Some Antics

I distrust anything shiny

Yet, I want this to be brilliant;
I want to wake up tomorrow
or a lifetime from now,

and disbelieve it ever happened-
that kind of brilliant.

It’ll be a quiet shift of floorboards,
settling under the weight of footsteps,
as I tiptoe my way out of here.

I won’t know if you hear me leaving,
but I promise to stay wide awake
as I glide through the getaway filth,

navigating noxious words emitted
at the end, mostly the ambivalent ones,
that translate into a slow falling out of love.

And while blinking back tears, I’ll realize
that if blink fast enough, the passing moments
record in still frames,

like a metamorphic montage-
where escaping becomes embarking,
where shimmering reflections blur into silence,

where baring teeth from smiling or pain
depends on interpretation-
and don’t we all find that more meaningful?

You see, I will turn us into an art I know how to love.

Facing you

Your absence

seeps like a carnivorous vapor …

insidiously consuming my mouth, until smiling burns,

and my eyes, until the tears come (and they do),

even my ears! until endless chatter hurts as much as endless quiet,

devouring my skin so slowly and methodically until eventually,

I don’t recognize myself.

By ‘your absence’, I mean the way you come into my world everyday

without…being…here.

Auto-Immune

(a poem written by Bill Wheatley)

She rejects whatever is alien,
poetry, Voltaire,
saxophones,
waving it away, like the plate of
octopus
the waiter tried to put down
in front of her
at the hotel in Portugal.

“No, no, no, no!” she cried,
as if it might
infect her
with strangeness.
This kind of immunity keeps her strong
while I can catch
almost any stray virus.

Sámara, Costa Rica

They tell me to enjoy myself,
while ushering me out of the house,
smiles, nods and “Pura vidas!”
until I am out of sight.

No one is at the beach today.
Seaweed sprawls like destitute bodies along the sand.

I sit, rest my head against my knees,
watch my toes stir the sand,
and curse the sun as it sears a yoke around my neck.
It’s so hard to get comfortable.

I’m on vacation.

I think, ‘the quiet is like a vacuum,
drawing foreign sounds
from obscure sources…
is that the ocean or a sob?’

I intended to travel alone,

but the mind is that clingy companion,
impartial to longitudes and latitudes,

unwilling to be left behind.

breathing room

In the deep-throated darkness,
he makes his way forward,
hands pressing firmly along the walls.
‘Get out of my head,’ he whispers
to her image lingering eerily close to his temples;

the space dense enough as is.

Pride

I’m one of those people
who smiles when they mean to cry.

There’s a grace to it,

the way a handprint dissolves
into tiny beaded capillaries
and eventually disappears
without a sound or trace…

and you tell yourself you’ve won.

for David

It’s been over a decade
since we spread Grandpa’s ashes.
That was the first death.

When it’s hospital beds and oxygen tubes all over again,
your body is only 23 years old,
and no one knows what to do
except grip your withering hand
and beg you to come back, as if you have the choice.

Maybe you do.

It’s awkward how we gather outside your room,
night after night, trying to share the grief, but mostly
wondering at the physicality of losing you;
your father’s posture is the first to go.

Months later, after you’re gone,
they’ll want to know how it happened.
People get curious about these things.

I’ll look up and slightly right,
where that night we found you after the accident
suspends in my mind like a tragic painting.

It may be an uncomfortable silence,
but they can wait, and they will,
while I gently slide that picture aside
to reveal all the glorious ones before it,

stirred newly by their vibrant strokes,
those impressions you left behind,
the wealth of art you gave me,

which I will describe with an almost ethereal duty,
like a committed docent

who loves the artist for his textures and colors,
and is grateful that he lived.

you left

a chill in the air
so steady I can’t get warm…

or feel my heart beat.

this one…

… is about sitting on a Los Angeles balcony, chill Sunday morning, surrounded by rooftops and power lines, sipping blonde coffee, one bleary-eyed neighbor stumbling out his front door with a leashed boxer … he glances up and nods, secretly obsessing over lack of time; no one yet knows that he will be discovered dead in his apartment from a drug overdose. A train sounds nearby … lint settled below the dryer vent stirs in the slight breeze … the black and white cat from two doors down traipses by on three legs … the looming sun bleaches the walkway below like a gateway to heaven.

kamikaze lovers

Of all the ways we destroyed each other,
agreeing to try again was my favorite.

The heady possibilities only lasted hours
(as long as the make-up sex, more or less),

but for that time, that ecstatic play at devotion,
we were victims only to the clock behind our heads,

its ticking barely audible.