Equivalency

We try so hard,

To explain and package,

Everything that we are and feel,

And is happening right up to now,

The same as when I was little,

Alone in the upstairs closet,

Trying to put on all of my father's shirts and ties,

All at the same time,

Each foot in one shoe from each of his two pairs.

Quietly In Spirit, With No Alarm

We crawled out from under,

Quilts that our grandmothers slaved over,

With our bodies feeling like they do,

Right out on the edge - all open

Swirling air and toes gripping,

Cold flat rock,

Like some tiny amount of control,

Was already being redressed to the grave,

Drawn back through our shadows,

Barely the size of children,

We made eggs and opened the window,

And talked as the temperatures equalized,

About Caroline, and how living

Never gets done feeling new,

And if we had enough money to spring

To get a bigger freezer,

While Hugh mowed serpentine across his yard,

The green scent meandering gently around our noses.

Tomorrow's Monday

So concerned that I

Am drastically behind schedule

At being the person and everything I want to be.

People are dropping like flies out there.

Let the Meeting Begin

The gnats like shooting stars,

Diving at the underwater light,

I felt so small up there,

So quietly representative,

Before diving in,

Listening to the congregation of bubbles,

The glaze that moves with my hands,

Sweeping around itself,

So unconcerned, or entirely there,

All the secret voices,

But before I could respond,

Laughter.

Reverse Mortgage

I awoke to doublestopped time,

Dylan's glasses and bedeviled,

Impossible infinitesimals in the floorboard,

Instinctively I reached for my face,

To feel for a bearing on my age,

And found it full of hiding places,

Not even a majority occupied,

Drinking from Mímisbrunnr,

Was probably a mistake in hindsight.

What I Remember

She made the autumn leaves,

Into boats that sailed down the creek,

Where the old folks washed their clothes,

We should've stockpiled our innocence,

But we were abandoned to it,

Like Icarus,

She had difficulty understanding the word dream,

We wrote new stories in the dirt after every storm,

About Aeneas, and Heloise, and Jesus, and Wiglaf,

She made my heart beat so bad,

Every time she skipped ahead,

Her hands covered in the granules of the earth.

The Epilogue Always Contains a Wedding

Balcony,

You sit like

You're so full of volumes

Weighed down with thirty,

The future,

Your too tamed tongue

Carmine your dress

Lacks nothing.

Your luster keeps up with the times

Until the dark very morning

Where coffee is more stirred than enjoyed

Early Morning, Full of Gusto

I want to throw my fresh-legged twenties,

Into you with smirked, swelled veins,

To repurchase every hillock and hostel alike,

To dig our feet into sunset sands,

The only fitting memory we have rights to demand,

To become new fictions to fall asleep with,

Luminous in space and time,

As entropy works accentuated knuckles,

Around the stars we dine by.