phase phrase

All phases of life at once
out the window 
I fear

the man who walks too slow

until I see the bucket hat bobbing

a tick behind,

an elder, a mother or

client. Or friend?

Are we still in the early phase

of friends? I was alive

when my parents lost theirs

and they were not young

when I was born.

WASP NEST

Ancestral goal of nothingness

a poison pill now dissolving

in mom's eighth cup of coffee,

caffeine a weak pigment

brushed against the blank

canvass of a privileged life, 

long suspected as unearned

and so rejected incorrectly,

and now there's nothing left

for home or clothes or future

but at least at last the need

that masks the question mark

consumes the mind that might have

sought to crack the shell

had it not found shame instead

to keep it in its place,

a place that sprang from nowhere

and morphed into a big, fine house,

and another in the snow,

and another even bigger later

when the need for it was less

and then the chase forever after

and the shame, the chase, the shame

the houses and the blankness,

and then sigh, at last the debt and then the worry

and the questions never asked

Alt History

one morning I woke

in the dirt-toilet timeline,

clean cool and muted, 

reading the news

in my earth closet,

no dampness, no splash,

just muted acoustics,

incense burning,

wood walls like a sauna,

no plastic or porcelain,

nothing cold or white,

a system that

churned or turned or

tilled and refilled

with the slow grace of soil,

not the panic of water

always rushing,

you could go to work whenever,

moving at the pace of earth

in this world,

the water had tried

and had been left behind,

unsanitary-seeming

to the people of this tear in time,

and, don't ask me how, but

the thing had advanced

like spaceships or farming or

phones or pants,

and the logs in the loam

slipped peacefully down,

and you walked away quiet

and soft

and free

Structural integrity

it will never happen.

erase, repeat.

it will never happen.

erase, repeat.

it will never happen.

erase.

things undone, or never done.

erase, erase.

semantic satiation, renovation satiation, I thought it oftener 

than not and then,

erase, erase. erase. 

if you're lucky enough to have a house around you,

then you're lucky enough to watch it crumble.

the plans for new paint or safe stairs

subject to a ceiling that simply 

won't. stay. put. 

it will never happen, it will never happen.

erase, erase. 

erase erase erase,

the beauty of the phrase,

next summer, when we have time,

erase, erase. erase erase. erase, erase, erase. 

Fewer Strangers

 Stranger with sunflower, him or me?

An excuse to talk; if him

to anyone; if me

he waited

hours

days

weeks

he seemed aged

so

years?

That was happening a lot back then. 

Lately I've been trying to remember.

Passing through each of life's bodies.

Too-open faced while young,

too-in-between for

days

weeks

now

years?

When people ask me for directions,

that's so dumb of them.

What do my props make me look like?

What does this look like?

A person wants to ask, hey, I'm a person,

what does this look like? I have a flower,

I have a book. I have a baby. How do I look?

Wormhole

 Backseat passenger side three years ago,

night time sobbing as fast as I could towards others

also sobbing, and suddenly backseat driver side

three years later feeling the time travel vibes

of off-blue highway skies, day time quiet

in the all-enveloping cone of a child's needs,

how, indeed, did the wonders of my own biology 

manage to tesseract me into this deep peace 

so temporally far but cosmically close

to a winter evening's grief

License to Write

 A road block.

A useful term, though I don't drive.

My won'ts and don'ts, 

the greatest pleasure

of my life. 

But times like this,

the turns of phrase of wheels through space

so present in our little tongue,

I need them now to give you all

a sense of where I'm coming from,

but coming and going, that's the rub,

I've no control of that sort of stuff.

Last year had all that love and blood,

but now's a Fort Lee of the mind,

with traffic standing still as mud. Ugh. 

And me a passenger all along, 

I always was

a militant pedestrian. 

So find me on foot on the bridge tonight,

Screaming a honk that comes out trite. 

Slippage

 Have you ever, on the train, as it starts to roll,

slowly drawn one hand horizontally across

your head? 

Does this sound like anything?

Have you ever, looking out through just one window, as you please

felt the wideness of your forehead and the speed of your hand

so different from the flash of ads along the way? 

What am I getting at, here

Have you ever, just, felt, your own head, your own skin

where it's stretched against the bone like

badly measured wrapping paper on the final side of the gift?

I feel like I'm going to scream

Can anyone hear what I'm asking, here? I had an experience

that had nothing to do with any part of what was actually

being seen or felt by me, or anyone in the vicinity

I don't currently have access to the language I need

My face is a mask puppeteered by my ears,

a hand should never touch a mask, never touch the puppet,

not like this, it shatters the illusion