Alone in the dark I burn houses you leave, my beehive mind making lovers helium-float away, mothers evanesce into wrist- poised instruments, slips through self-ish fingers. In the dark, Alone slowly chokes me; moss on tree.
2
Four paws hammer the span of my plywood back. She foots me with a millipede's mil shakes me awake in a ritual I love to hate ending with her, a circle in my circle, flower off the long, curved stick.
3
Frank, in my dream, I say write me a flower. Make me your kind of boy. Find this body in your back.
4
White bowls stacked bowl in bowl brimming in the hutch like nesting dolls, like white: we know within it roils a prism of color though all we see is light.
5
Geryon's wings veiled by a trench coat shushing adolescence like balled sheets burke a wet dream— Baby, I wouldn't want anyone to see me either, all my red monsters licking their wings. Soon, my body will fit its jeans.
6
How I know a heart is fisted is your ear on my chest in the morning, warmth between us like water in a wet suit, disquieting beats like a woofer in a club and still you name this ire not ferocity but love.
7
I use a battery-operated – insurance against oversleep come from an outage's corollary noon-blink on the digital – even though it means I cannot snooze (no lazy bars on these tocks) risking oversleep anyway since when it rings my body turns it off without waking.
8
Don't wash in the morning just let water make runnels out of you, keep coffee from the spray and decide what to wear while the hot slowly goes like clicks on a timer whose final tintinnabulation signals, only next.
9
Eight-and-a-half besides being my shoe size is the number of hours I waste five out of seven days a week, like this: one to check email. One to drink coffee. One to write a poem and half to lunch. Then it's food and the dopamine eye of my mind in which I see a small and glimmering you that makes the last four drag like a sermon.
10
At 10 a.m. I know you're still sleeping in the bed. I read off someone's paper pinned man lifts 10-ton vehicle off self and surely this is a miracle, you still sleeping in the bed, me more than a mirage away, sweltering like a rolling summer road: there I am (see me!) so small in the crook of your arm.
11
Your solar plexus is the origin of scent and your hip bone to your belly button to your hip again, in figure eights, is the origin of me.
12
Sun through spaces in an overpass: bread and jelly in the air on 14th; sausage spices dueling down Duboce. A pigeon just misses. When you can no longer see the skyline, that means you're in the skyline.
13
My dentist says I have two
small cavities back to back
like twins arguing height
as if two primordial cavities
is the sum of gaps a life
of decamped lovers leaves.
At two o'clock I laugh
at cavity, another word for longing.
14
I want orange like a dragon in my mouth so when I open to speak, sunsets burn your lips.
15
When nuns said idle hands are the devil's matchbook I looked at my celestial palms, knuckles on formica, a spill of stars in the lines like thrown dice and knew she meant idle minds like mine, staring at my hands knuckle-up on the wood grain desk.
16
We open windows in the corners of our office to river wind, as if air could cut carpet the way water cuts a valley.
17
You are a river of sky I tether to, my heart a bowl of your making— my potter, my pour.
18
The stuttering train, the miasma of the too-close rained-on folk, the flickering lights keep me stuck at this line, this one fucking line, hand on the cold metal stanchion: I make the birds sing – listen!...but, for you.
19
Twilight, the blue wash Magritte-ing the sky over China beach, where you and I become silhouettes: take me on a wet, black rock.
20
Is there a word for what's done by adding a suffix, as in flowered, then making its opposite by mirroring the suffix, as prefix: deflower? you ask me on the aerie, wind in the thistle. I could pick you.
Floral Rest / Leslie Marcus
Your two cats on my calves like laundry, you around me like a pea coat, and scarf— I don't dare pump the bellows of my lungs for fear of smothering what small fire’s born between us.
22
My slew of kin living lives three hours into my future simply means when the phone rings too early someone must be dead— I can't roll out of bed with sheets that freeze when you leave them the way snow crusts after rain. Whatever it is will have to keep 'til eight.
23
The rats' race begins on a wire outside my window at 11 p.m. I mistake first for UFOs, black disks against blacker black, then for a lazy metaphor: me in my nine-to-five. But they are just rats, running the shortest distance from roof to tree, like me (awake when I should be) sleeping: the shortest distance to tomorrow.
24
Cold without snow, my cross, for moving so far from family. I miss the white muffler, the storm to run out in nine at night, no shoes; I miss my red-raw feet with which I could steal your heat— But there, there is no you.