both wrote that we may be heard
over the century’s thunder
but stopped, hid, tired, retired—

shaking hands
halfway to tomorrow,
never touching—

two strange strangers
left sleepless and motionless in the same notebooks,
the same house:
in the same cradles and the same coffins.

What was your crime?
Was it heinous,
Or trifling?
What was so bad that could leave you like this?
Was it hard at the time?
To sustain us,
While stifling
-- all of the feelings that couldn’t exist?

Was it too vast a weight
To be wielded
Unaided?
Or was it too great for an army to bear?
Too small to relate
Or too shielded
Spoil-shaded?
To understand all that was happening there

But I’m no longer small
Or at least
I am older
I’m ready to know what was tethering you
Or chasing you down
Like a beast
Or a soldier
With a thin sheen of orange, when green wouldn’t do

It’s okay to tell me
Exhibit
Or model
Emotions, by spoonful as heavy as lead
To let it all out
To live it
No bottle
For weeping, and raging, and mourning the dead

Still neither we know
How to feel
These things safely
The throat-ripping scream that may never quiet down
The full force of hate
That’s so real
To me lately
The terrible fury no bottle can drown

The shocking events
That founded
Those feelings
The violence and panic-lashed vigilance born
Their timbre makes sense
Compounded
Their meanings
No piece their experience doesn’t transform

But why such deep shame?
Some misdeed
Or error?
Your fault that’s a focus for manifest wrongs
The heightening frame
Of this need
Is as ever
Pointed internal where mercy belongs

It’s okay, I know
Self-kindness
Is fleeting
More tricksy than empty-glass, bottle-stirred glee
Emotions may flow
In rightness
Repeating
       The heinous, the trifling, transfigured care-weightless
       The self-sighted shame now silk-slightful and shameless  
The criminal pardoned and duly set free