1-13-17

Always you dread the approach
Or maybe the departing depending
Which way you face
Short days and long nights
The leaves turn and your gut gets
Sucked back knitting up your vertebrae
Bracing it builds and builds
Molds and crumbles

The first ice on the windshield
Feels unfair and clunky like grief
Cold feet in the sheets
Until clicking gears land you here
Venus bright and flashy
You, this mirror, how to be
Sharp and clear

Hard, metallic
Like biting your tongue
While racing downhill fast
Like a kiss with knocking teeth
Growling about death while
Stirring stirring flesh

1-5-17

Writing poems at work

Instead of writing notes

Measuring affect and hygiene

How do we tell how well we are?

Well enough to wash and dress and get on the bus

The last time I wrote poems at work I got fired

I also sent sexts to a boy from the marble tiled bathroom

And took long walks uphill to the cathedral

To light candles and pray

Well enough now I eat lunch across the street

When there are twenty minutes to spare

Watch the dogs and traffic and cranes

Less praying, less sexting, these days

I buy coffee from a redhead with a new tattoo

She pushes up her sleeve, “for my brother

Who died this year” and makes my latte

I want to invite her upstairs but maybe she is

Well enough taking orders, steaming milk

Frank O’Hara wrote poems at lunch

Away from the museum it can be done

In between phone calls and meetings

Writing notes that say things like

Pervasive pattern of instability

Noticing the light on the face

Of the person sitting across from me

As their grief grips them by the gut

And we talk about hope and what

Well enough could possibly actually mean

1-4-17

"Snow is nice when it's not dangerous"
"Yeah when you get to look at it
From a window and not worry
About sleeping in it"
They laugh knowingly both knowing
The specific hardness of cold concrete
Colliding with tailbone
And scapula over and over as you wrest yourself
To get some rest in

After dark, after 5 PM, the lights come on
Across the street. Pale yellow lights
From fridges, blue glow of TV, once
The quick orange lighter spark that lit a blunt
And danced around the kitchen
She's been inside one once, for sex,
"Three grand a month" she smiles
Wryly and turns back to her anger
Management homework

In the dawn light, after 6 AM, there are ripples of life
Out my back window, their red tent and blue tarp
Bright against the grey concrete
Through the leafless trees
I've never been inside them but I've
Watched them sleep in glances,
Walking to my bus. Streetlights,
Flashlights, sometimes lighter sparks
Too, lit blunt in gloved hands, a quick
Dance under the highway overpass.

1-3-17

1-3-17

Winter

Everything is sharp

The sky is a knife blade

We are hunted

Orion’s belt bright overhead

I was born in winter and am reborn

Into the shrinking and swelling of it all

So many anniversaries

Record snowfalls and a crowded

Calendar of remembrance

Layers of grief and celebration

It's dark and everything changes

Bodies heave open and snap shut

The stillness of the cold is just a veil

We all keep living and dying

Balloons and cake and baby jesus

Heart monitors and frozen graveyards

We have wait for the ground to warm

Before we can bury our dead

We cast ashes out on a frozen sea

One year everything floods, the year

My father leaves, and I help my mother

Mop the icy water up in our basement

While neither of us cries

1-2-17

The heat is off and the ice
In the air, on your skin wakes you
Still dark you half sleepwalk to the wall
In the other room, turn it on
Don't bother with the bathroom light
The cats in your bed barely notice your return
You were dreaming of a stranger
Who asked about your wedding ring
A thing, in your dream, you had forgotten the way sometimes
You can forget your name
A few weeks ago you forgot your face
You looked in the mirror and it was wrong
For a long enough time that you cried about it
Half awake brain frets --
The stranger was handsome
You touched his leg
Meaningfully dreamy on the ankle
But you are here, in your cold bedroom with your not stranger
Sleeping soundly
And cats and winter and only two
More hours of sleep
Til you'll have to turn the lights on
Start the coffee wash your face
Whether it's yours or not
And let the day go on

1-1-17

I want to tell the story
And include something burning
Or maybe melting
Smoke and danger, destruction
Even as it was happening I wanted
Chaos
Eruption
Something thrown at a wall
Shattering
Applause
But it was just the feeling of trying to carry
All the grocery bags from the car
Up the stairs in one trip
And one of them slowly slipping
Out of your grasp
The slowness of learning to fight
Without talking, your whole life
A glacier of anger creaking