"missingness" poems
A furious 'thud-thud, thud-thud' hammers my bones
as I whip shirt sleeves and scarves across my room
and into the small latch-lock box.
The one with the brown leather handle that smells
like things-so-old-they've-turned-to-air.
Long ago I lost the key but the shape of its missingness
is the most familiar thing left in this place.
Latch-key box latch-key house latch-key life.
My footsteps ricochet off the walls to the toc-toc of the witching hour.
I hail a cab and lament the bouncy back seat and pop tunes of the humming driver,
pay with an app so I don’t have to say goodbye.
Not to cab, not to town, not to room.
The high-pitched wails of the most popular human carting system
grates my melancholy between the tracks.
Claustrophobic, crammed into more boxes
I.
Hate!
Boxes.
I…
Can’t remember how I got here from there.
I sit at the airport waiting for a canceled seat so I can get the next flight to:
Anywhere, Extra Cheap.
I look at a clock and I shouldn’t have.
Footsteps haunting, tracks grating, bumping, wailing, mouth humming slow to a blur.
The family next to me carefully removing themselves from the smell of my suitcase.
“Latch-key box latch-key house latch-key life,” I tell them.
Dec 2, 2017
Dec 2, 2017 at 4:39 PM UTC
i won't pretend i'm fluent in remembering
but maybe if you put me through some
stretch of missingness
i'd forget why i'm alone.
i could fight to end up in your head again
but it wouldn't last for long, unless
you started to want what i got.
but if we're gonna do this, you better
stop breathing like that
i want to bury my heart at the sound of you
tell it to sink a ways away
so i don't have to ask you in its morse code moan
do you lo...... never mind, it wouldn't have rhymed anyway.
i have a friend who said don't hate yourself
if they want someone else
but we don't ever listen to ourselves, so
maybe that's why i ****** in a withheld farewell.
i don't know where you've been
or who you've been
or who you've been with
but if you asked me to i'd be there soon
i could be fluent in misremembering, but
excuse me for asking, voice trembling, noise severing
but i'd ask you to please pick up the phone
if it meant anything close to bettering
the crooked tangled ways the wrong roots went in deep grown.
Mar 13, 2017
Mar 13, 2017 at 1:57 AM UTC
Fraught to conceal a grim incomprehension; the chaos in my soul
Transpsrancy through shadows lead the way back home
Who am I if not for you?
Displacing this floating intensity
A missingness of my former orbit takes hold of me
Only you can console this immense deformity, in me
Forcibly, my flame
Faintly say my name
I am content
Aug 11, 2017
Aug 11, 2017 at 5:07 PM UTC