He hoarded fingernails he bit off or found
in the curtain-less showers in a pile in his cell,
like a pixie collecting shrunken satyr horns.
He ate only the cheese at lunch and pulled
off the white fat bologna and let it sweat
in the sink.
His markhor beard held dead skin and peanut butter
clumps and it refused to grow anymore.
Behind the rosewood door
he stood on the steel toilet and stared into
the sun-glow bulb dimmed behind plexiglass.
When he was tired he slept under the bunk
like a frightened child.

He was allowed an hour a day
to stretch his harpy legs,
he’d hop to the phone and talk
to the dial tone like it were a confessional
to John Paul II,
“God doesn’t know, God never knew”.

I found him on a Tuesday afternoon
after lunch cleanup hanging by a shoelace
from his light fixture,
curved like a sunflower.
I cut the stem from the pseudanthium
and it wilted into my arms.

His neck looked like a corseted waist,
and when I loosened the shoelace
his dry mouth opened and he coughed bleu cheese
returning life into my face.
His teary mud colored eyes rolled forward and we stared into
each others as I cradled him like a baby.

He later told John Paul he wanted to quiet the voices.

In ’97 he took his ***** girlfriend’s crying three
month old and quieted him by crushing his
skull in a dresser drawer.

in blades of grass
ants follow a guide,
a following unseen by
boots mangling terrain,
like sea glass,
like years of forming,
one takes time to care for
one they made.

the bed they lay
in the following night,
many strings of nights-
is like ash,
grey dirt piled for thousands
of spoken dates,
years- days following days,
until he came and took the days and
made them years,
and told us what the years were but not
what they meant to the bulbous rocks,
or how seven days made sixty two moons
a sixth
from the sun.

on purpose.

or if
he meant to **** the girl.

or if
it were naivety.

the water trickled reflections of
death, birth; frog legs
that looked like bullhead lilies.

his scars, sutures, shared bones,
they made him together like the
together we fight against.

a monster,
unlike a monster this gaseous air
has seen,
or gasped,
or choked on.
A monster like no other,
that found us here and taught us
to teach each other to drown and
forgive and drown again.

birds, like the ones with red feathers,
or blue feathers,
it does not matter to make
a picture of

birds.

together on opposites sides
of a galvanized fence.

birds that have feathers unlike each other
but are birds.

birds that fail to tell one another when
flight occurs,
but they know.
they take flight like tin heroes,
but feathered,
it’s the silence we don’t understand.

the bulbous eyes,
the stuttering heads,
the chip, chip, chirp.

the song.

like sand slipping through my
together hands,
the song,
the spaces,
we don’t know.

writing a poem about falafels wouldn’t
be like writing a poem about love,
or death,
or even ideas.

writing a poem about a seamless dress wouldn’t
be like writing a poem about marriage,
or faith,
or even divorce.

actually-
it’d be like writing a poem
about a poem,
but not.

it’d be like listening to music for
sound,
sound like a screen door slapping
shut,
kicking up years of dust in a room,
a room with a floor that held feet
from nothing it could know,
but nothing the floor didn’t know,
dust the door thought it knew,
a facade of spew the not knowing
found important enough
to write a poem about.

Ha, I get it.

The shine is from a
wet cloud against
a sun
that stands in the rain.

I get that
the way the gloss
shimmers
and you don’t want that-
the rain.

you don’t like the flash.
the drips. the wetness like
hair growing over your face.

you don’t like the way
the hood moves in the
light.

you don’t like the way
the glass reflects images
of a second there and
a second now.
(And how they are the same.)

but the sun is
against us.
(So is the light! Collusion? How
can’t it be)

Look away!*

didn’t you hear?

the light wants to show off,
the light wants to prove you never had it.
the light wants to illuminate the sound
of things we can’t hear
of things we set aside

of things we think others want
to
see.

this old heart
wasn’t always so old,
it once was young and
tenderfoot,
wandering through days and
seeking regalement at night.

this old heart
rarely defeated it’s angst,
clenching fists at duelists
only with intentions of
defeasance,
never relegating the significance
of the win but focusing on the
sacking in a loss.

this old heart
played board games with
his sister on snow days after
laying out paths in the white dust
with an orange saucer
while chasing a laughter
only the belly could muster.

this old heart
was once a boy,
with hair like the white hot sun
on an August afternoon,
with bronze skin running about the grass,
chasing an aging brown dog with a ball
in it’s mouth.

this old heart
was once a boy, yes,
but remains no longer.

this old heart grows weary now.
this old heart bears weight.
this old heart stopped asking questions.
this old heart doesn’t laugh.
this old heart has no dog.
this old heart gets lost in the dark
whiling staring into the blinding sun.

I had slept for too long, I know, for my eyes crusted over,
and when I rubbed them I felt relief from sleep.
Walking into my kitchen undiscovered, like a mars rover
I stumbled towards the counter in a bumbling flesh jeep.

the fruit bowl overflowed with bananas and mangoes
and they were beyond their years, wrinkled and hot
from the heat of today, and yesterday, their death grows
towards a beginning only a fly could know, but not.

their fermenting skin was armied in fruit flies,
they had built quite a formidable force and I
wondered had I slept so long? Their fleeting red eyes
scurried in my presence without a question of why.

opening the cherry tomato container unleashed an army like Agamemnon’s,
I feared I had slept that long, in a house of Aegisthus,
a deceptive horse unleashed
flies about my cheeks and eyes-
I feared their anger, only in that moment though,
I hadn’t even thought about it before.

a cider vinegar trap was the plan,
with a plastic wrap coffin,
and in some hours a cider vinegar graveyard
full of crimson eyed drowners.

A brash plan, yes-

or maybe an overthrow of a sluggish ruler
with a small army of energetic soldiers,
my crushing hand slicing like a scythe,
only to be matched by a putrid hatred of a kitchen subjugator,
a hatred the ruler understood himself-
a fear of waking up to it left the fruit
bruising in the basket
in
the
first place.