recreating stillness in my home
by the ear of the city savvy--

I think of the quietude of outlands
as a roughened silence / where skies
consume sound like the lights,

forfeiting memories of stars,
of wildlife or the movement of trees
with passive shuffle-sounds of wind.

I think of wrapping darkness
and silence in totality / the animals
are dead, as still as a thing can be.

a man asked to watch a meteor shower
forgetting my enduring apathy,
so I went along / it was beautiful,
but inside of painful thought, I didn’t care.

so I pull my curtains for dampening.
my house, it sits dug into the ground,
lets its dirt / cement shroud hold the streets,

and sirens are caught in humid air,
shuffling drunks can’t pierce through,

like they’ve never been actualized--
this is how I see the creeping dark
of land away from liveliness.

it’s fidelity to the void, or it’s
all the ways that I don’t know better.

keep my missing memories intact,
let me trust in the silence of far away,
it’s deafened.

In Entirety


understanding a desire for lawlessness

when there's enough space left to un-govern:

houses strewn with snow, built

in an effigy of unwed wind--it's breadth

speaks in such a terse ostinato--piercingly,

she says it's been enough time between

cities, she says there's going to be something

grave tonight, says she's going to a show

and she doesn't, but she says she did

it's softer that way, languid

and so very becoming. our legs look long

in a place without sewers, city tunnels

for the sickly creeping vanish in this place.

vanish is a word for city widows, vanish

is a place I'd go to in the bible, is a light

and irresponsibly vacant state of mind,

is a stop on the highway, is fifteen years of

snowshine, vanish is where I'd go to die

if it fits in the itinerary and out here

I reject the expanse, I resent

the chasm between swaths of highway,

grass lays about the ditch without

a hint of intent, stays there until

we are so turgid and brown I can't breathe,

I can't breathe, I won't...

you aren't enough mouth for me
not enough gape or maw or
 
piqued pieces of exposed skeleton
teeth, you aren't enough teeth
 
for me, you're not enough skull or
moon or meat or stars, you're a lot
 
less than more than enough, if
tongues were alms you'd be too few,
 
if I could keep language in my hands
I would, I'd lay mouths to rest, but you
 
already have no lips to offer, no spit
to drip along to, if all tomorrow's
 
textbooks fell dormant I would find the
page about mouths and scratch your
 
name from the record, you don't belong
in a holy archive of tooth sounds,
 
you're not enough mouth for me, you
aren't enough mouth for me, you're not.