To let another come as far as you
with sunflowers, scissors, a Mason jar
somehow, the hot sky over everything;
the dark obligations mindfulness brings,
those bits of invasion called “your feelings”
in the event that they require a name—
anything that might be love could mean shame.
Think how power, that forever wet wind,
seems to come by itself quite naturally;
how what happens now has happened thus far:
somebody somewhere more or less saying
“I just called because it’s my job to call
to make sure a man you said was dead is.”
Daydark like a cave up here in the head,
its core a stockpile of talkative jewels,
I’m walking while trying to hold too much,
a win-lose-lose-lose-lose situation,
but what of it—what not of it, really,
when you get right down to it, which I will
before too long or shortly thereafter,
while familiars come ticking through pictures.
Mind’s its own consort, logic its own whore—
gonna go on getting any younger.
All day scraping my way back to the day,
I pull myself together in a way
I wouldn’t think to make a camera
or a chimera were I to have to,
though I do, and it’s only the present,
so I can’t know when things will cease to work,
that whiskey’s cheaper just three blocks away.
The insect-like clicks of a bicycle
behind me are the sounds I’d expect
from a poem or two, and so it goes.
Prep for what can never be continues.