A misread, that happiness comes indecently— but there’s certainly no modesty as this seedling unfurls for how many years was it less than a thought a dream of life impossibly both blueprint and raw material in a desiccated husk a hull a fleck of the plant that it once was and will be again preposterously and joyfully the promise is kept this the little green antidote for a heart that is wanting–
Wednesday the tired wrung-out day the lightest of rains falling and sometime last night the kid ended up coding went back to the Unit and this morning my head aches my dispo brittle in so many ways of course there’s no such thing as silence on this floor it is a living place it groans with life and at its leaving rattles like the IV pole of a patient making his rounds all morning long […]
For Lent she said the Copts go vegan and what do I do? As if I’d give anything up that needed giving up I might opt to do rather than eschew might give up giving up might sharpen these long teeth might really sink them into something might hold on for once might become resolute with all the tenacity of a bad bad habit
Could it mean something that today everyone was singing? the kid the chef the drunk man on the corner hands raised waiting to be raptured for an hour The chef had the words but not the tune arriving at work just as I was leaving the drunk had the voice but distance muffled his meaning the kid went I need you I need you more than anyone darling before rote memory gave out and red-faced […]
In the holly, a steller’s jay, angles hiding angles– black-beaked, black -crested, less bird than polygon, the very shape of caution– its sleek blue bravura hidden in the shadows of one hundred glossy leaves, I saw momentarily the bird itself, not the brash emblem it presents and loudly projects from blatant chimney perches– It was unguarded I saw a touch of matte on a bird that is all glint and grit and out and open, […]
I don’t want to be a landscape she wrote but instead of a plea it came out as trees and Midas smirked.
Writing as a landscape, a warning– don’t mistake placidity for peace. It could be that the stillness of the trees is self-imposed, the dormant volcano, disciplined; though tired of being a backdrop, too tired to do much else but stay, glacial, to wrinkle the horizon with creases the same non-hue as a day-moon, elusive, barely showing up in photos.
You get the sweeter guava I get the crisper night This is what I hear when I talk to you now: the blurble of nearby fountains and incessant motorbikes. You said you felt old and I said so-and-so got married and so all we really spoke about were different types of distance and the connection kept failing as if to drive a point home– it must be so nice to get away from it
The rain coming down to soften our edges to dampen as to muffle not as to douse Such mildness today we thought we’d have a standoff but all we got was tired understanding the kindness that evolves when nothing else is left It’s been a long week everything is weary us the sky gone pewter the slickening roads and bridges that pull towards home and there’s never a lack of water here a glut of […]
Pour it out a perfect phrase there’s no way of getting some things back and every night at every second mere feet from disaster cars course along the freeway Beyond the exit a soccer match is being written out under the spill of floodlights by leg and sinew and there’s many ways the game could go but in the end it can only go one of them so much determined by these white painted lines […]
OPTIONAL POETRY 