And Forward

When I sleep
At night and
Wonder
What I should dream about
The ooze gets to me
And pulls me tight
Like a roll of Ace tape
To keep my alignment
And my organs intact
And I sit bandaged
Lying trapped
In a soft unconsciousness
Of draped ideas
And none of them
Are particularly good
And none of them
Will wake me up
And move me backward
And forward

My Child

Sits in a library in the afternoon.
I'm away, maybe even busy,
And he drags his fingers across
The spines of the book
Like he's playing a xylophone.
He smells the old wood
The pulpy cheese scent
Mixed with the bitter ink
The two fermenting each other
In their closeness for years
As he looks for the oldest book
He can find.
But he stops.
This may have never happened
I wouldn't know if it had.
I wasn't there.
When he presses his cheek on the
Linoleum table top
And traces an invisible pattern
That only he could imagine
As he falls asleep,
His temple fusing with the table.
I come back for a moment
In his darkness
Just to make sure he's still there.

"JK Rowling"

JK Rowling
Looked at cows
And created Harry Potter.
I look at my toaster
And don't even know if it's plugged in.

Later

An acorn drops from the apex of some tree
And it falls on the soft branches
Still light from spring.
The leaves still have their fuzz,
Invisible but there, like the hair on my temples,
Like a hiding peach.
The spring was so late the ducks haven't grown
They're small like marbles, rolling on the waves,
Smoothing their feathers with oil as they shake their bills.
The weeds greet and sprawl across the surface
Sleeping on the tops like sinewy lilies.
I'll write this all in later.
The balls of my feet heat up over the hill
And as I walk upwards I can see over the bridge
The clouds, polished smooth from the wind,
Glassy almost, preened for a perfect moment.
And I'll write this all in later
Unless I've forgotten.

"Our True Nature is Happiness

Like the iterations of needles
On the edge of a pine.
Humans are meant to be happy
And this is their state."
I may be just a depression
In this patchwork of joy
That all humans say they should feel
But what does that make me?
Bliss is the purest form of happiness
Like pure coconut oil,
Too nourishing, too rich for skin,
Lipids too long for our cells to understand.
And yet we marinate ourselves in it
As if one day our pores will say
"Oh yes, this is what we needed
All along." But cells know best.
They know what they are
When we lie
Why we do it.
And so the oil stays on the surface,
Shallow and slimy, slippery and thick
With fat.

In Memoriam

The hill by my house is steep and smooth
And sometimes when it's damp out
The tiny grooves on my tires fail
On my elderly car
And it stalls. I start it up again
Looking up at the street lights
Curved like ribs on a snake
As if the road were its spinal cord.
Each lane line is a vertebrae
And its head is where I'm going.
I like my description of my tires
Of the lay of the highway
Of the sad state of my car
With a rusted chassis
Brittle as silver leaf in a tapestry thread
And I wonder, "where have I been?"
What has taken me so long?

My car purrs as I let some tears out
And I stroke the dashboard, telling it
"This won't happen again."
On the radio I listen to a story of a boy
Who remembers the only time his mother held him
Because he only pretended to sleep.
I've never held my writing.
I've never held the weight of a rusty sedan.
I've never even held everything that I could say.
Something explodes in my brain, spontaneously
Like fuel in an engine,
And off I go.