Tag: Alinear Dissonance

what wasn’t

the news about you
like a sun setting behind hills,
those days when you and she were
keeping alive what was young
(when so much so many
aren’t even keeping alive)

you kissed her long
before i ever did and
you occupy a place indecent
for me to intrude upon 

for nothing is owned
except memories,
and those are either
painfully real or
effortlessly manufactured

behold the reticent night,
afraid to show her stars,
for fear of us knowing love’s secret
and forgetting that life is
less like a lover,
and more like 

a linebacker

by products

A meditation on our role in the choices available to us

the world’s a store, and
we walk by products that are
arranged to catch our eyes;
our attention often fixed upon
objects not present, the
subjects of our current fixations –

and yet, if economics allow, we often
buy products that we know we may not
need or even want, merely from a sort of
habit of politeness; a feeling that
so much trouble was gone to for us, we
really should show some support –

bringing home these pointless objects, we
find ourselves leaving by-products, traces
of these and other half-optimal choices that
make up most of our days; the things we do, because
we must do something, and so we choose from among
the options available to us

if, of course, by “products” we are thinking of
things like relationship and career choices, this
only becomes more true – and more the
pity, since we frequently either don’t go to
enough stores to provide sufficient choice or
go to stores long after the right choice has been
purchased by someone else

the serpentine illusion

inside a taste of everything
the serpentine illusion;
as alabaster cities once
you drink as though you don't think you
will fall

a paramedic shortage means
you have to wait for ice 
to hit your veins,
but there's no kind of flow
along the passageways of 
melting land,
the hashtag ampersand,
the infrastructure longs
for one more breath

emotional diathermancy

he asked, but no one seemed to know the reasons
or hazarded so much as a small guess
why wasted time fills up the best of seasons
and leaves him to a life of emptiness

in roil dynamic or in static posing
a tag of nothing but diathermance
to radiate within secure enclosing
with only pallid nonsignificance

he asked, but no one gave him much to go on
he read, but found no clue to get him there
he knows that used or not, the days will flow on
a spinning wheel
that leaves him
in the air

grey drive dream

because of

hands on steering wheel
to roam

it doesn’t matter how
to feel

no home
no lights
just motorcar

and a single luxury -
just hollow

space to wallow

and more dark & truth
than sweet to swallow

empty pillbox

unused pillow
and fresh tears enough
to grow

a downstream 


willow

fourteen times

the story and the metastory

always, it’s about her
  and about her knowing it’s about her

so much kindness in her voice, arrogance
  only specious in intentional
  vacating of previously occupied
  territory ceded to the opposition

transactional analysis, used
  to good effect upon mountains of
  regret and underneath umbrellas of
  translucent rainbows

young life scrounged
  fourteen times by hotel maids
  who once served hot dogs to
  shy cabinetmakers and window-washers

 

lies, luscious lies –
  with the occasional truth
  thrown in for flavor

intersection of parabolic interests where
  cold indifference serves as a
  reliable guide

plain plastic platitudes sent
  seventy-six ways into
  walls of wanton

sensuality