a gaggle of revellers giddy
with booze screaming
forced joy at their tottering
friends running for the suburban hills and
the whoosh of a passing car
eddying the damp nocturnal air and a
lonely firecracker letting off
at the year’s passing through the
same night arbitrarily, divided
i use all the gears
tearing down these lanes,
evernarrowing while never quite
running out of road, not lost but
somehow losing my sense of self in
this evershrinking island; its
shredded coast distantly
crumbling, inevitably,
into the yawning sea.
they cancelled the trains
on new year’s eve eve
and left them stranded
here alone with me, meh.
she wasn’t there: perhaps she’s
hidden in a vessel in my
brain, perhaps she’s wandering
disconsolate among the remains of a
longforgotten dream. Either
way she’s gone now & i don’t
know how/when/if i’ll ever,
ever get her back.
Every day is different
Except when it’s the same
i’ve lost a world
inside of me. Daily
i’d take her out, all twinkly
& alive, humming with
an energy oblivious to
confinement. I’d
take her out, turn her
gently round in my
upturned palm, lovingly
put her back inside for
safekeeping. Today
I capture the moment but it eludes me
Spinning around it reveals its nature:
Not one moment, but many, a day of moments
All equal, banal to an outsider’s eye
Facets of an amorphous whole that isn’t really there
A ladder poised against a gutter
An ugly collection of Italianate marble urns refusing to decay
The sun, courteous words with a neighbor
A cup of tea grown cold
My son in the car chatting on the way to wawa
You used to fence there I know
A deckside lunch, lackluster food
Family
Wrestling on the couch
A hug
More likely, far
from this new
emptiness, a
different kind of
life in this, or another,
universe:
a birth, cradled by an isolated dip in
spacetime, never knowing, never
caring it’s all happened before,
happens again; until happenstance
itself ceases, and there
is, and was,
no time.
barefoot, we paused a little to contemplate
the silent noise ;never the long-ago reason we
left our sneakers and socks behind
One day, one night, the
world will end; all
memories and art and
artifice will cease and we,
our helixes unravelled,
will disappear
as if we had never been.
Perhaps, some ship of fools will
survive the many lifetimes it takes
to reach another world worth living on;
perhaps, hitching a ride on some lonely
asteroid, a virus or two will seek out
new chains to infect. Perhaps not.
inconsistencies; recalibrates ·her
perspective; smiles like the
first time she heard him:
He will make them all go away
all the ones not like me.One by one they will all be
gone, picked off, shipped off
someone else’s problem now.
and she in ·her world,
soothed unfurrowed
unencumbered bewombed.
And only ·his
voice, ·his words,
and ·nothing else.
barefoot, we walked from one
house to the next, halfhopping
the gravel driveway to the relative
relief of the tarmacadamed road,
baked just enough to smart
young, shoe-sequestered feet
barefoot, we found the road peppered
with islands: horseturd patties,
tireflattened and desiccated, the
strawlattice carpeting a soothing
intermission in our awkward progress
barefoot, we skipped on down the hill to
where the brackened floor of the woods began,
cracking to the tune of our heels
i started writing poems because i
wasn’t getting laid. Then i wrote
poems about getting laid, then
not getting laid and wanting to
get laid; then getting laid… & ♻.
I wrote poems about hating who
i was; i still write those, i guess.
I wrote poems about:
ideas ·but in things’).
Yet i never wrote about
love. So why start now?
She faces the bowl of emptiness and
dips of regret; remembers what never was.
On the halfshattered screen of ·her phone she
contemplates the man whose vague promises once
spoke to her, as twinkling hopes in some
glossy firmament; she rationalizes the
the arsehole in me stands railing at the unjust world
, where ignorance & entitlement walk hand in glove
the arsehole in me protests endothermically, endlessly whir-
ring permutations of immediate & vengeful schadenfreude
the arsehole in me is never the better person, is always
right(eous), indignant unforgiving, unyielding
; un-everything.
The arsehole in me never does anything, never
leaves the cage he angrily rattles, never sees the
bigger picture, or the needs of others, unless projected
through my own need to divest guilt. I look hard at
the arsehole in me, and i think:
¡what an arsehole!
Walking up 7th avenue of a
friday morning among
10,000 office bound
and music
for 18 musicians blaring
in my
ears really (yes
really) fucks with
your
brain
If i were Jim Henson i’d be dead;
unsullied by a surgeon’s knife,
uninvaded by tubes where tubes should not go:
unsliced
unstitched
unhere
The city is the place we go to
be alone together; little pockets of
ego vying for anonymous attention
We spread our wings, yet stumble,
suffocating among the towers that
suck out the winter sunlight
We come to the suburbs to
recapture ourselves, our meaning in
society, and procreate
