Daily
Scrawled grocery lists
and Friday afternoon traffic jams,
the smell of lumber in a big box hardware store
and sprinkles on sundaes.
Toothpaste splatters on a 6am mirror
and yearly performance reports.
Separate fibers
overlapping,
spinning,
weaving day by day
such a warm tight
swaddle of flames.
February 2014, Denver, CO.
Eleven below
at one o’clock in the afternoon
in Denver,
the lungs are small.
Inhale
and the air forces
its hand down
bronchial tubes.
Cold rushing
expanding squeezing
tormenting mocking
the collective caveman
brain that hyperventilates
siren-like inside.
“You shouldn’t
be here.
You shouldn’t
be here.
You shouldn’t
be here.
You shouldn’t
be here.”
Exhale
all that’s left
and the center cracks
outward like shattering glass,
still
but not whole.
Ghost memories
in escaped vapor.
Empty Pools
An extended line of empty pools
uncared for,
creeping over with algae,
sitting behind some abandoned
American Dream
White Flight ranch houses,
the overpowering permeation of chlorine
long since faded.
I have sympathy for
the children
in that deprived
neighborhood.
All their parents must
force them
to piss in their own toilet.
Reflected
I spent last night
half drunk
in my backyard
tossing pebbles into
an open pan of melted snow
reflecting a full
January moon.
When the rocks hit
the water they
rippled the Sea
of Tranquility
and sent wandering
neighborhood coyotes howling.
Sense and Order
Numbers are just symbols
for something else.
Alone they are meaningless.
Cold, dry
scratches on a page.
Random lines connected
to the universe
by brilliant Arabs,
much like an alphabet
gifted to the Western World
by the Ancient Romans.
Heartless, war-crazed, expansionist
conquerors
that carried with them
a gathering
of lines and angles.
Both sit quiet, senseless, hollow
on a page
until
someone writes the words
and someone else reads them:
In the summer
of 1994,
3 months
after your abortion,
I tried to kiss you again
in your parents’ backyard
but you pulled away
and all I could taste was
the salt
from your tears.