LETTERS
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.