Night drive just like the last night drive just like the city lights that paint the freeway pavement archetype of neon if only a heart could be trained to sit or stay I take it with me driving home about seventy it’s late which compounds its velocity but a heart can’t be trained and every night we both race home with only one of us arriving
Now an awful dream anemones growing out of my skin how the subconscious processes drowning and I watched cells dividing to herald more arrivals two four eight the biologically plausible nightmare of a scientist deep deep in sleep and under water.
Untethered untethered a psych ward day no one was there even as they sat there lost like reception a radio song cuts in and out and it’s not the same song that they hear anyway so I move politely on or try even my shadow self-conscious here they are not a ghost but it feels like a void here like an ache from a sharp blow like static no pieces no whole just cracks and […]
The day after the day leaving in the early dark the radio DJ playing soft songs to ease the hangovers even the broken rhythm of the rain is subdued. I dreamed you wrote to say that a tsunami almost got you I should really probably write you back and everyone else it’s just hard to grasp that these daily dull laps might seem comforting to someone who isn’t so weighted in place, so yes I’m […]
Venice, again. I had forgot the earrings I bought there and then lost, one after the other, maybe too careless with things, but never with feelings. I remember them, clear as the Adriatic, and it’s raining there while it’s raining here, and just how many places has this rain been? Counting the same place more than once, of course, as no place ever stays the same.
And just like that the ocean recedes, it got so close but spread itself too thin, and now returns to its silent, sunless depths. Silence. Eventually, the bear becomes balm, the bite of alone grows toothless— too well known. You wrote to me in words of loss, I haven’t yet found a reply— but agree we should get back out on the water, soon, that is, unless you’ve had your fill of straddling two worlds— […]
Here is a progression of leavings: leaving too late and with the wrong person, leaving too late, leaving at the correct time, still with the wrong person, leaving alone, leaving too soon, leaving before coming, that is, not going at all, which is forgoing going through motions, could be forestalling, but what could have been in time gets outweighed by all that was, or wasn’t–
The sun’s still out, is this fog or smog? Something fell, perhaps a cloud to Vermeer up the landscape. Can’t be sure of anything here, the interstate spanning the valley now floats high on condensing vapor. A growing thought, a blue-eyed wonder, sticks around under the soft chambray sky, the day refusing to cede to the night, and so this caprice lingers longer, too
You must feel so grateful when you get home– You’d think, the way I talk big, putting out fires. But really, I mostly sift through the ashes of what once was, in front of those who knew it far better. Any comparison would be unkind, and superstition would say, unwise, but to think that way would cheapen things. As if any of us really stood a chance– all that to say when I get home […]
This pigeon could be a dove but for its dull asphalt plumage and oil-slicked neck either a proud bruise or thumbprint or defect– it could never be Aphrodite’s pet but its dolent call still seems somehow sacred having traded sky and olive for the Underworld of a parking garage– level two to be precise where the pipe leaks and no one parks in the Acheron– it doesn’t judge just paces the empty ill-lit spots and […]
OPTIONAL POETRY 