it’s still light out early to bed a headache all day dull creeping thing– absence too spatial, temporal the gingko trees or the sky in between I take it back though there is no void nothing is relentlessly a thing the streetlight comes on a breeze stirs the leaves thunderstorms tomorrow no reprieve
surprising, the sun today surprising, the sunset dramatic on the rooftop suffused, cinematic and people being kind genuinely good it makes the worse worse the same way presence augments absence the news is so bad the night so beautiful long long notes from bitter -plucked strings
At night the half -constructed tower is full of light and nothing else, each morning recently it has snowed, heavily, after a period of rain, it is natural and unsettling what fills the hours, open places devoured, as if commodities– mere weeks till spring, and then what?
How many words for snow what could be long-awaited or sudden sea change overnight the gulls are beside themselves the city roofs are white ice-plated pavement you are far and likely to stay that way for a while the sky is still flakes dislodge in the breeze whole trees dissolve into white pixels and then it all starts up again like an orchestral chorus overwrought and beautiful it makes its own time
a game, to step around the fallen leaves, to not disturb the early hours you can’t not face it properly cold out now and it isn’t a coincidence if there’s a causal link what comes next is mostly predictable
It’s sunny in the mountains but it isn’t sunny here fog expands, descends bright with day but clinical, sterile silence like a tumor excised or silence like the scalpel– malignant and precise– the skyscrapers disappear into the white inversion, soundlessly no breath of wind the gingko leaves a thousand stilled tongues
It is an active quiet low jets in their final approaches cars accelerating all departures the lights in the half-finished tower go out in blocks goodnight, goodnight the muffled bassline of some song in passing the man-made geometries of light against a matte black night no moon, no stars just the bright cascade of glass bottles into the bin behind some bar the city full of emptiness expanding out like a lung
heart of the city cracked asphalt like fire’s detritus it had to be hotter than they said it was feeling the heat even now late the air crackles against faceless glass infinite expansion manifest destiny new construction no heart no love in the man-made canyon voiceless only noise a bottle crushed under tires a snapping metal wire until a man speaks from his rooftop only five stories up leans over and says this this is […]
Arcturus again nights in the city a bus sighs, idling, sounds of passage, low tide traffic and the distant warmth of disembodied lights from a great enough distance things become clear a deserted rooftop everything coursing below and it isn’t lonely at all, somehow
First seen from afar bas relief of steel the edges of Manhattan and proof that it does end and one hot train from Newark is how it begins a car on its rails a needle in its groove a burst of static and the track starts to play
OPTIONAL POETRY 