mining

Sifting through sediment for precious objects

valued minerals like pictures of time forgotten

scenes emerging from murkiness then receding

back into the river, only a few captured and

repurposed as mental adornments.

Here the drudgery of loss lives and dies

and memories, like stones, wear against water

but disappear much more quickly

song

Are you listening? Really listening?

I don’t believe you hear me singing.

The song and words are from my youth,

my Rosetta stone, unlocking me.

Desperate screams from disparate voices.

Melodies, trances; sight lost to hypnosis.

Answers to harmonies yet asked, while

choruses echo, three sentences passed.

Sing aloud in bathrooms and sewers.

Conjoin reality to fantastical rumors.

This is my opus, loud and long, listening

to the composer, my master, a song

carnival

Take one chance, throw the ring

You never know what tomorrow brings

Clichés and counterweights abound

In this forsaken one-horse, one-trick town.

Making love under the moon and starlight

Like we read in your magazine one night

Makes hell less hot, water less deep,

Back tatts brave, and footsteps fleet 

touch

touch my hand, here, flat on the table,

skin thin and wrinkled, but responsive.

Remind me why, and retell the story,

once, or even twice would be nice.

Follow me down the hallway,

and watch me

counting cracks on faces in mirrors

on walls in bathrooms at the far

end of the house,

in the guest bedroom, away from openings.

I’ve been back here,

wrestling ghosts I don’t believe in,

for a trophy out of reach, in a circle

in a square,

comprising the nightmares

and calculus of another’s making.

Tell me something different,

something meaningful and clever,

to win an argument

or calm a disjointed mind. It needs you.

begin

Jumping from the bank into the river

near where we all lived

Summer days, humid, stifling,

finding the only respite around

Taking turns diving in

while the rest watched excitedly

Sparing a few seconds to appreciate birds

crossing high from one treetop to the other

The soft whisper of wind seemed to speak to us

and approve of our folly

Those days were the launch of our lives,

reserved to daring, juvenile to adult

Auspicious and untethering

survive

Pulsing through each corner and curve

flowing into everythere simultaneously.

Pushing outward

unending for a time,

to the tips of my fingers, tingling and humming.

Speaking in my brain and humming at my ears,

determined essence, hemoglobin carriage,

rising to fill in an autonomic tumescence,

subterranean,

reptilian,

with a fallacious but firm resolution,

seeking only propagation and continuation

of these, and solely these, corpuscles