floating and leaving no trace
or you know
just strike the match
and watch it all burn
all those piles of paper
all those piles of words
literally
mountains of thoughts
drafts of repeated scenes
my god how many lines labored over
to get a phrase just
so
and then the tumor of a manuscript
it sits
and swells
and pulses like a pseudo-heart
and gathers the kind of
dust that makes the tapping
on of keys a bitterness
like the dregs of coffee
with enough practice
he said
not exactly smiling
but not exactly frowning either
with enough practice
you can plant knives
directly in the marrow
of the bones
they’re seeds at first
like most things
tiny and silent but
hungry and determined
their roots crack the bones
they have been planted in
radius, ulna, humerus, tibia,
and especially the femur
and the blades,
the blossoms you see, all grow up
seeking the heart
as if they possess a secret knowledge
all things that
grow from seeds know
where the sun is
the air
squeezes you like a hug
in these eighty-plus degrees
and the rain
cold in the heat
isn’t cold enough
to keep you from sweating
the dog
doesn’t seem
to mind walking
and you trudge along
behind to make him happy
because he’s old
the clock ticks
erratically
and you wonder
–why won’t the damn thing
keep time
the way it’s supposed to–
one second after another
one minute after the next
not
long stretches where the minute hand
doesn’t move
or jerks suddenly so far ahead
that the hour hand is dragged
along in its wake
or actually
moves backward
an impossible dance step
but never far or
convincingly enough
to change a single letter
in this poem
Friday Haiku
the smallest wren
perching on the fence’s edge
the loudest song
shouldn’t we take the train, you ask
on trains
the country slides by
like frames of film
like an illusion of life
or a series of photographs
or paintings
granular in change
so subtle from one to one
so different from first to last
like the station where you boarded
and
the station where you stepped down
in another place
and another time
sure, i say
and i go to buy the tickets
the hands tremble
when they reach for
a glass
a pair of glasses
a pear
a peach
another set of hands
the shaking comes
from inside
an earthquake in
the blood
a tectonic shift
in the marrow of
the finger bones
still nervous
after all this time
still timid
to touch
return
again and
breathe
the air you breathed in
yesterday
the air the neanderthal
breathed in thousands of years ago
breathe out the air
breathed out by the first dinosaurs
i don’t know what
happened to the brakes
but everything seems to
require
more pushing of the feet
to effect
more slowing of world
maybe if we all applied
the brakes
at the same time
there might be some squealing of tires
the smell of burned rubber
–but the sweet silence after
a million bees
is what he said
a million bees in the
hollowed out knothole
of the old oak
in the rising heat
under the shade of its own branches
the sluggish bees crawled
around the entrance
to the hive
each bee
a drop of water in a wave
an undulation of apiary activity
we stood on the trail
talking in whispers
though you couldn’t
even hear them humming
in my neighborhood
you used to see them swarm
inside the water valve boxes
near the sidewalk
escaping the concrete covers
through little keyholes
to look for nectar or maybe
better digs
in the end the city
would send someone to remove them
i never found out if they were relocated
but the evidence of their broken hives
cracked wax chambers dripping honey
remained, drying on the sidewalk
swarmed with ants
Words and Feathers 