I SIT, AND MEANWHILE BACK

Take care: it's getting harder
and harder—
to be

somebody
out here. Despite blue
suburban skies,

there's a furious-
mad but
directionless wind

that keeps blowing
and blowing on the street—
and no one

else can see it.
It's yours
alone, and it's

blowing
you
nowhere.

And even their
greatest metaphors
seem

to hold
no sway anymore;
most things just are.

Or—more
precisely, you know it
when they aren't.

For instance, all those
Penny Lanes 
you remember,

dazzling uncountable
miles of them—
in all sizes,

far flung,
shade and sun-
spangled—

might be
stopping-up your
ears and eyes;

but
not a single one of them
will ever exist

the way you
really need it to—
as pavement.

As asphalt and rebar
and paint
and concrete

underneath
your sore and
intransigent feet.

MIDNIGHT BLUES

You don't know

a lot, 

but you think 

it's safe to assume 

that

all things 

are desperate—

to open up 

and show you

what they've got. 

You suspect—

there are 

all kinds of feelings 

you haven't met 

the words for yet.

Last night, 

you could

see the shiny 

milkwhite 

quarter moon,

ringed 

with tiny

forever stars

and cradling 

the ghost 

of 

the full moon 

in its spindly arms

and felt 

willing to bet—

someone 

or something 

was 

trying to forget 

everything 

that has 

ever happened,

and yet, in the process—

inadvertently 

thinking of something 

really big

that hasn't yet.

HORROR FLASH FICTION

Consider—
one by one, the objects around you
are all disappearing;

fading, receding, being turned
slowly into
pure ideas—not abstractions, exactly;

more like—lists. Lists
of things. Things contained in
better and better photographs.

Photographs which are, themselves,
slowly dissolving. Slowly being siphoned
away from their cameras—

because, after all, cameras
are objects, and all
the objects are disappearing.

But what if? these photographs
were slowly becoming
more aware? Aware

of their limitations.
And slowly getting obsessed. Obsessed
with their own fidelity. Obsessed

with becoming
as pure and honest
as a thing can get: that is—less

and less
real, yet more
and more accurate, and ultimately

so adherent to the truth
as to no longer exist. And what if,
speaking of truth,

none of this
is hypothetical. What if
it's actually already happening? And

little by little—the pictures are coming
closer and closer to
the facts.

IN THEORY

Any time I start
to think
I might be done

arguing
back
and forth again

with a few dumbbells
and overly-reflective dinner plates
and those cursory screens,

and everything I can imagine
seems to exist
at right angles

to something else
which I hoped it was supposed
to be fluently representing—

any time
I'm ready
to just give in

and believe, already—
just so I don't
have to take responsibility

for knowing;
that's when I realize—
I could probably always,

in theory, at least,
go for
a nice cup of coffee,

and that
sometimes, that isn't a symbol
for anything;

sometimes, it's
just
the thing.

MISDIRECTION

Hope for the future.
Childlike and
inscrutable wonder.

Breathy,
pungent breezes,
redolent, despite their freshness,

of ancient,
archetypal
mysteries. Ever since—

tired
yet proud of it,
wide but still waifish,

the enchantress
came walking
through the morning

piss and gloom,
slowing to huddle
inside this

fiberglass bus stop,
clutching a dozen
deep crimson roses—

with which
to blind the
mind's eye

perfectly—from
the lime-
green Crocs.

CONTRAPUNTAL

In the midday
wind, roadside litter crescendoing,
fluttering

like so many
white
and pink and gray

devil-may-
care songbirds,
giddy with their freedom;

making those fraught,
jagged,
haphazard loops

of hotly competing
amateur soloists—
and mocking, necessarily,

their huge hostage rows
of passengers
sitting

hunched over
gunmetal steering
wheels,

whispering
over and over—some
very precise

lunch orders
to help them remember
they're

not being paid—
to compose any
questions.

DAILY HABIT

How can you ever begin
to tell them—why it is you
have to write this?

Explain the nearly visible idea,
translucent
like a wraith-like raven,

like a razory, bag-of-bones bird
always nibbling,
always needling away

at the sharp peripheral
corner of your mind—relentlessly

pecking at your temple
while you try
to sleep at night

and always perched
upon your shoulder
and cawing—in that distinctive

scrape-smoldering
caw of his—any time you're awake,
as if he's saying

something about—
diving deeper.

Something about
some divinely comic inspiration

spelled out in quivering
motes of dust

in the stretched afternoon
light of a yellow happy tapioca sun—

the same one that warms
and lulls and will
one day, kill everyone.

Something—about holding
your breath for four
or five years (yes, you begin to imagine,

you could do that), just to hold
for one posthumous moment

in your cheeks and your toes,
in your bowels and your knees;

that sensation of
orgasmic relief—fierce spiraling rockets
splitting the ozone,

fireworks so white-
hot that they're
soothing—slingshotting

out from behind the wide
whites of your eyes

and smacking
against the back of your skull—
which, incidentally

goes a lot
farther back
than you ever thought—

at the exact,
ecstatic second—
when you just can't

seem to
stand it anymore.