#36

Stranger Fishing Trip

Patterns in the boat's wake
catch things already caught,
memories too frail to save.

Your piebald hands draped
over the hatch. Through slots
I see patterns in the boat's wake.

I imagine pools at the bottom of the lake.
The rod catches, string taught
as memories too frail to save.

I play as though I have no stake
in petty bribes to the cod,
their patterns in the boat's wake.

I've got my hand, it's shake,
to contend with as well. Got
a patched body too frail to save.

We've all got diseases to share, take.
Purple air burns down as the sky breaks.
This memory is too frail to save,
a shifting pattern in the boat's wake.

#35

Doctor says I gotta try

Imagine a perfect place, he says:

There is a white room.
It is always white and bare

at first. I fill it with my mind.
It's instructions are filled

with no question or alarm.
There is a big, fluffy bed

that basically leads into chairs.
A large, beautiful television.

I have everything to relax, eat,
and write with Lauren there

to keep me sane. In just wanting
a thing we have it. Feels like

we deserve something special
after everything. We'll learn

not to appreciate it soon enough.
The darkness never comes

that is not peaceful. Oranges
in a bountiful number. Hair

bright and shining and in multiple
colors. Weightlessness and how,

always how, we wanted to look.
Imagine how claws would grow

in us to stay there. It is too much
to imagine that I could imagine

something terrible. That we cover
ourselves in something bad.

I'll take it though. I'll take it never
paid off or even really mine.

I'll try to fly if it puts me right
in the damn sun. Come along.

#34

The Safety Poem

Well if I fell into a real deep hole?
Who would be there to pull me out?

Suppose the hole went deeper down
and I found my people.

A tribe that jealously strove
for the future. Every ugly event

that they grabbed for they tore apart
for the early learning. Imagine I learned

a dirty lesson down there. In holes
there are no meanings. As we

do not live in fantasies many
things are true. Many men

are crushed or moved to dig
and dig. Just leave the hole.

Imagine that you learn nothing
as I learned to imagine. Family,

fortune kept from all of the dirt
I could fit under a fingernail.

#33

Sestina for Summer 07 and Kerasotes Theaters 12

My worried feet hit the warm pavement outside the theater.
The people in winding lines, who do not yet disgust me, laugh.
I do a work squirm into a bowtie and a mauve hat that deadens my hair.
With this dumb dome only eighty year old women give me a smile,
right before they buy a landfill's worth. I persistently worry
about the popcorn level, filling myself over the paper edge.

I watched several things birth out of the screen here, on the edge
of my seat for a midnight ride. But, the new feeling from the theater
is only a constant churn of acid and butter flavor. The way the worry
forms inside of me, grasping and groping until I flee from the old laughs.
The shows are a horror variety here where managers lurk stealing smiles.
Looming, they smile over me with blunt performance warnings. It wilts my hair.

Tucked away from this viscous drudge I remember a slender girl's hair
on a hot, nervous first date night. I only managed to see the edge
of the screen for the view of her strange, alien figure, wishing for her smile
to explode into frame. It stayed loose and absent. So, there is the theater
that has always had this heart of disappointment inside of it. High pitched laughs
of new teens and their sticky wars in the aisles haunt me, adding to the worry.

In the soda circles and burnt hot dog vomit, I presently wander in worry
that I cannot sweep in proper ways. The popcorn sticks to the hair
that worried itself to the ground and ground itself into gum. The laugh
of the man on the fake radio station is a demon rattle. I think his knife's edge
is so sharp to cut the human condition as it does, in half. The blank theater
managers who yanked him from Hades must have found a beautiful smile.

I sing hard and embarrassing in the gray, droning back room to prepare my smile
for times when it is an actual thing. The beat up band that leads my worry
into a different place. Out the community center doors and around the theater's
hot, twisted grasp. Their claw diminishes with the chorus and dies with a hair
whip and a to-the-rafters yell. Time erases so quickly that it has no lasting edge.
Its bite is soft and numbing. It leaves little moments to catch your breath after a laugh.

Day dawns when I hit the doors, that final midnight shift over. I have a single laugh
for the moon, which must be my new sun. The fake radio devil carves a new smile
onto each thing I do. I confidently come across the pavement and at the edge
of the glass doors ride into the old place, where always an hour and a half worry
salve waits, through the impotent hell-travelers and salty smells. I can let my hair
down in the dark rooms. No longer the arbiter, broom splintering in hand, of the theater.

With my crown down the weightlessness marks me. There are other things to worry
people into the ground like edges of popcorn. I laugh, smile, and run as a hare
into a future full of green places. There is not enough natural green in a theater.

#32

Making Love Happen

I am love with the gas fireball. It keeps my relationship with the gas stove fresh. It keeps lighting me on fire. I keep coming back from the hospital gloriously alive in the newest places. In the arms now and the face. After you left with everything but stove you thought I might be alone for awhile. You thought I would have to think awhile about what I did. What we did to each other would be all over my dirty, damned mind. Not not so.

Every day I go to the grocery store and buy three pounds of bacon. I bring it home and light up the stove. I let the gas run for awhile. I unwrap the bacon while I wait and feel it's cool grease on my hand and my arm. I wear a bacon glove to entertain myself. A strike for your plan. When my gauntlet bores me I stare into the burner. It's light keeps me alive. The hospital must have an understanding that I have bacon to burn through. Which is true. I place the wrap on my burns and bring them in. They started at my fingers and spread, like the staff's suspicion. Until I am buried in the bills I will wait in our house with my new lover. I will sleep in the kitchen and hold her.

I wonder when her flame will flicker. I wonder when the heat won't seem so exciting to the touch. She'll go just like you. The parts of me that felt something will die, one by one. Hands to arms to legs to feet to any nerve ended place. I hope you'll come back before that. I know you'll be here to light my fire again. Some glorious, blazing bright day.

#31

Digging

The places that I've found to build my house in:

The unshakeable space between the halt in your breathing
and its starting again.

The point in your teeth when you dig the fresh current
of my skin. The salmon spawning color in your gums.

The curve in the body that also bends and layers
down. The painter's crevice in a playful shadow.

Each blood vessel that carries you past blushing
points and into something dense and bright.

The lucidity out on the edge of your eyes, that powerful
ledge that holds up understanding.

Each line and grasp of your hand. The bones underneath
of glorious, bleached bedrock.

I will build.
I have a loving, digging, moving shovel.

#30

The House of the Risin' Sun

I'm aiming to live in the Risin' Sun
Where Dylan lived with the Animals then
My bag's on the track where the Orleans train runs

I've been a good son and had a fair share a fun
They tell me that don't make no legends of men
I'm aiming to live in the Risin' Sun

Make a ruin of myself, so destruction will come
Take a pair of unlucky young girls as bad friends
My bag's on the track where the Orleans train runs

Every day before summer I'd think as I'd hum
Of the sound of a man when his life hits the end
He's aiming to die in the Risin' Sun

With nowhere to go on the edge of a gun
He's riding the line 'till it halts and descends
His bag on the track where the Orleans train runs

In the glint of the passenger windows I'm him
I'm gonna live transformed in the dirtiest den
My bag's on the track where the Orleans train runs
I'm aiming to live in the Risin' Sun