Letter by Letter

Stop using your hands to cover your body in the basement is a punching-bag that belongs to the young man upstairs asked not to use it in the kitchen a mouse we’ve never seen fingers along the doorframe an abstract feeling of ugly can keep you indoors with these lonely-feeling the way a rainbow disappears on a blue set or a row of quarters into the dryer that tumbling sound as a child when your mother washed your tennis-shoes and they did emerge again but how now like something that belonged to somebody else

Did i wake up in human kindness?

Calendar of Days not to Remember

Brighton Beach, after flu: March, a Tuesday, the air purple-fingered on my sun throat, everyone but old people—shuffling down the salt weary boards—had something bigger to do. I found you a crab claw the color of a baby's eye (blue), open just enough for a breath to breathe through.

Coincidence, not Mere

I HAD A RAINBOW ON MY
IN A ROOM WITH PEOPLE

WHO LOVED ME WITH

PEOPLE I LOVE(D)WHAT

WOULD I DO WITHOUT

YOU IN THE WORLD WHAT

WOULD I DO WITHOUT

YOU IN THE UNIVERSE

WHAT WOULD I DO IN THE

UNIVERSE WITHOUT YOU

Not for lack of sorrow

The clock's hourly bird buried in the bed linen. Am I the only one here not weeping my eyes out? I am. And I am the only one here. Remember the rock we sat on together, knees bent in the same sun. A heron cut the creek-shine like scissors renting a backdrop. What did we expect would be revealed? More bloody dogwood, less toweled love? It's seven days since we last spoke. In human terms, called a week. Which means our distance has become measurable. And yet, a few strides down the front walk, I find myself in the middle of the ocean. That sudden, overwhelming sense you're not going to make it. The noiselessness of grass all froth. As I never predicted—every mechanized bird cry'd go through me—until I stopped hearing what's real.

Winter is the center of something I can't

When was the last time I read something that

The thing is, I could die here.
The thing is, you could die.
I/we/you/they/us could, at anytime die. Here or there, in a field with the single pony named Ginger Ale, beneath clouds trimmed with fat and gold, and live oaks farther off, lining the highway and it's about to rain. The pony's eyes are broken blue and he swings his head to listen, and all over the nicked ground are the hoof trimmings from actual horses. It's about to rain and everything, everything from that life makes a memory that chokes.

And some die in their own beds, cheek to cheek beside the stuffed rabbit brought as a gift for being born.

I'm not asking you to listen.

On a ferry from Denmark I did 4 shots of Jagermeister by 10 a.m., and settled in to watch Polish Forrest Gump. The view outside the window was all sea to the point where the horizon imposed some relief. My geography fails me to say which sea, but water, as we all know, and deep. A man led me from the bar to a small ship's room. He laid on top of my clothed body. Beyond his right shoulder a curtained sun. From very far below us, rocking. I slid my hand down the wall's seam.

Something from that hour has stayed with me.

But fixed to the page like a merciless star,

a mosquito,
how many summers ago,
you closed in your book.

The farthest to occur

LIMITS/DISSOLUTION

impossibly pass/impossibly remain

never explicitly stated

scenario for the unlikely