309

hot wednesday, your afternoon
tells nothing. cars seem to
vanish from all their parking lots.
i pour the light back outside
and turn my thick blinds away.
like guards they line up,
dense to serve their purpose.
the cat sings out his purr-hymn,
pawing at all my loose hairs.
a friend has said to me,
'i feel as if i've been
walking this whole life,
and i just want to sit down.'
i lean back into black
knowing and die for that
moment. and in it, lucid,
a stain, i stretch for ever -

seed

I wonder if she ever thinks
of him when she looks at
me: The rampant weed of some
scattered seeds sprouting up in unexpected
places now. The gift of a fit of
assaulted caution - we don’t speak of it.
I wonder if she loved him, even for any moment,
or if they talked about who their
child together would be, holding tight
like orphans, testing that one more second
would be for squeezing the very last drop
out of the only thing that could not run dry.
They were looking in the right places
for the wrong things. But it’s
growing now behind the words that
straddled some stranger’s confession, beneath
the blanket of every fairy-taled child sleeping
with the enemy of their soil’s soiled stem.
There’s no room to be welcomed by those who keep
spitting into the sand that falls through
the fist of every half-born son and calling it their own,
those inadvertent pacifiers who need sex most
and are the least like parents.
It’s living between the fantasy that keeps them
together in the mind of the same old placebo and
the moment when they wake up,
still barely turning their wet backs away
from a vanishing nightmare and screaming:
we can’t own life, You can’t ever own life.

the boldest

crying for the cage, i cried
beside it, sinking with what lost lie.
you sat heavy to call it for
what it was. at least, in your narrow way -
and i looked, through further gray
and saw what you thought you threw.
our white sky skinned and the
sun blistered over your pale hand.
your claims praised you as most bold
of open land. but i didn't create cages,
and i'm not so tired, small
like you say. i'm not so weak
to call you your hate. the wind
blows even the boldest when their
passion fears itself. tell me:
where does it go? does it protect you
from what it knows? who does it follow?
the facts of math, with their hands
too small to hold? i want things
you don't want to see. i, too,
slipped into that heat, turned around,
and watched your thick eye
sliding.

born remembering

i followed silence to where words dissolve into color.
i followed my mind to the place where i gave birth to you;

you are there in my memory, an echo,
weightless as flowers blooming underwater.

you seem so much more real in the dark.

i have seen two places,
and of the two, reality has given me only proof---

those two silences never meet in words

warm moon

try to predict a meteor falling.
a dinosaur going extinct
after millions upon millions
of years on an earth.

there is only yellow prediction-
no attempt to call out
past clocks but fear; the loss
of the womb. you want
to know, with your eyes,
that you'll come back to it.
like two, mother and father cinched together.
forget mouths, half-ready
with curled lips that don't lead to any
nowhere. there is no nowhere.
we fear that there is no joy if
we cannot make it predictable.
forget that even the warm half-
moon is still whole.
give the pupils in our eyes
bigger, further back bodies,
the more of our children we see.
we look up at the sky and we fear it.
we cry. sweat. forget to breathe. forget even
the cinched smiles inside us. the clock
when it rests between tickings.

the spark alive

i want to watch
their blood beaded body work
make waste with what was idled dead.
in tore their flexibility,
underscored velocity, rediagraming for
the lost at home. we may need to decide for
each other. or instead pad the tissue, pre
occupied with what is too good to say.
you have to stop trying to remain
unattained. reaction is one thing - but
the spark, alive, is only fair. only matter
when it's present enough to point out.
you pull blood from where it should be
needed, like crytallized red thread.
sit down. or oscillate into
a rhythm even you can't relate to.
i want to appraise the work
ing inside something real that requires
no anterior allegations. split fire, and
at least it's personal. at least it knows
that it burns...

Much

Two hours late and the crying eyes have closed.
The morning is without a memory, it shakes
the leaves in its delivery and new birds are close
but unseen. There’s only a beginning now
and they seem to have never slept. Quicker than
my ear they keep repeating, “let’s hear it.” then
don’t wait for a response. They must know no one
could come out and say anything. I think
they know it all already anyway. Still, maybe the
chaos, the obvious must be stated; maybe it’s just --
the same, old story, inspired again by a new anger.
claimed as creation in some rebirth, selling symbiosis to
the idea of a stranger and wearing a holy hat
on the cover of the auto-biography. But why
is it too much not knowing if the girl's story is
familiar? Why can I still feel her burning beside
me? Identifying the family we have can be hard,
even if you know no one remembers to define it but
you. Why do we still try to forget something
that now has to have made us freer than ever