Grim weather workday
Co-workers tower and storm
Frustration wind gusts
Colleague’s deep weeping deluge
Workwear, my only shelter

Hi-tech coveralls
Cold tin pressed over concrete
Full-body shielding
Spikes guarding critical zones
Early threat sensor system

-------

--Tricky meeting one---
Sensors detect unstable air
Towering cumulus,
   imposing updraft,
     condensing vapour,
       supercooled drops,
       colliding particles,
       electric charge,
       energy below 100 Hertz,
       below 20 - infrasonic range,
       cloudburst impacts,
       downdraft wedge,
       gusts at 90 km/h,
     winds slowing,
   anvil passing,
dissipating feeder air

-Coffee break-
Systems check
Minor damage
Vibrations neutralised
Commence shield repair

-Tricky meeting two-
Scans register earlier storm damage
Key infrastructure stressed,
  dam failure,
    imminent water surge,
       significant hydrologic activity,
       evacuate downstream,
       clay soil,
       infiltration below 2 mm/h,
       gage data above action stage,
       avoid low spots, streams, and rivers,
     sandbags in place,
     wall seals holding,
    precipitation easing,
  infiltration nominal,
subsiding flood water

-Coffee break-
Systems overload
Unable to assess damage
Full reboot required
Commence systems reset

-------

Home brings fine sunshine
Joy-filled fluffy puppy front
Gentle joy breezes
Clear skies, household index high
Soft clothes, it’s cuddle weather

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.