High Piano

Everyone forgets
themselves sometimes.
Getting noddy noddy
to familiar music I
make music to go with,
beating the short bones of my fingers
against my desk until
I think better of it and beat
my knuckles against the cigarette
scorch marks
to a tune I have been hearing
in dreams.  And I remember
who I am to the dirty drag percussion
coming hand, fingers knit, to hand
and the remembrance
makes me giggle
because the I in me and I
always waits for me at home,
but he knows there is no
take yourself to work day.

Tin Touch Kick Needle No Record

And it goes tick, knock, buck, tick, nothing.
We observe the shallow end
where the bars are at their least and,
binoculars to our eyes, we
seethe inward loving the
groove of wave forms breaking red
on the high rocks where our selves
watch back as they
mulch against the stones
where voices rise and fall like
lifetimes of city walls against
voracious nature, litter swept
until the plastic bursts, belly cut
apart again to foam wind high.
From the balcony, not above, crossed,
but too near not to taste the wind of so much
reduced to mist by distance, but still
thick enough to prick senses,
we observe the shallow end and
something stands up where the air thick with
voices not ours tongues our skin cold dead
against sunlight's warmth,
pressing grooves of wave forms where
the breaks scream high red and
fade too slow and it goes tick, knock, to nothing.
The record skipping where the paper
circles the spindle and
the silence
is disfiguring,
observing the shallow end,
the violence of its being
able to touch.  The paper ring at the record's center
only there because there is a record.  The
tide pool and those dwelling within
only there because
something crashes against faraway stone
and it goes, and it goes, and it goes.

Thrush

In the spaces where 

the ropes of poetry

lock around a throat,

rise gives like skin sweat

come to surface

in the grip of the contest.

Verbs crest like veins

come to surface

in the grip of the conquest

slipped away in the

cross travel of the 

finger thick braids of twine.

In those spaces thinning,

light at doors sleeping

while you wake and awake

while you try to sleep,

there is the crusth,

taking you apart piece by piece

with little joy

and toward a meticulous

composition of something

a little more becoming a

starting end point.

Through the Gate

You at the zoo and feeding the animals and I
am happy to be on the other side and empathized,
before I see and taste the other side
where I am and wonder
what they do when they leave and
wonder what I do
when they do not come
with little hooks of sandwiches and
pieces of tired things that really are delicious
if you starve long enough and forget and
wonder if they wonder how I occupy my time
when the turnstiles lock at the entry booths.

A zero sum sounds appropriate, but really
I want what they have in me and hope they
want what I have invested in them.  Their showing
up at all.  Where I curl up tight
to the space heater inside the cage and think
about how the world could be a better place
if we weren't so entirely separate and
so entirely linked by threads that do not
identify definite relationships of any color
in their vibration, but possess a musicality
any ear would acknowledge
if the notes
were audible,
I wish our palm prints matched up
in more than the fleeting spirit of
steamed glass and eyes that can see the same
ghost lines before they evaporate.

Enter to Exit

River boat banners curl between
the god sneezed stars like stack smoke
when this town used to make things
more than places to hide
between trips to ports and visitations of
the ugliness of the perimeter,
the head banging to bars and the hours
lost when a skull breaks through and
the shoulders never do.

River boat banners curl like long exposures
on new cameras with bad settings at a party
for two, pregamed to bursting, and then
fifteen more friends dropped in and a voice said
you only live twice so make the first
death count. Seeing them touch
the points of light like time lapse connect the dots
worried over by a dyslexic with no attention span
and a bad eraser, you watch your breath
balloon gray blue in the moonlight.

Gray blue river boat banners of contrails
have fallen from the upper atmosphere and
are kiss blowing as they gift wrap
the sky over head.  The sky you can take
in with dilated pupils and winter rouged cheeks.
They furl and sway and you could touch them
if you knew how to swim and leaped
from the handrail with everything you had,
but you push back,
push up sky, Spaceman,
and let it wheel
because without you where you are
it is nothing close
to what it is.