Friday, November 16, 2007

there are men in the sky but I only see containers. claws when I want to float.
five chiseled minutes of sun on the neck of this battle.

they are underground but seized on less. daily chants, silent mutterings, unwashed six o’clock news appearances. they say “hey, I know”. or they say “hey, I know and I keep knowing, and when I’ve had enough I know some more while they close the lid the way some downtowns close on weekends and I get to know some more then that I didn’t know”.

there are people in bed doing the good work, the post park horizontal walks. they pull rabbits out of hats, (what’s up doc), they step into magic cabinets where they both disappear into the sound behind the sound that comes from the tree in the city square when the christmas lights first go up, when scarves clean reading glasses, eyes that need adjusting at birth but months go by, a mesh of fuzzy and coastal clear, days that want to join something before they come apart.

there are days so down that they never leave a chair. a crowd so obvious on top of us that we never notice.

Tuesday, November 13, 2007

off the rack

"to take possession of a city of which you are not a native you must first of all fall in love there."

--from "the untouchable" by john banville.

Tuesday, November 06, 2007

my vote went into the exhaust fumes on 16th and valencia, pressed hand on glass, cupped a see-through meditation, the way sadness leaves you overheated out on a cool night. wet. how close lament. how often do we wander our own streets. turn once this way on a corner, turn that and remain, in pockets. never leave this place. have no memory or have memory play. it resides in your house, somewhere beneath whatever it is you’re wearing, like sky I will never touch, but only fallow. falling. pursued.

how to tell of inkling, of booked rhythm, what follows me, or leads me past the colored electrics of closed shops, white lit men, balled-up palm trees, the lack of illumination in some buildings, the flat shoe wearers, the rift in anything seen here a declaration, or the way we assign definitions — home. city. skin. more alive in the waiting than in none of the above. in that fall of breaking and broke. in the soak commissioned. as if I knew anything or were anything or how I swear I’ll bend my knees when I get home just to see what it feels like, kissing the dusty floor for the taste of petals.

your hand touched my shoulder quickly, every shyness ignored or endorsed the way we once ran from somewhere with our hair still wet, before we knew better, before I noticed the length of your fingers, or any reason, of void, and season, and way.

Thursday, November 01, 2007

sparrow. ha, little tremble. little else. little definition kiss of arms. stolen air ceiling fans. tuesday says here it comes. wednesday, busy. thursday hangs up a phone in alcohol halls. says hey look, my gun is loaded. then the list of things you’ve decided not to think on. by definition an experiment in comfort. epidemiology risks results. plays a long song of sweat, and the other list, of the things which bore sparrow.

believed dry. hand resting quietly on his chin, or beak, which makes it hard to speak. the alcohol mall another dogged projectile of the way any street can shake. press repeat for repetition. a flight back. a forward sneak at the hits you have coming.

sparrow hides red sweater fascinations. how it can all fuck you with a glance, a skinny plat-formed shoe dance of gathered possessions and pretty pretend things. the smile of dish carriers. think indentations in your skin until they cut. be something on purpose, or come with me a bit because it’s right. this day in march. this started again when you weren’t looking. dying, died, casanova avalanching the black bird into the little holes that lips make when they close. you can’t tell that I’m younger than you because I know what building was there before the machines came, before the empty spaces that people leave behind like punch-lines in tract-homes, or the taste of forgetting your straight-bodied neighborhood just to find your own body again. sparrow still and small, he feels them all.