* * *
Lines like Bees, Like Ghosts
I wake up still drunk, wines scabs on my lip, steady stumble to the cafe, and I pick the seat at the outside table right next to the grumbling homeless man. My mind is muttering to itself just like he is. It slices the lines of the book of poetry between my hands, and then I’m mouthing and breathing the words, Frank O’Hara – sometimes we lose ourselves, the streams between conscious and unconscious blur together and suddenly the rain and the river are the same thing and I can’t make out the shore. He’s waving his arms in the middle of the street and still rambling as my pen makes underlines in the book, and then the man takes his seat beside me again and says softly, “This is your book, of your poetry.” My eyes start to sweat because he’s right, it is mine when I breathe it out, this is what happens when I wake the words, when I stir the dead.
Two months ago I met six-foot-tall dimples and a mouth to match my own. We talked about what god we pray to and how everyone in the city shares the weather like a story we’re all living together. He went north and I daydreamed of telling him to take that ring out of his lip and put it on my wedding finger, that I only have one muse and she lives in a red mess in my chest– if you want to know how to fix me I make more sense in the dark, and in the morning the sun will be a huge bell through the window, a car alarm that we have no response to but try to drown out with our own music. Even though he went north to make the mountains purple, I still think about him every day. The final star in the constellation, pointed like a compass– this is what happens when I hunt ghosts, when I stir the dead. How can I stop believing there is meaning everywhere when the trees in this park lose their wings like tearing hundreds of bees. God, say all that is hard to say. Give me something before you take it away. Wake his words and give me his vibrato, it comes in heavy shakes, an earthquake that rocks me to lullaby.
* * *
Where Did That Firefly Go?
She Ate My Glow and Left
In the light of the first night of this new year,
I try to forget her in the bathroom sink,
I try to forget her in the curtain folds,
but the morning always grabs me,
an alarm of daybreak or its slow coma,
and I cannot forget her there.
In the space where I search for sleep’s lost images,
I try to write her back to me.
Write her hair falling like silk worms,
releasing from the tree.
Write how everything lives in a circle.
The trees grow their fur for the sun, then molt for winter.
By this same law she should return to me.
But the repetition of keys types the time out of the clock,
and the sun puts the morning on a stretcher
since the birds are speaking their siren,
an ambulance, my gentle defibrillator.
In my room without lightning,
the building earthquivers,
bending in the wind.
My bottle of wine draws me a bath
where time overlaps,
a Venn diagram of night and morning.
My kneecaps jut out of the bathwater.
I awake hours later,
the right half side of my face
draped in the cool water, having lost its nerve.
Without her,
I am when flowers turn brown.
I am blank like a dead marque.
Nothing is coming.
