Fridge Note

Dear,

You are out of red meat and wine.
You are no man. From the beginning
I thought you would hack me up in
a trunk. Even you know you have not
been pleased that I am human and
eat stuffing or laugh at Larry David.
You thought we were a death-match
but I do not love your brittle soul.

Petit Chou

Make

the skin fit
to electroplate
with india ink

torch then hair
to a black bulb
scalp divine
unscrew eyes
to luxury
a radish

On the Floor

(scrubbing the milk
(you spilled at breakfast
(twenty years ago and
still you are (You little
shit--you spilled it!)

How well to one
we do our wrongs.)

The Bird I house free

with the second
I burst to yellow

an epiphany and the beak
breaks my chest

I feel the world rupture with song
from a lone wooden one

who knows everything opens
from nothing to then stop

with an apology of silence
and once closed inward

tucked with darkness
behind the door of its chamber

does then resume counting
the sound of its pulse

Where the Torso

All the fingers that hang
are branches growing out
of the surplus of a season,

and away from recognition--
that still they arch from one

The Glass, Having Broken

To Hover
To Want
To Burst

And Two to Hold

I feel often my hands are not
but made of wooden spools.

Bare and dry, these two hold
nothing and cannot know

any texture of another.
Until you are thread wound

like a corkscrew, dark in bindings;
defining movement and history.

Hunter

It sounds like rodent burrowing inside
a tree or someone unfolding
dried petals of a rhododendron,
whose lips are always bent
upon dissolving--

But it only you, as a child who digs
with a stick, deeper, closer to the minute limit
that an owl pellet circumscribes.

Each stab erases exactitude
of what the owl was, of the remaining whole
existence of the organism. Wondrous are
these cracks made now in decimals of bone
by you, merely touching

anything and nothing; so pure with want
to derive what color lines, like bark
the other side of someone's skull.

Untitled

No one embodies a metaphor
for sleep better than a lover
or my fish, Hamlet. In the dark,
he sinks beneath his flat eyes.

For the Flight

She is riding far too far away from us because she is yours,
your Cordelia. And she yells through curls
It is the cars, Daddy. Daddy, look at the black!
She is riding from them. What I would give
to catch her; I think I would let you go and would leave
you. I think I will go now and go
through cars and bodies for years. So often you, as anyone,
I have thought of what I would give
and tried often to make you have
entire drawers of me
paltry things I had wanted to have. You would remember
the bird perched on brown knotted leather,
kneeling and never ready to steal
itself away from your breast because you know it
for what it is and know it is not
a thing that is best. It is felt on you always
for the distance that exists. And we learn
a little more each year how to exist by giving each other less
because giving is baring us
as a confession. We are learning to love
turning ourselves into our opposite.

What Work It Was

It is funny to remember what walls
the mind silently built around itself
placing each with the attention of one
working out the layout of a labyrinth
and with the attitude that this is
what is delicate and so far beyond
what is sacred that it is only for one
to ever want. It is humorous now
to find, where once one lived, is nothing;
only the room inside a dime-pocket.

There are dark rooms, cavities for the soul
that unfold to bare one's whole existence
for as long as one is willing to stand
senseless and ignorant inside of them.
They have doors that look like mirrors inside
a line of mirrors. These are the doors to forever
close or affix open; either affords more
and more hinges to be used for change.

A Rose Is

not a poem
or even prose.
All one writes
about the rose is
what it is not.

For Good

At night Adam rolls over
to look at me, looking where
his rib is and softly tells me
he would like to have it back
by morning before he wakes
and remembers for good.

I, So Tired, I

want to sleep in my clothes
and give myself away
to no dream but find purity
streaming blankly across
my mind and then nestle
into the dark emptiness
of no one

Roses I had thought

might be nice at school in the room
that is a box, the length of a bed.
They were leftovers from Easter.
Ivory half opened and half
used, wholly unwanted. Rarely
do we crave what is slightly off
the edge of death. It might as well
die upon infection or infected
we will feel with fear. The passing
of the moment for passing, between
to pass and past, between
the voluptuous blossom and the hard
fragrant head held later is worst
to endure because it is the best
collage of where once we were
a mystery and where now one is
thick and grown over with clarity.

The Grape

the bug sees as fractals
and dreams of apotheosis.

The Room that Bodies Lamp

Hungry ribbed men
are lured naked into a box
surfaced with stiff faucets,

see their hard reflection turn
thin like ballerinas,
and change as the smell of gas

runs like perspiration.
Their grunts spit into music;
howls up, for security,

from bodies coursing down—
the dicks of history. Locking all
to mirror the make of a porno.

---------------------------
(cut up Eric's)

Body Bag on the Runway

No one cares much for the doctor
Or the nurse when there is a lady
Following with an alligator purse.

Even the child imagines the bag
To be a prize, with a wide-eyed
Gator head and leggy extensions,

Before knowing the price of real hide.

A doctor or nurse I would care for
On the street where there is a lady
Turning her magenta scarf into handles

To drag a dead dog from the street.
He hangs on her like a purse of cement
As if he were wanting still to stay

A blockade in the traffic of other bodies.

He reminds me of first carrying you
And the thought that if the doctor
Or the nurse had come in, into war,

There would not be a third, a lady
With a body bag--her purse full of you,
Who had gone, blown to once, and sent in letters.

You are well in death, a glossed hide
Having and hiding tight some lady inside.