How I Came Here, and: Xanthic Branches

How I Came Here

Grab shade, shed, and mend how I broke open into real things, leather and woodlace. I brushed hard-wire music away from my life, towards woods to burn throughout half-painted winters. I picked the dark glass from my head. I didn’t enter for politics or to persuade—how I came here was the same way as weather, a bemused breath-stain, but liberation let the bathrooms be clear. Unfocused wolf-shaped lightning over the beach air is the sauce. Turn your head—freshness. All night walk. Four or five hours from a bus stop to bedtime and that feathery pink smell of a KJV’s barely touched, crisp pages. I drive my feet dreary. I’ll walk the round staircase, spin the knob if not knock the door down. In a café, try telling a child to go sit and then not regret her pointed fingers explaining the badness of impatient, beastly people. Obsession bursts, my name naps raining splinters or else, what am I doing in super-blue with these cottony glands?

Xanthic Branches

I think we are going to die. I was wondering if you would find me, if there’d be wind shaking fire, graphite, cartilage, an idealist’s eye enduring moments of discipline. Before that, you bake in your country castle, and I hear creatures voices scratching the insides of midnight— robes, alarms, candles, and stars. Earth is a speaker. Manners are inclined to alter from region to region. When your eyes float away what’s in your mind? Your job is a deadening arrangement without the wonder of orange on a bird’s flank. Original dreams lacked our sly minimizations, we snake a way into wild power, and I forgo the poison to the brim, the narrow place, a water-field without water, my playfulness an indicator of hope or resignation. The physics of choice.