Fire & Ice

I’m not your friend

Until maybe tomorrow

Or Tuesday

My schedule is somewhat hazy

And

And

Wait

And

I could never pick the candy bar I wanted.

And…

I’m not a disposable camera

I’m not an expendable employee

I’m not your favorite toy

Grown old and dusty and thrown to the corner

I will not be a soda can

Drained of its purpose and crushed into a pile

Of un-purposed matter

Although I know I’m deserving of it.

And…

On windy days like this,

I would give my heart to be a buffeted tree,

To waver but retain that grip on the ground,

No more being dragged to unknown terrain

And dropped, disoriented, struggling to find my way

Back to the empty hole

Where I had just been standing.

And…

I’ve said before

I feel as though I’ve lived ninety years

In twenty year’s time

Without the happy accomplished memory

That sometimes comes with age

Now I believe I’ve only lived an instant

Because past and future are both pictures

That continually flash and are burned

Because the only proof that they both exist

Is in my condescending scars

And the hope that sometimes fills me up.

Coraline

It’s been articulated in every direction,

Spilled from its carton by a boisterous child

And it’s dripping off the edges of the counters

And leaving footprints through the halls.

Some could say

It no longer needs attention,

And some could say

The mess it has left

Ought to be cleaned and sanitized.

But despite its history of chatter,

Love maddens me

As though a wire were strung through my chest

And looped around my heart,

And the further you walk away from me,

The more it burns,

The further I’ll walk where you lead.

The stories that do not leave me

That color my dreams

And sharpen my days

Hurricane around me with great force

And you, inexplicably,

Are standing with me at the center

You are the keystone in songs

That itch in my ears

And fill my skull with eerie light.

Some could say

That without you on this earth,

Beauty would pass through me like a window screen

Unconscionably unnoticed,

A golden spindle wrapped in graying thread.

lithium carbonate

London’s on her way

Back into my eyes and ears

Like fog sinking down from the celestial plane

And wrapping round the weathervane.

Words come slower than they did,

Catching up their coats and dashing from the unemployment line

To see what the new development is and, hopefully,

To get a graveyard shift.

The sound of rain on the darkened asphalt of Palace Court,

Of tin foil clenched in a child’s fist,

Comes rampaging out of an unswept corner of the year previous,

And drenches me in fear,

The kind that fills up your answering machine with unrelenting calls.

The broken heater, the glass-top table,

And the loquacious sound of letters being opened,

Followed by sinking news of home,

These things bury me.

New Jersey

“It’s time to help.”

Like a bath in chocolate syrup.

And as bright as lemons.

With no stacked absences.

And no tired glances.

With concrete waiting for my feet

And all the strangers I could meet

And no eternal last defeat

A life like brazen gold.

Answers come to those who wait

They come upon a silver plate

I’ll love the things that I should hate

And live before I’m old.

Space Invaders

Words line the roof of my mouth

Puff out my cheeks until holding them in makes breathing difficult.

Shaking with anger, or fear, or both

All cradled up in a fire of eyes.

Lusting after catharsis in the gloam of a computer keyboard

At 11:11 on a Monday evening

When words tumble out in sightly uniform

But bridges, heaped in ashes, safely burned

No sweet return with seemly lessons learned. 

Unlucky

Concerning the business of finishing second—whether

Honey sticks to the palms of your little ones

Because it was sticky from the moment it dripped from the bottle

Or it became sticky once bonded with the soft flesh of hungry little hands.

Whether flowers in the garden die because they are not watered

Or if they die because they were fated to go unwatered.

A half-hitched hello is thrown to one

And a salutatory hurricane to another

In every half blind eye,

The kind that twitches in the act of chewing. 

The Olympics never famed a silver medalist. 

In the rainforest, when a green behemoth falls

To the leafy floor (a grand old sage who likely saw

The forests’ beginnings, when the old magi

Spun his honing wheel into green and brown

And sprinkled it out across the wet earth),

The only sapling to survive and take his place is the one

Who grew from the most favorable soil.

The lucky sapling who was intended from the start

To make the canopy seamless again.

God favors his fated favorites.

Keep the fiery fingers dormant in your chest,

Never allow them to escape,

Hold them at bay until the contents of your skull

Melt into a pool that seeps stagnant into the legs

And makes walking beneath the stuttering streetlamps

With your head up

An impracticality.

I’ll write another invisible epitaph

At three in the morning

Spin the words through my fingers in a manner that felt graceful at the start

But grayed with time, cracked along little weak points.

We’ll step toward the shadow of the stairs,

My left foot swinging outward slightly, habitually,

For an illusion of corrected balance,

And I’ll hold you back with everything in my arsenal

Other than my words and my arms,

But shoes pad their way up the stairs,

The door opens, the night rushes in,

And I’m alone again in the darkling house

With a familiar lovesick scent on my shoulder

And the air framed with yellow sparks.

Notes don’t come anymore,

At least, not like they used to.

I don’t trust them like I did

Not when the phone’s light illuminates a downturned face

And you get out of your seat and step outside

When every word that passes my lips,

That had festered in my stomach

And absorbed every inch of me

Is for you.

Four months in London

In a dusty room

With a stack of letters and a broken heater

And a capricious brain

But New Year’s came and went

Not with a bang but a whimper.