the sieve and the sand

I bought a watch
and your face replaced its face.
Your face: on my white arm
on the third seat back
of this bus.
Your face like an oversized freckle
with plans.
My room is cold and the things
in the roof are jumping in rhythm
with the tick
tick
of your night-time
recital.

Your face: down the
backstreets of
Brunswick, where graffiti leaps
from the walls
with thick sets of Achilles.
Where gutters slip and
buskers quote Chaucer
verbatim.
Click
tick
your face in my arm
like a swelling drip.

Uninvited like a brick lying on a seabed
Hole-heartedly wasting away
never minding god and men,
mulling over fishes’ easy swims in dirty water

I came in here to you alone
you sat, you frowned, at your cell phone.
A message on the screen was clear
your wife has left. She’s nowhere near.
So taking you for burritos
we talked, you sobbed, you blew your nose.
Beans, and rice, pico, and fat
I’d think could solve any lover’s spat.
But…
The truth is mexican can’t solve
Issues like two missing balls.

clear day through
a cracked window
with focus you can
truly see
how the smoke rolling out
of your head
now dissipates in the
sunlight

My lips are chapped and cracked.
They are also inconsequential,
as I should not be speaking. Pleased
if you do not let me speak.

I will foul things up I’m sure. These lips
don’t work so well to speak so chapped
and cracked and inconsequential
as they are. I will foul things up.

I will sit and wait this whole thing out.
I will let you do the fouling, if fouling
must be done, for these lips are chapped
and cracked and inconsequential.

dreams
(like poetry)
dont always make sense.
i’ve written enough to know
random symbols tied together
does not symbolism make.

metaphor followed by allegory
does not deep meaning create.

words in order randomized
does not a sage produce.

i’ll express vulnerabilities
as the rest has been
torn away through a slow
peeling as though dipped
in a lemon butter sauce
and pulled – each bite – slowly
through the teeth
filtering the meat from the
leaf.

tree scatters leaves like
ashes over sweeping grass
surging ocean waves

All the things you cannot count
are adding up around us.
And all the things you cannot change
have a oneway ticket to my pillowcase.
My pillowcase: the kamikaze.
The warm pancake of a thousand nocturnal
addicts. The night has figured you out. The
beer in your hand has figured you out. Your
bedside lamp is thinking. The moon is watching
you closely and there is nothing you can
do about it. But the moon is sick tomorrow.
The ticket inspector is sick tomorrow.
My shoes called in sick tomorrow and are
hiding in your pillowcase. Your hair is knotting.
Your wrists are swelling and clicking like
metronomes. Don’t expect to dream of angels
dear. I’m back in your bed and I’m back writing
poetry. Kiss me three times and roll over.
Sincerely, Kamikaze.

You are pent up aggression
yet you hardly move a hair,
Laid out and on display
like another used up metaphor
that no one consults anymore.

Though your fingers twitch to
scratch the ink to paper to scratch
the itch of lust of blood just
beneath the chin, you have not
made to move your mouth.

You could make bared teeth,
but faulty teeth too. How to
break the skin when those incisors
break upon it, really?

But though the rabid dog may not
deliver his pissoned gift, he still
will be put down and directly and
by any means requisite to keep
his faulty bite at bay.

Though hardly can we credit you
as a rabid dog. The dog, you see,
like his cousin the wolf, has the dignity
to mean to bite what he bites.

Your nibbles do naught but
cause to order up
an execution.

lets just sit
and allow water
to feel our curves
and wrinkles (as they may be)
and iron them out
or add to them
until we can no longer
stand the sand between
our toes
creeping up between
our ‘lower cheeks’

then lets stand,
run like children,
and body surf until the morning comes.

progress.
forward movement
with or without
momentum
moves me from
one step back
to one step forward

you know when
setting out for a run
you feel like vomiting
until a mile in
when your system
gives in and stops
fighting and overheats
and then enjoys it

progress.
forward movement
momentum-independent
until the moment i can
stop.

and brakes will do their
thing.
lazy boys on porches
with a bloodhound loud
and lazy as we scream
at children for being too
loud and the weather for
being too tough on our
knees.

yea.

progress. until we
stop.

You looked so good
in your Sunday’s Best
but on a Wednesday night?
I can not fathom why.

You looked damn good,
though. Cruel to say per
haps, circumstantially
speaking. You looked
damn good, though.

I bet you can get
way down in those
wingtip shoes, though.
Boy, I bet you
can get all the way down
in those black heels.

But on a Wednesday night?
I can not begin
to try to fathom
what you’re doing out.

up on the rooftop i hear this
dude in red walking round
stroking his beard and twinkling
his nose

our chimney is small to say the least
and the man can only be described
as “girthy”
so i sit and drink some christmas
flavored schnapps
(something about schnapps says christmas)
christmas schnapps
awaiting the round man.

i’ve got a new game you see
and i hear this guy can get down for a fat guy.

i cant beat my family
but maybe against a round guy with a reputation
for dance moves
i can stand a chance.

i look forward to it.
with my christmas schnapps
and wait for roundy to slip through these
here ashes.

further proof that you can’t trust your nerves well i saw the blood on the cloth last night and when it dried so too did the feeling and when it dried it disappeared and i love and hate and feel like crying all within a cycle of the heart and when it’s gone wouldn’t i kill but when it’s here wouldn’t i leave further proof that you can’t trust your nerves.

They sink their blades so
deeply and if I am to simply
bleed out of my abdomen and
moulder and die I will try to do
so at home so at least I won’t
feel so beat up about it.

sometimes you pack up
your bags and you head for softer ground
made by god not man hands thousands
of years ago when He decided these mountains
should make a baseball glove
(because He’s God and He knew about
baseball long before folks cheered
when the yankees lost)
that would catch sand and then
catch snow on sides and sun
on others to create a perfect

place for us to run and fall
and crash face first into pain and sand
and forget all about that thing we came
to forget about.

and sand in our socks to give us memories
that aren’t the thing we came to forget about

i called you
two minutes from home
because the moon,
low and orange and gigantic on the horizon,
was worth seeing

when you couldn’t see it
you told me to pick you up
so i pulled over
you stepped in
and we drove

no longer visible from
where i had called you
we continued to drive
over the bridge
into the next town–
to no avail–
nothing lay on the horizon anymore

we marveled
at the speed of the moon
(but really, the speed of the earth’s rotation)
kissed beneath nothing but a street lamp
and drove home.

Yes, the wolf,
he bites and does his damages
to prey and plaything,
choking out the beauty
so noble-ly, and until
they die, only to rend
the flesh from bones.

But he, he is a fisherman,
and a catch-and-release man, too.
He deals only so much damage
and just long enough
to claim to have held,
before casting catch away.

At least the wolf,
gory and red though
his work may be,
has the dignity
to mean it.

a hankie is just a way
to carry your snot around
with you and slowly
crust up your pocket

You look down your nose with your
cathedral-colored eyes while your
flapping jowls sling pickling brine
and my hands are dripping from
covering my mouth and my back
is cold from this damp, stinking shirt
and I try to understand your rambling
but amidst the catcalls and birdsongs
of the passers-by it’s hard to
stay so focused on such blitherings
as those of your station tend towards
but God and all, I swear, that
one day I will stand and step and
smack some sense in to you
with the back of my wet hand
and when I drop my quarters in
the washing machine down the road,
I’ll mail you a bill

repetition-tition
brings those things that
you claim you never
never needed or wanted
or hoped for.

those things that
like rhyme
like reason
like the phantom in that
phone booth
can handle words yous
cant otherwise use

like that and take that
and smoke that
and

with a beat or two
and a white rapper
you could be something
if you only had words that
you could throw down
in a pinch that
make people twitch that
scratch people’s itch that

um….
yea like that.

i’ve a brilliant idea
i’ll wait till the children
downstairs are most likely
asleep and then i’ll grab this here
rope and see how many times
i can leap over it in quick
succession and shake
these floors.

if these kids want to learn how
to sleep i know just the thing
noise. noise. incessant noise.

i’m really doing them a favor
i am.
teaching them to sleep.

Some will play those bleeding heartstrings
until their fingers bleed just the same
and no-one has a place to stand because
all the cobbled streets are awash with it

I played another set of strings, though,
down on the back of a hot small-block
and though they did not bleed,
they certainly had heart,
and all the burn was more than enough
compensation.

And when you tossed me those rags
to clean the bleed from my fingers,
Friend, I can tell you, Certainly
was the only way I thought
that all was right with the world.

Season comes again.

Walking, air stifles breath.
Breathe, absorb frost.
Autumn, but it’s Winter.

Icy air—mindful—you.
Scent unidentified—familiar.
Wafted from north.

Leaves whisked by same wind.
Take this kiss, blown.
Stretch—reach Providence.

Remember.

Oh, how the world
it jostles itself in to order
one way or the other

or that’s the way it seems
hit every red light once
and tell me different.
Hit every green and tell me
the same.

Like the time that you
made two pies and
ett the second one first
and then you realized
that the first one needed
to bake a bit longer.

You narrowly avoided food-
bourne disease that time,
too.

And now all your friends are over
and just raring for
a slice,
or two,
And you ett your fill already
so there’s plenty, anyway.

Funny how things work out
Or that’s the way it seems,
anyway. Bake a pie
and tell me different.

all of you deserve a song
or a sonnet at least
goddamnit some sort of prose
maybe a short poem
at least a couple of words

and the world, well
it deserves the finest painting
or some sort of modernist
abstract piece
one that would garner review
in at least the college paper
at least

i should mention this night
in my autobiography
or an essay, a memoir
my diary
at least

and all of the unknown
doesn’t it all deserve some
thought? at least?
an hour of life,
set a side
at least a moment
or two of reflection

but i?
i deserve nothing at all
not but a stretch of solitude
at least.