Darkness lifts the wake of dreams.
The broken narratives untangle in small-window sunlight.
The boat left in the snow next winter harbors blackbirds you can count on two cold hands.
Let’s say the scars on your face shall heal.
The animal similarly afraid.
Forgive to surpass stupor.
It was a silly doodle.
It was a painting of calm.
The navigation from one world to another curtails the new picture of heartbreak on the dining room wall.
Sea water blurs the last blue-green map to you.
To think about not thinking about the mourning doves was still thinking about them.
So still in the backyard, talking of sorrow.
We had been navigating through childhood neighborhoods to rescue magnolias.
Driving diagonally through crisscrossed streets for a new point of view.
We drove the wrong car, the one that wasn’t paid for.
That was before the ghost of the house stole your newest watch.
Time isn’t helpful, one of us said.
The wind moved through us as if we were wind.
Our shortcomings mistranslated last Thanksgiving.
We left the tome of questions on the coffee table before one of us drowned.
The TV was out of touch.
We visited a museum built out of numbers.
Someone said, I’m an exhibit of deconstruction.
I’m a parallelogram.
I lost the horizon while I slept.
I danced with the old woman because she was already me.
When the windshield wipers broke, it was raining on the highway.
The model ship folded into an envelope on someone’s doorstep.
Strangers spoke of their dogs and how crowded Walmart was at night.
I was watching myself much later.
The river was swollen from snow uphill.
All intel indicated epitomes not epiphanies.
We burned our effigies in olive oil thunder away from the huddle of cows.
Night carried scents of smoke-wood and rain.
Nature buried her own somewhere we visited while dreaming.
Our unchronological stories bargained one kind of longing for loss.
We wanted to trade ill-thought-out careers for a week or two.
One hand clapping sounded like a heartbeat.
I slept in forsythia branches sprouting yellow stars but woke in daffodil bells.
The coyotes may have visited.
I can’t tell.
Winter froze violins under the lake in eighth notes.
Sheet music mocking ancient heroes too tired to navigate Thursday.
Proclamations became frozen birds in a reel of forgetting that the moon mourned lost footprints.
The children hoarded magic under porch light.
Shed behind the thickest trees, our words tired of us.
Our coats lined with notebooks no one knew how to read, armor for someone else’s heartbreak.
I was erasing personal espionage.
Hoping someone would scurry the trail towards openings in paragraphs.
When the queen abdicated in January, she left a note about silence.
They say electrical currents won’t ameliorate the abstract plummet.
That the king wanted an explanation for a running out of town.
We were good until we couldn’t be good anymore.
Mismatched melodies about subletting suffering.
No one knew how to take it really.
Profound slogans in front yards.
When the angels in the script were no longer enamored of us, we sent fan mail to glaciers set into free-fall.
The penguins discussing hierarchy.
I became my mother without a cane of roses.
Rumors under light bulbs that didn’t work anymore.
A Christmas tree of errant doll postcards.
We might celebrate composure when the bullet hits its mark and breath dismantles the sky’s promises.
We were ice fisherwomen who cut out the violins and cut our hands on strings.
There must be an explanation for some of this.
It was more difficult when others watched the inevitable splintering.
Other times, being unseen for too long was dangerous.
When all was said and done, the finish line might be cursory illusion.
The start gate, after all, had been jarring, to say the least.
The obstacle course in the scavenger hunt could subside with the fluffing of pillows.
One hoped for special effects while stringing the talismans onto a wrist band without a clear narrative.
The stop sign was stolen when one slipped out of focus.
I had forgotten to use permanent ink, and the sudden rain encrypted my sentences written to an estranged beloved who would sleep through winter anyway.
The mail carrier sings the same song every morning, which some days I find comforting.
The refrain often follows under eaves that don’t terrify completely.
When three hawks fly overhead, slicing the sky, they form a perfect triangle without a familiar beginning, middle, or end.
Their beating wings don’t cast shadows or substantially change anything, yet a feeling takes shape, a balloon that lifts the horizon.
Then the fog comes to erase my memories, my wanderings through the forest at night seeking absolution.
Sometimes the answer is another question spiraling.
Crooked hallways lead into stranger houses.
Books lining shelves mocking mirrors.
Bereft and disenchantment become synonyms that can’t fill a pitcher, pour out an anodyne.
Not every day’s a page worth salvaging.
We imagined the stars’ aptitude, powdered bones of our dead encased in glass.
I wanted to assist someone, anyone really. but I was busy drowning meaningless souvenirs.
Transgressions could be experiment’s unfortunate delay.
Things became so multi-layered, the mirror couldn’t do anything but multiply.
No strands of gray or white hair, the scalp’s genetic birthmark, could be expunged.
The manifesto targeted the ones dreaming in dumpsters.
When the storm hit, the ships unmoored moonbeams.
The wind doesn’t say where it has been even though I listen.
I could sleep only when church bells rang or when I located my grandmother’s purple dragon broach.
The stray dog has soot in its mouth and was frightened by anyone calling until the shaking of small stones.
Should you visit, I may not hear you if I’m once again painting noise.
The apple pie might burn while I dust for ghosts in the basement.
Don’t be alarmed by the clanging of.
Trial drugs would be money-makers, stock raisers, but no one believes, life rafts.
The disease could mutate a handful of times by the time you read this.
Ancient sages in a bamboo forest are sculpting giant hands to wave to eternity.
The applause craved occurs in increments like melody.
I discarded all time pieces to know myself better.
I missed the ticking when I wake, dislocated.
My attic room was an essay and multiple-choice exam.
The subject morphed while ideas receded the brain’s windows.
The lone race typified for typewriters.
Someone might tell the mother of the girl who studying under columbines during lunchtime that she needs a better coat.
The others are always throwing a ball, inventing new names for lost rabbits.
I wouldn’t say I was scared to any applicable parties.
The invitation came too late to RSVP properly.
I wanted to bring wine and align in time for the bonefire.
They echoed while I separated again, hiding from puddles.
Tomorrow I will be better, but I wasn’t sure if it was Friday or Saturday.
I’ll sew delicate curtains and invite the ghosts upstairs.
The news loops and re-loops until tomorrow’s loop loops the next tomorrow.
We are cloning light blue beaded swallowtails before frost settles in.
The storm windows are winning us in light only painters can manipulate.
Words are trite in the backdrop of war, but someone needs a distraction.
Boys play golf in the field, worried about a physics test.
Next month’s money slips through unfortunate calculations.
The cello, though restrung, has forgotten the Chorus.
Those beatified have crystalized new stained glass windows.
Things hurt in new places.
Last night I was something more interesting.
Last night I wasn’t preoccupied with home.
I swept the sun from the garage floor because everything hurt in reverse, and I couldn’t climb up to catch the autumn leaves as if someone were listening.
No one shows up for the conversation about Monday mediocrity at the broken mailbox or rusted fire pit that the rain claimed from memory.
I couldn’t help burning the contract with myself to turn the layers inside out with the patience of daffodil bulbs and daylight.
The streetlight will mock the moon after darkness sets her onyx wings to enclose us without a soundtrack, without a sound.
I applied for the job of holding things during the relay race toward knowledge that doesn’t follow the chipmunk underground, shatter windows, or make chimneys crumble when we’re asleep in dreams of splendor.
It’s funny how the house pretends to know us, we pretend, before the next day might begin its shivering.
There should be someone to call in your contacts to explain the measurements of hours that meander, but not exponentially or terribly eloquently—blankly.
The owl holds winter in her feathers and will continue writing her sestina. Wing bones, like the bones in one’s hand, take forever to heal.
Dark so early, dinner might last all night without a book to write, without a fight with eternity.
The moon is venting tonight.
The clock sticks to its rungs.
You’re swimming underwater toward something prehistoric.
Climbing a hill that doesn’t go anywhere through cloud.
No one visits that many miles away from the setting sun.
One hand can still fold and clap seaweed or some other green acquisition.
Sun lost in the grass.
Lungs breathing a song no one quite remembers.
It’s become passé to claim stalemate against yourself.
The kingdom always wins.
Tomorrow the moon hides behind entwined trees and chattering bats.
Buses filled with mannequins slip through the rain.
It’s October again.
Friday maybe.
This letter won’t find a stamp.
This phone call won’t discover your labyrinth of stairs.
Only some of this matters.
Only some find fortune in paper cups.
If you’re lucky, the coyotes pierce your dreams with wandering above ground.
An estranged friend calls with hidden bounty though you won’t answer.
Something about a picnic in a forest of litanies.
It wasn’t always like this.
Libraries on fire with lost magic.
Homes pulled inside out by conjecture.
You’ve been meaning to articulate a flight that’s not ridiculous.
Toward the catbirds moving south.
Articulate a better plan.
The hammock left in the basement, so you can measure properly without summer.
Without leaves wrapped in your hair.
On the postcard, there were miracles written in cursive.
The moon didn’t lose its back.
Cicadas weren’t dying.
Summer had been a symphony of abandon.
You found something worthwhile.
Something that makes hide and seek with a new self obsolete.
Something worth mentioning.
Some of the dead keep growing old with us.
They watch us breathing green light after a storm, playing word games none of us wins,
paying dues in a strange currency that fell under the sea.
The loneliness was too painful to own in those inner rooms larger than intimacy,
windows swollen with a summer that didn’t matter.
Surgeries left inner scars.
The mountain erased itself during conversations not critical to stepping forward to a new view of a sunset that didn’t need us.
You were too metaphysically tired to want anything.
The old woman dropped all her medication, and the blue moon didn’t write back.
The wind braided itself with leaves and light; emerald dresses of angels quivering against September sky.
Cars hugged roads that may or may night be winterized.
The teenage girl in a wheelchair, before dreams lifted, could fly.
An old man transposed childhood.
The birds had been thirsty all day.
The heat, a less important character than time.
You needed to find your way back to the dream under the sink to tell the girl you couldn’t go with her.
Someone might need you.
Someone might decorate night with your absurd dreaming.
The dead say it’s not too much.
It’s not a case of addiction to melancholy.
The answer was under the boat.
The questions were soft tentacles tethered to no one’s watch.
You watch for someone who knows you, who folds the map to your location on the tired grid, faded rivers.
Planets are whispering to stars.
The birds are leaving.
If it’s not enough, maybe wait a day.
Maybe stay until Tuesday.
When the rain becomes us.
When rivers dream new fish and mountains.
The garden, a micro-wasteland: cracked ceramic and glass; peat moss gone amok with ice, tangle, and quandary. Mourning doves thread dirges into blackbird noise; the blue jay cry, a semicolon.
Let’s pretend to be yellow, he said—the yellow of daffodils; we can somersault through crocus, primrose—without any definitions for sorrow.
I bought tickets for the monorail, she answered—so we can live inside a different city where pristine snow glitters under quaint streetlights, where passer-bys dream in poems without any answers.
I’m disappearing, he said—studying the palm and thin fingers of his left hand. When the ice shifts the sun, I can’t form human sentences, remember the passcode to myself.
Blackbirds are stuck in my throat, she answered—mourning doves nest in my unwashed hair. The blue jay is a semicolon between cities where I could have loved my breath on the mirror, your hand on proliferating, turquoise doors.
It’s true. I’m a con-Artist. I can’t pinpoint on the calendar the day–or on the wind-up clock, the hour this new identity coalesced, grew into its genetic paws. Strangely, I’m not one iota ashamed. I daresay I might be off-the-chart titillated by getting away with items at the bottom of the shopping cart I didn’t see when I checked out at the register with an AI-robot half-cloned from Mykie. I think but can’t remember; the driving away with my takeout food after presenting a dead debit card for payment; dining and dashing because of a make-believe emergency phone call about an ongoing, quite boring family crisis. And then there’s the overestimation of money needed for a sudden ridiculous, requisite expense for which my rich mother begrudgingly writes a check. Hey, I’m not a corporation. Well, at least not yet. Why does the sun cost so much? Isn’t rain free? Nope, nothing is free in America—no free lunch without strings attached.
Every story has a beginning, so I’m searching for point A. What was the first sign or premonition of this new fun game, one lacking conventional rules? I guess I was creating my moving red ethical line in the sand. There are those who follow rules and those who invent them, and I’m one of the latter, so I am being true to myself, and living a life well-examined. Even now, I’m gazing into my reflection in the picture window, searching for clues. Those new lines at my jawline, my sinking eyes—there are signs.
Perhaps I had been acting out beneath the surface of the days, turning my inner pain inside out away from my skin—or perhaps this is an attempt, ongoing, with proliferating layers and iterations leading toward an invented justification. For too long I was playing chess with existential demise, checkers with corporeality, chess with death. Yes, I’ve borrowed that dangerous game against The Angel of Death from Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. My dreams are A Glass Darkly, also a Bergman film—but for me in black and white while my brain travels in color to stamp its passport: Iceland to see the Northern Lights, Cabo San Lucas, Florence, Nice, Tunisia, Morocco, Lebanon, ancient Persia, Greece, Egypt. No one should blame my brain for my new existence as a con artist. It’s all on me, I can assure you. It was merely ART.
