Somebody else's stalker-ex

Andrew, the breaking and entering you tried to do
is not the crime you succeeded in completing, not
the intrusion that defined you, the one you got away with.

You drilled into my head, incised slits and pockets,
and absconded with my sense of security, the two of you
eloping as if you were the pen- and ultimate member

of some sick species of terrified and jealous beings.

brevity

Speech is only "short and to the point" when the sparse sounds are dense: the words you choose are not choice: your rarity is rarefaction, bee without hive or honey, flying on aimless wings.

left just alright

remember how the leftover
organic matter
stuck to the pan you scraped
with the hard metal spatula.

remember how the leftover
you I have
stuck to the sidewalk you sidled
away from.

you went straight and I stayed
perpendicular: definitively right-
angled to thunder and everything
everything that matters.

Two If By Sea

I held up two fingers for my father
who tested helicopters--a peace sign
to malign the naval carriers
he shipped aboard: they also launched bombers.

I hoped, however, that the rotors cycloned
upwards--my father's maintenance software
functioning and keeping him hovered.
He was super-aquatic: I worried about air.

Below, the waves splashed as normal
water is wont to do--pulled by the moon.
My father's night-flight experimented over
an ocean that was already tested and approved.

Regretting Youth

Mostly I lament the tame and nondescript
moments: the playground splinters; the generic card
I bought my aunt for her birthday, and mailed a day late; the extra time I spent
studying for compulsory, state-wide examinations.

Wildfire, you dug a hole for yourself, with your late nights
and incorrigible alcoholism. And yet that cavernous
impression you left in earth became a den—it was warm
where you were, your walls were solid.

By the hearth you remain. Where was I then, where am I
now?—outside in cold, lying in snow, my back tarnished
with melted flakes. Here in stiff air I flail my arms,
successful as all hell, trying to impress angels.

Cave-in, no echo

Boy with the name and face I don’t remember,
you can stop shouting, I can still hear you.

– Simon Armitage, “The Shout”


I thought about it and thought I heard it—
the shout of a dead man resounding in
muted echo, a murmur like the tinnitus
haunting the ears of my deaf great-uncle.

Uncle Harry heard the suck and build-up
before drums, just the whoosh of the percussion,
mallets falling and throttling air—never striking.
His ears were hollow, lacking anvil to transmit

throbs. I thought the deceased’s yelp resembled
this—the blast of emasculate bellows, coals
already put out, fire unfannable. I thought about it
and thought I could apprehend that sound.

It was more like a pistol: angry retort
with genesis too swift and mechanical
to be heard, or understood as music. The air
was absent: lungs, drums, woodwinds

decadent. Hardly tinnitus and more like
a ton of bricks—constantly falling, burying
a chimney-sweep in his work. He expected
to be coated in ash, and not hard-fired clay.

Cacophony was no echo, nor was it phonic—
the shout of a dead man incomprehensible,
tortured, whimpered, howled. It stole my hollows,
my ears always suffering, precisely caved-in.

Infidelity

Arsenic was a dust rock-men could grow used to,
their mettle processing the poison, depositing it
in crevices and coeloms. It did not produce the same
harm in them as it did in fireworks and bark-women—
realgar was mined to color clothing and explosions.

Roots slitting into the cave seemed to exorcise
toxins, sucking them, quelling their pollution. And yet—
though the trees that grew from bad earth
towered over the others, they were flushed by stone.
Pressed hard against rock, their insides reddened.

Quiet were women who grew with roots. Seeming
to be stable, cave walls moved when the ground shook
or when new plants cracked them. It was rare to find
flora that clambered like tunnels through mountains.
Stone-men were addicted to dust, that subtle poison.