Oneirophobia

 

All of this will be yours one day
he whispers
at his daughter and waves to a library of records,

books. In the street outside
a man tries to fight a bus with a penknife

and for all of the music halting this city
a flare goes up inside the noise
that says pay attention to me—in front of a dartboard

the wounded lover
wants so much from the show

but dear God the tickets were cheap and I’m drunk
so just let the jackals into my heart
where they can start laughing mouthfuls of hurt

like italics. I have recently encountered
the largest of the museumfish
but he can only play the piano

so our reasonable expectations of heaven are dashed.

 

 

 

 

Maximum Place

 

I look at the boats on the water.

I look at the women and men
on the boats on the water.

Nothing of them is swollen
like the void I suggest inside of this car.

Against the window of the taxi
I see my arm appear and behave
like my father’s arm and think of cousins

and their fathers’ arms
then push my eyes through the glass
to the pell-mell of cities cresting—tiles
that can only belong to water

and here in the swell exists
my father’s arms and his brothers’ arms
against then through
the glass a collection of body. I cannot explain

what shape those arms take

when they go up in the air
when they come down on the earth
when they move in every way

scouting for the head atop its torso
to bring their hands against

each time they remember how grief
labors unseen
onward and onward
stopping only to reintroduce its embrace

in the most routine actions of a day—

the women and men on the boats on the water.
It is the shape that allows a place

to expand back through and beyond
where time attempts
to fill the rent heart.
We will only witness—no joy can occupy.

 

 

 

 

In Bocca al Lupo

 

Fridays are meant for islands to tear
apart, water

to rush in, healed
wounds to open up ripe
in sunlit corridors made empty by your outline

at 3/4 profile. See the light
sloughing off me.
It is really just a cocktail of blood and chlorine

that I borrowed from your sister’s boyfriend
that one time he got too close
at the reunion

and I had to go outside for an hour.
Condolences

are placed on us as we attempt
to see our selves in a mirror that stays
shifting to and from focus—

a boat boarding the train for the salvation of cars;
a port approaching
in strangely the same manner
we move to each other
while the moon waits all over the roof

and we encourage
the toy animals inside us to play at the surface.

 

 

 

 

Simpatico, Simpatico

 

I move to the window with my prized teeth
and place my tongue

on the glass—I have become
a cautious
and belowless self. An academy of fireflies

settle in the yard and then
hexagonal eyes open blank passages

of freshly cut heartmeat. Thank you, I say

to them, for the red pen as it is helping very much
the crossing of my self out. Overhead

helicopters speed through the sky
in an attempt to unbreak

all of the people we will need but never recover.
This is the game

we gave away for our youth—the feeling
that you want to solicit.

The night is
jet-coat and has wet its self.
Little hands like intimate geysers go off unawares.

 

 

 

 

The Draftsman

 

In July I visited my dying grandfather.
I had a broken toe,
said I love you die softly steady landing.

No; I whispered it to my self in the corridor.

Time strides across the family body
a suitcase landscape
that we scrutinize in sixty-minute frames.
Then we are gone.

When they reopened
the plague-closed pools

I began constantly swimming—water escape—
building up my

motive strength stamina
to get purchase on the brightest exit
and backflip my self into the current.

A pool is static with no current.

I am the current; a floating gash of absence
racing
neon argon krypton xenon radon helium
across the sunset like a rodent

tearing into every food
in your kitchen

to die with mouthfuls of the same eager hungry.

 

 

 

 

Modern Entertainment

 

There is light on in my private darkness
and I cannot stop
arranging condiment bottles

in the door of my refrigerator while from another room
I hear a commercial

on the television for a local crematorium
and its initial conceit is money.

The clouds pore over unknown fields

the grass sweeps out
and part of me

lies down in the pall of the great furnace. I cannot wait
to be reclaimed by its fire.

Regrettably, my impatience diminishes
as I get further away
from harm and so all

of the pills I’ve hoarded over the years have spun into fruit
who burst like a bomb

in cartoons featuring rabbits and mice:

luggage—bag after bag, leather and reeking
of home, spill out
before the car as I try

to park it in the river. Leave me alone here—let me try
to refold these purple flowers

loosed by the hand who has always held me this way.

 

 

 

 

Paradox of the Heap

 

At the local university a group of men
take apart a cat
to see whether it loves like them

so if ever they need to augment reality
there is a general plan

as to how they could locate a heart.

Why do you think they’re stacking
all those dark rectangles by the shoreline
you ask across the table.

The sun crashes through us
like a wreck, glowing

fluent in pan-focus against the kitchen.
The men at the university

confide in each other their fears—
in summer lakes swim naked.

It’s got to be a stage.
Why else would there be so many people
running ravage at it…

I see the vestiges for what they are now—
reckless, arbitrary; giving
every new space the space to exit.

And you, turning away from me
with your open back an exact replica of water.

What was it we continued to pile
—under duress, atop our selves—
as we denied it could consume us. What

were those men trying to divide
their hearts from—

when did it turn into a thing
we could no longer refute. I can’t leave
you because we braced

the exits with our mouths and lilies and pages
like the pale battlements of a dream.