Climb Out

I drank half a gallon of sweet tea. I looked out my blurry window at the concrete sky. I tried to sing but my throat merely shuddered. My harmonica took my breath away. I looked for a pen and found none. I got lost in my own hallway. I segregated my confidences from my uncertainties. No longer will they mingle. I read lamentations. I missed that soft and bruised little heart. Missed it so much I downed a pint of something Irish, then two sleeping pills. The night is a foggy extension of my own skin. I wish to be out levitating in the night so cool and wet and thickly dark. Some industrialized Walt Whitman caricature, hovering over this amphetamine city, clasping my hands together at the glory of all common pains—the shopping carts corralled under the overpass, chain-link fences peeled up from the ground, a payphone being stuffed with quarters by a bronze woman with split bottom lip. There are wedding parties out there, maids clad in neon, groomsmen like beaming marquees, all for the newlywed. They gather by the river. The Mexicans with poles and buckets full of worms, the kids with Detroit Tigers in their spokes, geese squabbling over Wonderbread, they gather by the river. I can see them from my window, if I stretch, just a bit.

Smother everything in the name of poetry

Grey Kitten


Smoke off
the blown out candle
—a grey kitten

at the edge of my desk,
floating quietly away
from the acrid smell of old flame,

past bottles,
burrowing into laundry,
hiding from hyperbole.

Creation

On the First Day,
She laid down and parted Her hair.

The Second She painted
rock and mud and rubbed it on her forehead.

The Third Day She pulled a green chord
from Her throat, filled the air with jasmine.

On the Fourth, She plucked out each
of Her burning eyes, flung them away in fury.

She formed you from beneath Her left thumbnail
on the Fifth Day, wet and soft.

The Sixth, She blew life into the ear
of the wind, and finally opened her fists.