Transoms/Terrors/Mirrors

I hung the mirror on the wall not caring for alignment because like everything else in this house is temporary. And at the end of it all, I find me becoming more quick in deciding which shoes to keep, which to let fall where they do. The spider that built its web near my bed has been given amnesty with lockjaw amongst the other webs of confrontations and concessions. The spider is not a threat, but a benefactor. I’ve seen it so in the mirror while I sleep.

Esperanza

Although I may never understand this instinct
that keeps me out of those eyes
I was breathing intuitive religion of an Arabian horse
galloping all vague, big breath
and focusless eyes
stranger figure still in the wind, totemic
hurrying past these frozen tombs of lovelost
but tonight
I will stop
I will settle for the
gaping truth for the
crop circles I drew
in the blonde ashes from the tombs
in your hair while you slept

Hermoso niño: Esto está acerca de usted

1. Last year
you said
"I can't stand
Winter,
Goodbye"

2. and boarded your plane for the sun
that's right you try to find your way back
but in your absence, I burned away
all the snow until alone I stood
with all my scattered pieces, whole

3. The hand-knit of so far so short
threadings of you and I

now that somewhere
in the stars there,

favors hang and I

am unconscious to myself,

unconscious to the him-of-him
only conscious to what
has yet to unravel
from me

4. Nightblind, we peer, survey the azimuth for spectres of love with more watch than widows counting stitches with their hands while the waves are lapping seaside in their eyes wide-open.

But for us, we are newsboys, in bars, on street-corners, headlining frustrations while slobbering over bar glass. For you, there is always someone to dole out devotion. Lick your fingers, regroup and rechoose your resources all before the sun can wash the shore to reveal what the waves have already made clear: they could never leave a mark on me.

The Antiphon of You: Restoration for former silences

1. I file sweaters from yesterday in the [next]morning much like I file you in my closet of bodies sketched but never spilling. In twenty hours of sleep, I awake with this heart being the last to feel plastered or flaked upon because it’s new coat is the only thing I know how to wear today.
   
   
2. My love,
   
   
3. I was
   
   
4. a wave.
   
   
5. I am not sure what I was willing to give
6. not that time or physics would even
7. let them matter in getting what I want;
8. knotted, masked & smudged by
9. what or whom I do not need.
   
   
   
   
10. This wave is
11. Still and slow and thick and
12. heading outward with no gradient
13. until they reference it with
    
14. the color, the incline and affect
15. stitched and splashed
    
16. upon axis
17. of globes
18. in academia.

Hands as Humanity: "He is non-committal right now. I'm a little bruised but vital."

1. Hands down, in my heart
   I hear
   you may never know
   that I keep a clean sink
   or that my muscles run parallel
   to my spine with the power
   to take suitcases of loneliness
   from your hands.
   
   
2. But I sincerely hope
   we are more than our
   four hours of accidental
   teenage combustion of
   drunkjoy all armed up
   in the day that all my being
   alone gave pause to listen
   for the white noise of
   the trophy soul
   I think I heard in you.
   
   
3. I am the dog
   that lies
   against the draft
   of the door into your heart
   where the framework is
   neither young nor old
   because
   in the floorboards
   your heart
   only
   beats
   true.
   
   
4. I soak these hands
   in the water
   in the minutes on your shoulders;
   they tell the secrets as
   I unpack
   from
   between
   the beat.
   
   I heard it.
   In the spaces
   between,
   the spaces we exist silently
   vespertine
   and in my astonishment
   I can hear
   I acknowledge
   I desire
   you to be adored exceptional
   in my hands
   without time.

No one belongs here more than you.

Shrine-building For Fast Goodbyes

i. I exhaled with the bubbles in the kitchen sink now obsessively, compulsively, disorderly clean. Wainscoat white, left around to remind me of antiquity. Today was the first day that I excused your battery with a finger in the doorjam of a Volvo to a seeker of a stranger who has questions. Smiled to untraceable answers unsure of how I slept last night knowing I could not rub the neck of the dog I always I knew I loved more than you.



ii. I argued between orange or blue in the kitchen, eyes in the windows open, magnetized to the smell of the rotting fall that soaked in your hair, in my bed, in the past, in the shallow sheets of the charming clay lipped kid.

The only thing I can say I feel for you is as blue as I was.
Blue as I felt the imaginary time you convinced me. The time
I dangled heirloom china
from the roof.