Now That Tomaž and Jim Are Gone, and: Sleepers Awake, and: Unprotected

Now That Tomaž and Jim Are Gone

I worry poetry’s out there alone with a hurt paw. In a paper sack in a New Jersey rest-stop. Could it hurt to fall to my knees? To flaunt my disorderly crawl? I tried to throw a search-party while it swung above us like tomato juice in case we got skunked. In case we got politicized by tar. Meanwhile it was glimpsed across town in someone else’s underwear. It wasn’t even Halloween. Once I held my breath nearly long enough. Once I woke as if dipped in ants. Ant biting my eyelid mad about a plum, ant on its planet cranium. Granite too is mostly air, only my thick-headedness stops me from walking through walls. Poetry doesn’t mean, it incinerates. Meanwhile it appeared as a kachina in a gas station in Mexico. A flattened bottlecap looking animate in yellow shadow. Sometimes kerosene opens the sky in a puddle. Dew, excessively. I touched her breasts in a dream. Some kids in the park pulled tight a rope between two trees and tried to walk it. My dog senses something invisible in the pyracantha that wants to play without any irritable reaching after fact or reason.

Sleepers Awake

I didn’t want to start the day with a list of what makes me sad so I canceled that appointment, put away the X-rays, put on my torn red shirt and hugged my darling hard enough to taste the beach on her shoulder. How does she do that 1,000 miles from the sea? Unfurtively, I admire her breasts which isn’t creepy because of our relationship during which the time spent washing dishes, changing air filters and picking up dog poop etc. must be equal to or less than the time spent admiring her breasts from my perspective. In fact, the whole waterproof get-up of that body she’s wearing which fits so perfectly without scrunching or pinching. I like how she can sit down and stand up and hop without ripping. I lick the places where it attaches to her soul. They taste like alfalfa.

Unprotected

It’s been days since hoppy frog was wound up but he’s still got jump. Like a dead bee. Like a liberal arts education. Like a tree storing lightning inside itself. Like a window broken in a good way. Like cardiac tissue. Like when the apprentice assigned to paint the background shrubbery has some sort of fit like when the soul blazes out in the eternal and pierces your foot like in Blake. Not torn in two with gray claws. Not rotting deep in the pancreas. Not being hung upside-down. Not the stabbed-out eye of a peacock. Not losing your virginity to a scarecrow. The sky will fill our graves. The sea is made entirely of bells. I love you.