For you in Someplace new

Crawling to stools to dine resembles itself
in coarse northern cold & oppressive southern humid:
just awake, automotive rudders shudder my empty
someday carcass to lamplight & waitress
to slurp slop twixt moonlight & lifetime cook.

Tonight the earth suffused it, like before,
the aroma too brief & perfect, in patches.
Factual gratitude, it comes — warmth;
is gone. I’d anticipated it in college
near a U-shaped stone dorm, and also busing home
teenage, around the corner from home,
that descent around the corner, falling home
an autumn leaf. Tonight
by a brown house,
tiger lilies, willows,
automobiles yielding to blue-hearted stars,
and yawns of desert wind, as if we were isolated —

There is cultivation on the outskirts of city & self,
broiling & skinbound, and there’s a clarification
grown by & dimming with twilight:
what? — as the soul travels (the soul is traveling)
it finds itself the same on every pole.
Or could merely be chemicalia simmered
in proximity to things nascent & mating — ?

I’m optimistic. I should be;
young. The dull brunt of my cleaver
keeps falling on the stems of roses.
When the time is full, they’ll resemble
a wreath for spiders to climb in.

first published in Writing Disorder

church song

I drove to the garden
where the river spurts a burble
at hedges, walkways, evergreens
designed in miniature
by city planners. Everything from birthing Spring
in full rotation.

Police directed me, & traffic,
funneled we holy to penance & all else
to menace. Whitepanel glare
dwindling in citric dusk. Behind the stone
the microphone smothering human throat
through tunnels of ether to others.

In a hurry of heat I saw
men leaving ports, adjourned to depart,
milling in pre-tomb,
water swishing directionless
under wind barreling
to carry crowds to sense —

Amphibia careened around Her banks,
insects crisscrossed my thighs,
their paltry roughage.
The church shadowed me to lesser wilt
towering to a point.
The river wheeled on in a furrow.

The plummet
they blistered behind the stone, choirs,
our muffled erosion.
Sudden, splintered across my spine:
they trumpet their tempest,
& chilled, I swallow mine.

first published in Writing Disorder

Cigarette & Sun

When everybody smokes cigarettes then it’s a shame when
everybody smokes cigarettes then there’s no hope when everybody
smokes cigarettes then everyone’s alone when everybody smokes
cigarettes then rain will fall when everybody smokes cigarettes
then sleep won’t come when everybody smokes cigarettes then
are we all going to die? is it true? then it is death that we all are,
then we could only ever be a forest, then it is the one eye
of the lonesome soldier bent breathy over bar lacquer versus
purple seam of cream shirt girl with shoulder, two
turning on death-precipice, always jostling, jangling key
of life falling sodden on dark flannel ear of death.
It’s a cure, then—wouldn’t it be?—when the soul sights morning
& it is morning with the wintergreen sun, the citrus mint
he with the colossal blossom outpouring, the drink of red
for all blood-vessel’d creatures, of which so many lie
in self-sanctioned neglect, rueful undoing, lazing guitar
& stringless thrum, one patient fingernail
made to crack & crust in sunless absence,
& all he, the hermit, or anyone, knows, is that the sun
is the cambric, the cure & the constant, the tourniquet
& the reservoir, the breeder & the lover, & it is clear
that we must have something good to say about the sun,
in particular if we wish to abolish the worst of the smoke
that we use to summon him within us when he isn’t there,
or otherwise when he’s only there for everyone,
when, if we could smoke a single cigarette,
then we could get him within us as through a tube
an umbilical conduit from molecule to molecule—
it is thus that we dream of the sun when the sun
doesn’t shine then our mouths are all dry when the sun
doesn’t shine then we freeze in delirium when the sun
doesn’t shine then we invent different languages when the sun
doesn’t shine then we huddle close together when the sun
doesn’t shine then we bleed in semi-controlled doses when the sun
doesn’t shine the we need him inside us like a ray
of grimly familiar mother’s milk.

first published in Uut Poetry