Little Slips

Something like sentimentality
shakes the house frame;
our watery past seeping
into the sub-floors again.
Yes, the floorboards are fortified—
the fourth basement especially
well-shored for surviving rough weather—
but a shuttering is off-putting
in any kind of jamb.
Is it fog out our window,
is it heat coming on,
is it settling into the creaks
and thumps of posterity?
A sleepy pillow shoved
at the bottom of the door
and, never mind, it was just
a little ole exorcism anyway.

The Fifth Dinner Guest

An unfolding napkin
gently collapsing
into the supporting role
of the evening.

A graceful artifice
faintly subsiding
into the pull and tuck
of the gathering.

The corner of the mouth
softly acquiescing
to the light touch
of fate.

The Missing Forty

Unbidden, unwieldy,
lugubriously begotten
sneak-thievery.
Slip-shod and heavy
more sidling than falling,
pressing, murkily compressing,
sandwiching
‘tween twilight’s doorjamb
and fantasy’s frayed hem.

Uncelebrated

“They have names,”
I wanted to say to him
—as though he were my child,
as though he were my own and new,
as though I had to tell him such things
and he would have been captivated
by the sweetness of my ageless knowledge.
“They have names,” I nearly said,
and once spoken they would seem
closer to us as if naming were nets
that gathered the stars in,
slipping and writhing in our arms.
My gift to him
—the anointment of celestial nomenclature—
shared between him and I,
if I had spoken.

Noun

I am, become,
B-movie villain;
victim to the whims
of campy dialogue
and a lack of subtle nuance.
Forget you my friend!

The Japanese have to go
Paris to feel this way
—a focalized weltschmerz.
All the world’s not a stage,
but we do seem to spend a lot
of time in the limelight
or apt at handling the ropes.

Shall I grow gills
to illustrate the point?
No way else to effectively
demonstrate a dull ache
in the lower left jaw,
a hollow spot in a full stomach,
the empty clang of a phone ringing.

A Preponderance of Conversational Topics

The universe says go.
It says God is in Connecticut,
it says fame is in New York,
it says abundance is in India,
it says prosperity is in Canada,
it says possibility is in Austin,
it says everything is in San Francisco.
It says I’m wasted here.
It says go.
But God is in my bookcase,
fame is in the mailbox,
abundance is in my gas tank,
prosperity is off Henderson Pass,
possibility is in my back pocket,
and everything is close at hand.
Yesterday I leapt the abyss,
(two days after lasik
she sat outside smoking and reading
in pollen-heavy wind;
windows to whose fucking soul?)
perhaps I have further yet to go.
I spin again.
Patience personified:
let the universe come to you.
Ambition introduced:
put in an application.
Spin.
I have trouble pronouncing banal,
but I’ve scheduled to push my
boundaries next Wednesday.
Aren’t the little sinkholes enough?
Must there be landsides?
Spin.
She sits after the riot,
the silent air between us.
Two million miles would
have been closer.
Fine, I’ll go to San Francisco,
prairie dog holes or no.
I’m a fucking cosmic transmitter.
Just let me check the mail.
Spin.
“I found God,” she says.
“I found God,” she says.
“I’m beginning to understand the prophet’s voice,” says I.
It’s deep.
Get it?

Me and the Plants

Sunlight is an amazing thing. Yesterday was the eighth day of uncharacteristically icy weather for my little part of the world, and I was awash with depression. Today, the sun is out, the sky is blue, and I’m downright chipper. Yesterday, I dwelled on the distance between myself and friends, obsessed on the people who have hurt me, and thoroughly reviewed my lack of significant love interests. Today, none of those circumstances have changed, but they now seem like the manageable, albeit shaded, aspects of what is an overall happy existence. Yesterday, I told myself that’s all they were, but today I believe it.
Is it really that simple? The weather?
Am I really that simple? Me and the plants—bi-solar?
Perhaps it was my good self-esteem self-assurances coupled with a good night’s rest that did it. Perhaps all I needed was yesterday’s one good cry, the simplest catharsis, to face the world again at full self-reliant strength. Perhaps it’s me after all; I’m not afraid to face my darkness and I’m not afraid to be happy afterwards. I am a well-rounded individual—a little yang, and little yin. Surely, my emotions are as much my fault as the season’s.
All the same, I hope the weather holds.