There are these spaces or we assumed there were
these spaces although maybe that is just our fantasy as you call
it or call it our assumption.
Not that I do not mean it or that
I do not have things which I wouldn’t put spaces into or
drive things into like a truck tucked up in the driveway so the
doors hardly opened.
Push it over the cliff so we can watch something
else sinking in the ocean.
To hear you feel the things I can’t
be there to feel through you.
Was I loved or was I used?
Or if I chuck this one
off the cliff and the terracotta pot did or did not follow.
Stray
cats howling or is that fucking and even one neighbor’s
dog off somewhere like a Ferris wheel in the distance.
You need
to get a haircut so leave the trance of feeling and pick up
the goddamn cellular telephone.
The world ended once we had one.
I would drive there and press against you me we if you’d
let me which is not to say we haven’t been here before
because we have and because we haven’t.
Not quite like this.
Or you coward I dare you to take us.
Coward I dare you to take
you me we or one of us should and one of us hasn’t.
We’ve been at this for so long but not so long ago and
not nearly so many.
I’m embarrassed to tell you about these
things sewn to the edges of my skirts things that do not look
like the obese
convention and things that do not look like anything else I can
name or I would name them.
Tangerine.
Nectarine.
Sweetest to meet his lip.
Hung fury mammals from the hem of the
skirt line or did not leave the easement for small bloody suckling
hemlines to be tucked
fabric back inside back up inside them.
No matter how many times
we’ve been through these things
like another one fragile and then falling or another one because
he couldn’t or another one crawled into a nest somewhere
and took a bottle of pills into constant other with him.
It was
her brother not her mother that did the finding.
You are almost a decade in the ground and in these moments I
believe it would be different if you were still here to change
it.
To pull your breath from your mouth so we can suck it.
To crawl
inside your veins and then back out of them.
A small vile with
me so I’ll have something warm to remember.
Lockets of blood
kept around the neck and small mammals hung from the hem of
her skirt line and all this pain and beauty make
it pointless in the face of dirt and metal.
Darling anywhere because I do that much.
And he said I do and
very much.
And now there is this but there is not this which
is really another concrete something.
If we could these moments in a lifetime these moments for meaning
these moments on the cell phone when I walked out of the building
and hands shook voice and heat and hunger and then nicotine and
then hung up and then so nothing else but silence.
Sucked smoke
down my throat because I needed to be inhaling something.
Raccoons and skunks and opossums and stray cats come to the
front step in Oakland but we do not let them inside even though
we have food in here that we could feed them.
There is violence
in and out of country.
The back of the throat burns and she coughs like a handmade
cardboard box is coming loose from the cupboard of her lungs.
Are
you okay?
Is she okay?
And she is until she isn’t.
I would send you tea leaves for steeping but I don’t know
what kind of tea you like or if you like loose tea leaves or
bags or black green herbal oolong herbal or maybe you drink coffee
maybe cream and lots of sugar.
We could fuck past our midnights
but each time there would be somewhere else for someone to be
going in the morning.
What’s the point of midnights always
followed by a morning?
One straight to the chest or straight to
the head or he stood on the trigger and put the barrel just
under his.
Words fall short not once but twice.
Words fall short now count
them.
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