40 - Mobility

Easy, these shields

are light as beetleshells

protecting and unfelt but off

carapace carom some things

I can’t know now.

Look back to see what I saw

new child, tell

the shames of a then-child

too well in it to flame in

flush confessing its guilt

of low-class stain —

accuse with the bite

of a tidy kept babe

palate clean to taste tang

of humid shag and unwash pride

the slim slick inch above hunger

above the floor by height

of a secondhand bedframe

having only found that

one time vermin in

the vermicelli

left the bedding pissed

for a few days because what

what does an animal really care?

but our used clothes

had no holes in,

not even the sock-bottoms:

that kind of unselfaware

willingtodowhatever

then wave the flag

of a last remaining dignity —

show me its outside,

show me seeing me shameful.

Groping for my own life

in dark senses

I can’t tell you how bad it was.

But I can tell you the precise

moment when some food

is still just okay enough to eat.

39 - Suburbia, and Every Home a Lighthouse

Houses under a moon are vague.

In dim pulses, restless ghosts aether beat against windows

making us omen-readers all, who pass them on return

from day labor to this necropolis of light.

Somewhere in fabled despondence this scene

was a metaphor of exclusion; the bright interior

outside me, and thought warm, full.

But domestic glow correlates with nothing definite, save

for these soft adulteries with easy feelings

against a frigid night’s withholding.

The spirits are opaque, as blinded windows

and I discover my longings in the meaningless Morse

of TV lights, practiced as a hotline psychic

at embellishing eager leads.

I live in a broad circle, this its paranoid nadir —

the bright, regular pulses so much like a signal

made for a passenger of dark, heart sparked

to the meaninglike contrast that cloaks its own

being nothing in particular.

38 - Going Lightly

Do you remember that famous Christian book about cults?
On the cover spun rainbow waters in a down-drain spiral —

America the melting pot, or, an oil slick was in our sink but it’s going away!

What were we doing on the rim of it?

What was I doing, learning how subtle variations in the gradient out

from pure light all end in the same darkest gone-away?

We were prodigies of collapsing space

forgetting pipes to waterways covering two-thirds

of a planet made just for men, who don’t swim far.

We were forging the ways our bodies go as minds move —

that is, self-limiting, or, why I can’t now unfold all

the crushed wax-paper skies above regions I belatedly see.

The weight of our bones in the world is decided early.

And even as I’ve strained to widen my eyes

for the dim of unholy wilderness I know

the being-in-it feeling is no known quantity of light.

Others muscle in pressing-going through the friction-real;

I stay thin air, where solid things vanish.

37 - Passing

Footbridge west, in wire sheath shooing suicides to privater places

The air is close in agreement — go!

Souls of bleached stars transmigrate earthward as

Fools gold flecks of east hill homes electric test the resistance of viscous night.

Lawnfronts studded with grenade-weight cones

The rot bombs of spendthrift flora, I heft

A good palm-feel and sap-swell

To launch them, plant air in the sedentary fog.

Posters all-over-plastered in town tell me

Find your inner light!

There are so few places, any more.

I catch an errant breath of redwood pine

But it diminishes, like a teacher.

36 - For the Bird Who Carries and Lightens

Stone beach a bed

bird spreads pebbles

to ease

the weight from heavy places

in the piled-up day.

Sleeps on rock, too tired

from evening-out

our crushing castles

to fly home.

Feet in the night clutch

at daystones ferried

place to place,

even dreaming.

At sea height

the beached are beautiful.

Jellies light and stars

stud the ocean’s coronet rim;

drowsy eyes the dazzle

washing fin and feather

in the watery ink of

all the hard light-lines

unpainting fade of

land to liquid

at the sun’s egress.

Plume sighs little billows

bird on warm

rocks heard the water

helping him

equal the beach.

It smooths the sea glass

for his soft bones,

sending shell-gifts up

as shields from the deep.

35 - Borderline

There’s a mad devil at my center,

drives me out to my fingertips

and feet to live gutlessly

by touch and taking. I press

my hands on anything to keep

nerve fires alive on the outskirts of

my bad neighborhood heart. I

empty pleasures into other skins,

fluoresce along electric spines

and ride the spin of rooms

adrift in foamy wash of spirits,

slip through bends of typeset notes

on truth and fictions

overstating certainty in black.

But dark is fear of not seeing

what roams about in here.

They say my empty

is only God-need.

But it’s God threw everything

of use out, put up fences, and now 

there’s a mad devil at my center

rattling the ribcage

that keeps me out.

34 - Eating Spam for Dinner Again, Looking Out into the Yard

Divorce brings all manner

of truth to light; a plant

can become a corpse.

There lay Charlie Tree,

a Norfolk Island Pine

older than me and raised indoors,

mom told him daily she

loved him, told him

he was a beautiful tree.

Still gave him up.

Dad dumped him

under the backyard hedge

of his bachelor pad,

a new duplex

with sliding glass patio doors

for easy viewing.

We watched him,

being dead out there,

thinking about why

custody is called a battle.