It’s a bright night out tonight
a bright light like the light of a dead sun
bright enough to read by, to write by
star-studded? five hundred years ago it was;
and now,
while the night breathes in moist magenta
entrapping apartments beneath a wall of
light
is it day or is it night?

it’s red or it’s blue and it comes
still shafts of color, placid and turbulent like the plague
like locusts through the windows, open
like a woman walking in slowmotion
as the night advances in decomposition
and recomposes itself when the clouds lighten slightly
and morning comes wan, not bright
is it day or is it night?

when I was too young to know the moon’s movements
and naive enough to think that the
moon could shine as bright as the sun
I was confused, on a full moon
if it were night or day
and slept in my parents’ bed in uncomfortable doubt
if it were day or night

and now I am in my own bed
and the moon is nowhere to be seen
it’s a wet night in the city
a greenhouse, a science experiment
of its own light, under the magenta clouds, illuminated bright
I know it’s night
but it feels
not that way
feels like neither
night nor day.

never compare people to golden retrievers
never compare people to golden retrievers
never compare people to golden retrievers
never compare people to golden retrievers
never compare people to golden retrievers
never compare people to golden retrievers
never compare people to golden retrievers
never compare people to golden retrievers
never compare people to golden retrievers
never compare people to golden retrievers
never compare people to golden retrievers
never compare people to golden retrievers
never compare people to golden retrievers
never compare people to golden retrievers
never compare people to golden retrievers
never compare people to golden retrievers
never compare people to golden retrievers
never compare people to golden retrievers
never compare people to golden retrievers
never compare people to golden retrievers
never compare people to golden retrievers
never compare people to golden retrievers
never compare people to golden retrievers
never compare people to golden retrievers
never compare people to golden retrievers
never compare people to golden retrievers
never compare people to golden retrievers
never compare people to golden retrievers
never compare people to golden retrievers
never compare people to golden retrievers
never compare people to golden retrievers
never compare people to golden retrievers
never compare people to golden retrievers
never compare people to golden retrievers
never compare people to golden retrievers
never compare people to golden retrievers
never compare people to golden retrievers
never compare people to golden retrievers
never compare people to golden retrievers
never compare people to golden retrievers
never compare people to golden retrievers
never compare people to golden retrievers
never compare people to golden retrievers
never compare people to golden retrievers
never compare people to golden retrievers
never compare people to golden retrievers
never compare people to golden retrievers
never compare people to golden retrievers
never compare people to golden retrievers
never compare people to golden retrievers
never compare people to golden retrievers
never compare people to golden retrievers
never compare people to golden retrievers
never compare people to golden retrievers
never compare people to golden retrievers
never compare people to golden retrievers
never compare people to golden retrievers
never compare people to golden retrievers
never compare people to golden retrievers
never compare people to golden retrievers
never compare people to golden retrievers
never compare people to golden retrievers
never compare people to golden retrievers
never compare people to golden retrievers
never compare people to golden retrievers
never compare people to golden retrievers
never compare people to golden retrievers
never compare people to golden retrievers
never compare people to golden retrievers
never compare people to golden retrievers
never compare people to golden retrievers
never compare people to golden retrievers
never compare people to golden retrievers
never compare people to golden retrievers
never compare people to golden retrievers
never compare people to golden retrievers
never compare people to golden retrievers
never compare people to golden retrievers
never compare people to golden retrievers
never compare people to golden retrievers

enriched macaroni product
(wheat flour, glyceryl, mono
stearate, niacin, ferrous sulfate
(iron),
thiamin mononitrate (vitamin b1)
riboflavin vitamin b2 folic acid)
cheese sauce mix (whey, malto
dextrin, corn syrup solids salt palm
oil modified food starch milk
fat milk protein concentrate con
tains less than 2% of tomatoes
milk mediumchaintriglycerides sodium
tripolyphosphatecream citricacidsodiumphosphatelacticacid naturalflavour* onions* tricalciumphosphatepartiallyhydrog
enatedsoybeanandcottonseedoil guargum monosodiumglutamate garlic**yellow5yellow6spicemalicacid enzymes disodiumguanylatedisodiuminosinate artificialflavour cheeseculturemodifiedfoodstarchmaltodextrinpotassiumchlorideacety­latedmonoglyceridessaltmediumchaintriglyceridesapocarotenal(colou­r)contains;
wheat
milk

stiff is the flesh of rubbery, unripe watermelon,
strange and flexible as frozen laundry.
I dispose of it in the apartment garbage.

unnerving is the sleeping, sleepless city
eerie as an adult edition of I-Spy and equally unsweet
suspended indefinitely, creeping subtly in between
Christmas and New Year's Eve.

Sixteen songs have passed
And sixteen separate landscapes to wipe your hands with
And as I dream at night do I consider it
That a part of this doing is my half

Sixteen songs later
Sixteen quiet throats, yet I keep my mouth shut
And I shamelessly enjoy the gifts you give me
When we go to bed before I dream

Our love is in latin, it won’t last

Sixteen exhilarating chases, games, ever-expanding radii
Like irises on a road map, we flower through the countryside
We are an aneurism, we yell at walls, and we laugh
Sixteen family tree autographs

Sixteen sad songs, suicides, sixteen songs you keep on tape
Their last words bent into screams like pictures on TV
My dreams have become my trial
Seventeen’s my last

I swear I can hear the clear sound of record static
Like snow falling loudly and quietly upon the mic puff
I can also hear the lights and electricity ringing
Like a group of lost hikers found dead in the snow in socks
The neighbors upstairs make knocking sounds at 3am from another dimension

from the cold road: houses visible (without wires)
entrenched in white snow: sherd forest archaeology.
car parked, bananas and bars packed, we hike.
a magnesium flame painting, freezing. a collage. a frenzy.
now, various floaters organized in armies playing war
or grazing, flamingo legs embalmed and crooked
and cooked, charred and glazed in a kiln, kin amid
the cold air, the ground is a movie screen.
the sun, sidelong, bruises our pilgrimage
and lays shadows in place to dissect and incise.
light like a plague, a pear flesh, a frozen swarm of locusts.
the forest opens, we reach aforementioned rural shantytown.
those houses when we parked and hiked to them
were not houses, they were barns, the windows, doors
all were painted in detail on pieces of plywood,
some big movie set gone missing (headline: found!
deceptive, chipping curtains hung out in the cold).

I am one hundred thousand water droplets
Leaning fast on the oxygen like daylight over the cemetery.
I am that very light that forms parallelograms
In the sun dial of your bare white room in the rail town.
I am the child that falls and does not break anything;
I am the child that falls and gets hit by the train in Barcelona.
I was never yours.
I am your reflection in the back of a fish refracted beneath your lance
Ready to dart away. I am in the air of the prison vents
And in the vents of the court room just before that
And I precipitate within the dew on the monuments years later.
I am the parallelogram of light that falls
On the empty side of your bed after the war.
The same that forms infinite trapezoids of myself as the days wear on
And draws all over your walls in the evening and morning light,
The same that encapsulates the motes of dust that are not mine but yours.
Unfortunately you will have to understand that I am no more
And strangely so, I never was.

As the rose garden is a thief to the day, I am a thief to it at night
I feel the earth, the soil still buzzing with the sun’s warmth
I feel the earth like a chest, the soil is the same temperature as the inside of my mouth, and I
understand I could be buried here and remain very much alive
I determine bees and insects are asleep (do they sleep?)
if insects sleep, is heaven paralyzed like this garden?
like maybe photos in a picture book.
and the bugs live for only a few days, science tells me,
and yet they beat their wings and know exactly what to do
if I had them would I know how just as they do?

twin gulls at the ready!
resting and fidgeting atop a rock outcropping
sister galactic spaceships from cowboy bebop
ancient cutters of the sky, cloud divers and dividers
efficiency is key, swiveling in crisp circumferences
feathered razorblade acrobats
mother nature’s surplus fish-killers
spend their days as lazy air athletes
never in the sea deeper than their beaks

she talks about things she believes I wish I could do
I don't ask but she shows me her portfolio
casually sidelong I say between sips
"I am not running anyone over
But if you're in my way I will hit you"
and her expression changes from puzzlement to anger
I take another sip and flip her off

deep ocean steel
challenger deep steel
abyssal
like a bulkhead
behind the temple like lapis lazuli
fleeing something
the closest thing to life that isn’t living
i’ll put you up against my flesh
and compare and contrast
fleeting images of cold rainstorms
and flashes of light
flashy blade
from far away, a signal
candid steel
lucid steel
halcyon
mute sensations in a cathode ray tube
except in exactitude unmatched
and louder than the loudest
vocal cord vibration
and silent too, not a breath
escapes the hostage
with steel against its trachea
unsolicited speed
home run
thrown into the wall stud
luxurious scentless tasteless
and so rich and tasteful and sensual
if I’m in love with you steel,
I must be a necrophiliac
or not

potpourri of stale disheveled grasses,
arcane and forbidden mouse holes, and masses

of leprous bristlecone pine, acid atmosphere, of venus.
sweltering, permeates gold, naked, anti-shade crevice;

torn from digested fence to digested fence.
a seething sneer in the canopy, turbid herb scents

(of spring, or morning, or rain, have since
been mumified to accompany summer’s rescindment).

and ground-dwellers, caterwauling, as this eutrophic sea
is the ulcerated stomach of a carnivorous beast.

lust drives the ferocious field,
scorching as automotive steel.

i’m laying down with a
book on my neck
and your ghastly temper shook sarah’s branches.
the way they shook was reminiscent of
a code or some secret recipe
lost in the universe
like the way shafts of light
roll across the dust on a table
or the way the hawk cuts
the sky in half over
the barn
incalculable, it would seem.
your anger, too, shall pass.
so i roll over in bed and wish i was buried.

there was an interesting
night to roam; to be indoors, and
she knows she'll never be upright,
a nuisance;
i am actually a big difference
between what i have been
a great deal with.
so don't try to get me.
we're just imperfect
and you, a crippled horse.
and if i had the time to get a free
chance
it would not be worthit.
hogwash, like the vista cruiser
forgotten in the kudzu.
and in the brambles do you question?
what does it mean to matter?
if you're no better than what you envision?

I am a broken toilet
Spouting crazy ideas in the basement of some brutalist mansion
My thoughts gone lurid, growing on the whitewashed cement into flowery moulds.
I am a scarlet stain on the ceiling and I am loud and furious and I reek of guilt and decay.
editting editting editting becoming becoming becoming
I am an alpha particle.
Writing writing writing down everything.
I am a ray of light.
I cannot tell if I am real so I feel my face.
I am superfluous, overdone, like a Christmas sweater, Rococo, overtilled to the point of erosion.
I am last night's espresso into this morning.
I am twenty strange projects
and I scrap them as if they were funhouse mirrors.
I am shaking like a leaf.
I am manic and I am happening all at once and I can't ******* stop.

I have to remind myself things are changing around me
Even though I never leave this place
Even though these are the same walls always around me

The same riveters in the morning trying to close up the sky
With their rivet guns, their godly mission to blot out heaven
With blue tarps and steel
Building up the fourth wall around me and shutting up the sky

Today the air changed there was roofing material floating in the sky
pieces of apartment buildings flying around and leaves
The leaves, the trees were screaming,
It was like those home videos
of hurricanes

bone-colored clouds and the blurry static of rain like an old television
The rain passed quickly as it had come over me
Was it even there?
It was notable, I wrote a poem about it.

the town is dry and you can
look in the bins where the residue
lies, lies to you about
where the water was and isn't
and you still see the line where it was
and wonder that maybe it's still
in them, clear, like air, you
touch the cracked surface
of the plaster where it rained
and it's dry but your memory is
cold and wet and dreary

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

runny summer ooze
unlock the watermelon
and night hits neatly.

to think of people the weeks or months before they died
and what they were to you at that time
what they were to you
and then to think
what you are right now
at this moment
on a scale, how much you are trying for
you friends your family the stars the universe
who would be the one to think of how you were?

from the cold road houses visible without wires
entrenched in white snow that made my vision dance
various floaters organized in armies playing war
out in the cold, the ground was a movie screen
the dancers became shadows when the sunset
made me want to go home, made my head hurt
winter light weaving through the trees
light like a plague, a frozen swarm of locusts
or a woman walking in slow motion, the day decomposed
those houses when we parked and walked to them
were not houses, they were barns, the windows, doors
all were painted in detail on pieces of plywood
deceptive chipping curtains out in the cold by the road

I too am touch-starved, my beloved
I saw your face on an angel’s stomach in my dreams
and when god let the gates of the earth close about me
, I saw you
wrapped in winter seaweed eyes and eels frozen
doves’ wings petrified mercilessly in the water
forsaken shards eye-shadowed like a two-sun solar system
marked like some amazonian trail tree, blazed with rice paper
wet paint, fresh and false and free, my beloved
c-shaped tunnel round about your eye in crimson, like
some caterpillared jesus bust
I retched your likeness into my lap,
, minty razor blades flying across my arms
glistening with human-scent to mimmick
god’s work with lucifer’s lust

from the cold road: houses visible (without wires)
entrenched in white snow: sherd forest archaeology.
a painting on fire, freezing. a collage a frenzy.
now, various floaters organized in armies playing war
or grazing, flamingo legs embalmed and crooked
& cooked, charred and glazed in a kiln, kin amid
the cold air, the ground is a movie screen,
the dancers become shadows when the sunset
made me want to go home, made my head hurt;
winter light weaving through the trees.
light like a plague, a pear flesh, a frozen swarm of locusts
or a woman walking in slowmotion, the day decomposed.
those houses when we parked and hiked to them
were not houses, they were barns, the windows, doors
all were painted in detail on pieces of plywood,
some big movie set gone missing (headline: found!
deceptive, chipping curtains out in the cold by the road).

it’s sunny as hell out
but it has that rainy day feeling
I wish it were cold out and I was warm
but it’s hot as hell out
and I’m cold

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

i exist
i exist
i exist
i bleed blue blood in a bucket. i am a sleeping child for seven years. then i am a molting insect. pain. i have no mouthparts. i am beautiful. i only live for a single night to breed as an adult. i am a mother. i can taste the melancholy atmosphere. everything dies eventually.

it was swell to think the city’s smell is less sickening
than the soulless scent of pressing forests of bristlecone pine
fertilized lawns now sterile with nature’s pesticide,
the crystalline flesh of some cold, lonely comet.
the forests silent and silicate as the moon’s lifeless surface
trees packed, cartooned and phobic, like salted fishes hanging
with no throb of night-dwelling insects to hasten dawn’s arrival
no sidewalk nor always-lit subway maw as a means of escape.
cause of death? no depressive episode could match such exposure;
the mood-numbing nocturne of the inaccessible semi-suburbs
marching off between the sentinel forests of the northeast.

Jesus ******* christ
I would not let anything get in the way of my work and now
A face round and plain and full of darkness
Is in my thoughts
Mousey like Carrie
You would think she was strange too.
And I had a calm conversation
About weather
And then chucky.
There was no use to feign.
and I let my guard down on her.
Yet she's still there,
Why.
and I don't know if I can
get rid of her face
her two sunken eyes
lined with what? charcoal?
Her face was carved from ashes
She's something the moon would say
if it could speak.
What the hell.

I'M IN LOVE WITH YOU. I REALLY LOVE ALL OF THE LEAVES AND BARK. YOU JUST GO ON FOR MILES. AND I CAN GET LOST, FOR REAL! I THINK IT'S ALL VERY PRETTY. BUT IN THE WINTER YOU MAKE ME REALLY SAD. BECAUSE YOU'RE QUIET AND SHUT. AND SHUT LIKE THE BANK ON SUNDAY. OR WHEN I'M ON HOLIDAY BY MYSELF. PLEASE STAY SUMMER FOR EVER. MAYBE THAT IS WHAT HEAVEN IS LIKE.

the unapologetic trains were where we took shape like flightless shadows baboons searching the narcissistic night

the orchards and yards dunes of shifting hulking shadows of cold riversteel slick with oil like blood on stone

we whetted and sharpened our hands and skills as craftsman of sharing things and knowledge with eyes reflections in the starlight

in the places where the shadows come and go and carry things in two directions right or left forward or backward like time itself

greedy hiding in wait beneath the shadows in valleys in the canyons of technology too tall to see over yet we used it to our advantage

and crisscrossed the orchards shifting like rivers shift the landscape with time with each passing dawn and dusk and everything in between

smoke gutted the places where we hid and slept stomachs bursting with nothing arteries flowing with everything wanting so so bad

like stories shared hopped between our backs like hot things handed to each other in the winter like our backs on the backs of the freight trains hopping the rails

I walk now in the valley of death of fear for the people I think I killed but I am not sure if I did or not or left them for dead and it's dark and I am scared

only my god can help me if my fate was involved in their comings or goings or love or anything that influenced them strongly

she is the flat inspection failure notice
she’s in the red paper that you threw away again
she is the dripping air conditioner
she is the honeycomb
the salt of the sea
the smell of it in the heartland

she is the car that won’t start
and the ******* idiot keeps trying to start it
and it stinks and smells like monoxide
she’s the other idiot driving his bike
up the wrong side of the road

she is the overgrown rat hit by the subway
filthy and pitiful

she calls to you when you sleep
she stares at you in your dreams
in the life in that weird little universe
she knows you
she is your friend

you wake up and you hear
the world working its jaws
right by your ear
it’s her
it’s her, in the sky before the ****** storm
wet like a paper bag filled with water
oozing down walls
and up them, too
like kudzu
crowding out the other plants
even the bamboo
it’s her on the news
it’s her in all the mindless crap
you ignore and can’t live without

without the air conditioner
the warmth seeps into your
flat like blood
the cold air bleeds out and you
feel again
you taste the bitter sweat
you reach over
and turn it back on again
you go to sleep with it on
like sleeping next to an ice cube
ozti the ice man

Morning words that taste so sweet;
But your anticipation hides a hiss that won’t leave
And my attention will dwindle, too, like stars committing suicide
Problems precipitate on the porcelain sink and I think while it pours outside:
What you’re doing is eating at the pillars, your intent
Might very well be testing me like the Ocean tests a new continent
Your questions propel with good intention, but miss with bad-rap
And I drift between them aimlessly making no sense of the roadmap
And where my home is between fun and love and longevity
I watch you in the corner of the motel room as it stretches away from me
Your world crumbles like the end of your "bad habit”
That’s now mine too, and ever since I’ve been washing the red out of my T-shirt
I’ve been blue.

feel how fat and drunk the air is:
(it makes my head hurt real bad)
insects fall under the weight of the world in lazy spirals
the trees are doomed
eveybody's gone
you and I lie in wait beneath the blossoms in our car turned off and the air changes static, the rain is coming
the tree will explode and it is imminent
the deflowering
A flurry of shattered flowers
spring came and went too soon
I'm depressed and I don't want this

an awful poem is
someone that I see on the subway reading and I immediately understand
summer wind that doesn't need to be questioned
an item unboxed and used for exactly what it needed to do
walking directly from home to work and back
passing the fountain
not throwing a penny in
not seeing the child get it's shoelace caught on the railroad platform in Barcelona and getting hit by the train
putting a dog to sleep and leaving the room
crying

don't be a poltergeist that goes bump in the night;
can't catch you on film if you put up a fight.
i know ghosts that can scare, but that's about it.
what are you gonna do? frighten me to death?
and quit disappearing. it's very annoying,
especially since you never tell me where you are going.
just stop haunting my head. please start haunting my bed.
or don't even bother haunting at all.

she's shades of brown
mud near the lake
festering with geese
a scanner that will never scan ever again
a caffenated beverage
she's the wind that makes the doors shake
in the apartment at night
and you swore it was the way
she moved
and you swore it was your psychosis returning
**** not again
she's the grating sound of the indentured laborers doing their thing
at 7 am
she's the smell of your hands before and after you wash them repeatedly and needlessly
she lives in the paper that curls when burned
and in the skin too
she smells like cat litter
and ozone
and she tastes like 9 volt batteries
that may or may not be useable.

i feel the same doom a bee in a jar
feels, an
idol in the path of ivy in the yard
and all
i could think of when you left
is when you entered my car,
and we smashed faces
and you couldn't contain yourself.
but maybe i've contained myself
too much now,
and so i guess i've set out my furrows,
counting the withered stalks
until january
and hoping (in vain?) to smash
faces again, when
you return.

I'm alone and my eyes are on fire from the brightness of two on a sunday
I wonder what I look like, unshowered, abused by the wind that strangely doesn't affect the tree branches but sweeps up the tiny Chinese lady on Myrtle.
Presidential?
There were no mirrors for a while
People sat shiva until they figured out how to bathe and polish metal
Before the Greeks or Romans
I didn't look in the mirror this morning
But it's more than that
How often do I really smile?
You see, this is why I can't stand
hearing my recorded voice
Let alone see myself in a video
I'd never be able to do that
Without feeling equally ashamed and dissociated
But half of me eggs it on
The mordbidly curious half that likes seeing gory horror films
Come on, I want the cold hard facts.
I want to know the icy truth
Just like the Sunday afternoon wind.

the concept of you fills the room like a cloud, like
hot air in all the rooms in the house, even the atti
c and through the eaves into the evening, you ma
ke me shake, you swell around, make the air quiv
er and glimmer like the phone lines, you can go u
p and touch them, but they don't speak, and now,
all i am is a draft while you were a candle that ha
s since been extinguished and gone out.

switchblade little cicada abdomens beat like any old heart a la mode
& all the more graceful
were they not there the air would falter and wander/wonder in lazy eddies shedding the loveliness of sound they provide, in the heat of the day
mini sydney opera houses, screaming, consolidate on a sultry afternoon in June.

after supper rent a box of matches and light them one by one on the stoop, catch the air on the edge of the corner of the paper the day was painted on, a glitch

catch the night on runways of pale red dots, embryos of magnesium that burn bright and hot and overwhelming beneath greasy live wires dipping dangerously low in the road

do you ever look at me and
wonder if I’m really listening
or writing;

And while you cried and kept on saying
“I killed the owl”
or, the “Neighbor did it”
I regarded myself as something that
should care more than I did

And when you cried when
he came and lived
in every black volvo in town
called you when you weren’t home
Three times - “I love you”

I regarded myself as something
that should care more than I did

I was the one who found the dead owl in the shed
and now you think that you killed it
and it feels as though I did
even though I didn't

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

at night when you turn in bed with the lights on, it is
not exactly a garden, never a garden in the electric towers and canyons
the city never sleeps nor ceases to be, but never quite is.
it will do. for now
and at night, when things dim in low specific heat
everything begs you to do and you cannot do
a rest stop, a pause, you locked yourself out
and the fans whirr and stars turn and dim sidelong
you’re not paying rent here.
and stars whimper and beg beneath your shroud of night life
and that place, so far away outside the city, walls red with blood
and love and if you could say it that way, all the same,
you used to call it home, calling each time your mother speaks
counted each hole in the wall, remembered the rooms laid
bare and forgiven and relieved when you left,
you locked yourself out to be clean
and cast yourself into liminality

turn off the ac
turn off the fan
open the windows
don’t hear,
do listen
turn off the light
turn off the lamp
turn off the music
close the book
lay down
close your eyes
notice things

i am not home
(oh, I know You’re Me)
only the Best words come out when I am half asleep
but the best memories never seem to come back.

I love you for all the things you didn’t do.
And you blamed me for everything I took from you
But maybe you did, and maybe I didn’t too

And now all I see is someone else and feel my hands get all fuzzy
snow piles up in the subway
Tthe man stared at me, I don’t have anything to say

There is a line I cannot cross so I leave for a while
And I feel strange, I feel forgetful
and I feel uncomfortable.
i am not real

when the sun winks, and
you shut the door
tell the kids to come inside

slithering serpents, a fantastic show
flicker in the twilit sky
like the tongues of Hell

and
everything surges and fries
in the house, for a moment
like a haunted hospital
like in the movies

when the power's out, and in the road
passerby light their candelabras.

when the engines quit their mechanizations;
when the poles settle down for the
big
long
nap;

and the smallest calculated bearings
of your pocket compasses go awry
from that great fire on the sun

and 100 years is lost in 8 minutes.
you are what you left yourself ready for.