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The Cruelty of the Bloody Season
It is the first Friday after my lifetime
decided to rewind and my smile seems to have gone
on a starvation
diet while my want to touch anything nice
hid under the carpet and got stepped on.
So I am running inside the Bloody Mary I am drinking in the autumn
with the leaves that are not falling for me.
Marys are for summertime and cider is for this season.
Maybe that's where I got it wrong,
maybe that's how I accidentally erased two seasons:
the red one with leaves that sail and the white one with deep
footprints.
I did Bloody Marys at the wrong time and lost all the seasons.
TOO SICK FOR THIS
I am too sick for breakfasts of fresh squeezed orange juice and
vibrating kisses,
clarity's cancer is taking up room in my gut
lessening how much funny stuff
how much life
I can hold down for longer than it takes to come back up.
I caught what was not contagious
in a memory which floated between fuzzy airport exchanges:
a little boy tugged on the corner of his mother's shirt,
flapping against exhausted spandex.
He begged to be held,
for her hand to drop
into a believable grip around his.
Instead he was left at the intersection of her shirt corner and
thigh,
wondering what she could be doing in the world up there
too busy to drop a hand.
Gloom reached me
from his five year old island
where he shrunk into a bad kind of big,
wobbly knees locking into something firmer.
Too early
for that kind of survival.
I knew it,
so it reached me like a magnet
stinging;
mom's disinterest in my noodle necklace
burns;
mercury into my bones.
We shared it
for a moment
and I knew he would be sick
for a long time.
First Blinks
Dried juice,
sticky around the bottle top,
were my eyes
when I made my flight into your bedroom's
citric air.
A Common Preference
I got naked inside the spirit of Marilyn Monroe and then in the
living ghost of Madonna.
It just felt right on top of that night. I even let my fist unclench,
let my breath burst a little.
Later, I made something like love to a man who was carrying his
widow
on the rims of his glasses.
He was as shy as a rowboat on a whistling river.
Love that way was nothing like the blondes,
nothing like the ghosts.
Sideyard Homeland
Somewhere there is a pickup truck
sinking into a sideyard,
rust along its mirrors
like the dirt under Daddy's nails and sinking like Mama's thighs
into the plastic lawn chair playing
the piano on her fanny.
The homeland is the sideyard:
plastic swings and metal hubcaps,
fertilizer
for the land on the side of the yard
where people are pickup trucks
left standing in the dirt.
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