The sky’s a shade of lost gray and maybe lurid blue someday
Something sweet, so tell me what I want to hear
Leaving me to question whether I should stay or swim away
Or live life in this gleeful gray
The times I actually don’t stare lowly at my feet or gaze into the cracks
I look upwards, albeit sidelong at faces of this sea that houses me
And I’ll come by different shades, some warm, some cool
And find different ways of leaving and watching those who have left be dead
It's not quite appropriate to be living that way, in a sea that isn’t quite gray
The worst and greatest blessing is to never know
Something sweet, so tell me what I want to hear
Or leave me wondering if I should stay or swim away
Or live life in this gleeful gray

I am the wood shop air compressor’s pediatrician
I sit and wait in the pure darkness for it to stop
Grudgingly accepting this strange meditation

And in the street there is music on someone’s deck
Audible over the corner's relentless groan
And I can just barely make out voices

I’m a mountain climber in a hammock I made
hanging in a crevasse
And every time the sun is at that sweetspot
3:00
Just above the crack
it's a bit warmer so
I open up my bag and grab my pen and paper
And by the time I’m halfway through,
it’s gone and already afternoon.

The moon reveals herself effortlessly like a switchblade
And I’m at the bottom of this rose-coloured fishbowl city
That reeks of stale roses
I dodge the shadows and the light at the same time
And walk among them in the alley, my feet a compromise
I resist the temptation to be lured and then interrogated
By overhead bulbs
And out of the shadows, out of the Marianas Trench a cat calls
Ironically speaking an actual cat calls to me,
Desperate but cautious and controlled all the same
Hesitant like an oldish child asking for gifts from their “Santa”
The callous guttural sound draws me like a mockingbird draws birds of every kind
She’s stuck (but not lodged) in someone’s yard behind a chain link fence
Elevated on a wooden palette, a splinter sewing machine
So all I can do is kind of pat her head and stroke it with some fingers
And try to “pet” the lady
A woman with black and white spots and no tail, I’ve seen her before
She strides in under the magenta lamplight and enters the yard
I don’t
It’s the yard of some poor soul who thinks it belongs to them
They might yell at me if they see me
The frail one, she’s quiet now
But she won’t purr, we both know that
I, uh, say, “Look, your friend’s here,” or something, and point to the woman
And I turn around
She’s still quiet and peaceful as I leave the alley
I shut her up for the owner.

I'll trade this night's sleep for daydreams
And lay with all the lights on to keep me safe, terrified of
daydreaming. The earth intercepts contact with the sun. I'm dead like the apollo astronauts were dead when they slept
when they were behind the moon and lost radio contact
and if they didn't sleep they probably daydreamed
I'll daydream with the moon, she's much nicer to me
More lenient and a listener, not a talker
With a pillow over my head
daydream about terrifying things
like people's eyes
like the way I shuffle and move in real life
in the giant elongated body
with the hair and glasses that don't belong to me
I can do certain things deadpan
But I will stand in a party and tremble
then I go to the bathroom and
daydream of me sleeping forever

the intensity of the past month has been so fragile like the surface of something that I can't cross like plastic wrap like a bowling ball on a trampoline the niceness is unsatisfactory clouds passing by the air is cool and warm at the same time everything is happening to me is this what happiness is?

Let the kudzu blossom over everything in grandma's yard when she's in the hospital
Engorged on her dead husband's car
Fruits scattering seeds and dandelions and spores
There is a certain doom for the idol in the path of this mess
Plaster eyes gazing solemnly through the nettles
It's the same doom that
A bee lost in a room feels
Like me trapped in this stairwell
Quietly observing the stars