love and dumpsters

don’t tell me I know

Those are pearls that were his eyes.

Some years of his life had been staked on her, like impaled, he could not think to let them go for nothing, the years and all he had said to her. (He had spoken little or nothing to her all that time).

You eventually erase her contact info from your phone but not the pictures you took of her in bed while she was naked and asleep, never those.

We two, how long we were fool’d, Now transmuted, we swiftly escape as Nature escapes, We are Nature, long have we been absent, but now we return, We become plants, trunks, foliage, roots, bark, We are bedded in the ground, we are rocks, We are oaks, we grow in the openings side by side, We browse, we are two among the wild herds spontaneous as any, We are two fishes swimming in the sea together, We are what locust blossoms are, we drop scent around lanes mornings and evenings, We are also the coarse smut of beasts, vegetables, minerals, We are two predatory hawks, we soar above and look down, We are two resplendent suns, we it is who balance ourselves orbic and stellar, we are as two comets, We prowl fang’d and four-footed in the woods, we spring on prey, We are two clouds forenoons and afternoons driving overhead, We are seas mingling, we are two of those cheerful waves rolling over each other and interwetting each other, We are what the atmosphere is, transparent, receptive, pervious, impervious, We are snow, rain, cold, darkness, we are each product and influence of the globe, We have circled and circled till we have arrived home again, we two, We have voided all but freedom and all but our own joy.

One year they broke up seven times and threatened to do it another nine times.

My Heart That Mississippi chicken shack. That initial-scarred tabletop, that tiny little dance floor to the left of the band. That kiosk at the mall selling caramels and kitsch. That tollbooth with its white-plastic-gloved worker handing you your change. That phone booth with the receiver ripped out. That dressing room in the fetish boutique, those curtains and mirrors. That funhouse, that horror, that soundtrack of screams. That putti-filled heaven raining gilt from the ceiling. That haven for truckers, that bottomless cup. That biome. That wilderness preserve. That landing strip with no runway lights where you are aiming your plane, imagining a voice in the tower, imagining a tower.

A. Machine Hey, I am learning what it means to ride condemned. I may be breaking up. I am doing 85 outside the kingdom Of heaven, under the overpass and passed over, The past is over and I’m over the past. My odometer Is broken, can you help me? When you get this mess- Age, I may be a half-ton crush, a half tone of mist And mystery, maybe trooper bait with the ambulance Ambling somewhere, or a dial of holy stations, a band- Age of clamor and spooling, a dash and semaphore, A pupil of motion on my way to be buried or planted or Crammed or creamed, treading light and water or tread and trepidation, maybe. Hey, I am backfiring along a road Through the future, I am alive skidding on the tongue, When you get this message, will you sigh, My lover is gone?

I still love words. When we make love in the morning, your skin damp from a shower, the day calms. Shadenfreude may be the best way to name the covering of adulthood, the powdered sugar on a black shirt. I am alone now on the top floor pulled by obsession, the ink on my fingers. And sometimes it is a difficult name. Sometimes it is like the world before America, the kin- ship of fools and hunters, the children, the dazed dream of mothers with no style. A word can be the boot print in a square of fresh cement and the glaze of morning. Your response to my kiss is I have a cavity. I am in love with incompletion. I am clinging to your moorings. Yes, I have a pretty good idea what beauty is. It survives alright. It aches like an open book. It makes it difficult to live.