This strange egg you've incubated
has sprouted skinny chicken legs.

It follows you around clucking at
every throaty word you nasty-utter.

Pointing and pecking at your guilt
borne by some years ago sin which
all others hatch from and you keep feeding,
Remorseful grains of misdeed shell grit
to harden its anxious green shell.

With no law outside itself the taint faint
heartbeat of your reproof I hear beating
like fear's unglued false eyelashes

You soft swaddle it with empty gestures.
It gestates in every grimace of piety.

I watch it govern your vocation of drab
and undramatic mastery of feathered illusion.

I want to tear shreds in your black satin cape,
To avalanche your fears into frosty exile.
Burn them screaming in the blinding white of
anemic unconscious,
the blacking out.

Hang a trophy **** of your winged demon
taxidermied with glass eyes above my bed.

My compass needle has lost your polarity
there's just a crude representation of pain

I will plant this seed you gave me, in Lethe;
The River of Forgetfulness on its grey shore.

A watery landscape without vanishing point.
Where a white heron will weep tears of sorrow,
like a human to feed hope's tender shoots.

Small berms of snowice and cigarette
butts line beneath the awning sidewalks
of Yulitsa Pushkinska, impenetrable.

We have yet to decide
how to slice ourselves open, how to
conspire for casualties. Desire
lingers like four days’ melt mid-winter.

Who really feels day to day that
nothing will change? This faith
in schedules, taxes, credits, furtive
moments with a familiar lover, this
lack of spasms and undramatic intent
can suffice for half a lifetime, but you’ve
become an unreliable narrator in your own
novel, prone to
wild speculation and impulsive looks
at other women.

Once I spent a winter
with a poem; everyday
in the woods at work
I would say it, never
writing a word until
I had it down in my mind;
it became what I called
a floater, a work song,
a chant, until it sounded
just right and undramatic,
and then I wrote it down
in the dirt with my boots
without changing a word
leaving it there for the birds
and the worms and the roots.

Today, I watched my tea come to a boil, and likened the first bubble on its surface to the sighting of an evening star at sunset.

I missed the fire of a gas stove in the undramatic simmer of my tea, as I patiently waited for the induction to heat the milk pan.

The sky looks like the backdrop of an old studio here on many days, I thought, and photographed the unnatural blue to lemon gradient. Maybe I'll use it as my background on the next zoom call.

As the world shares a somber summer vacation together, I don't know how to feel anymore.

It was a poor film about old Mumbai that brought me to tears, because I've forgotten how to discern good content from bad.

The dark circles are fading, and I catch myself, too often, thinking about my nine year old self, intently cutting magazines into meaningful compositions.

I always made do with staying inside.

It feels wrong to be at peace, but the indoors are doing to my skin what socks do to my feet.

I'm worried about not having enough sanitary pads, and also about entering the job market during a recession. I don't feel useful either.

I am however, counting my blessings and my breaths these days. It's like we're all living in a dream that doesn't make sense in the morning, or in a meme that isn't funny anymore, or in a game that has run so long that we've lost track of who's winning anyway.

I'm grateful we don't have to have an opinion these days, at least for a while.

I'm grateful for this cup of tea, and toasted bread and butter, mostly because it's suddenly okay to simply watch the tea boil, and think untethered thoughts about the toasted bread and butter.

“gas your trash paintings of jesus’ head
and exchange your cross for some cash.
It’s a known fact that god is dead; we fought,
he and i -  bashed, he passed,
simply automatic, undramatic as that.
I yelled to the sky, “the guy is gone, at last!”
I danced on his grave and bade his descent,
and the next holy role call, he was marked absent.”
-Hehehehe in Hell

“just shut it, satan,
you are the worst.
i’m writing a poem,
go eat some dirt.”
-Wisdom William