s p l i n t e r i n g t h i n k i n g

why do I feel dead; or a hundred

people at once,

a hundred stories

and a hundred feelings.

did I already live?

A hundred years ago,

with white hairs like thoughts silvering

and thinning and burying themselves beneath

a heaving and sheltering earth.

welcome, autumn.

binded black-tied
into friday night
I gallop in streetlights
like the cooled sun
sunk into the folds
of my coat and seeping
skin deep
until I am night-warmed.

VI.

I do not want certain things:

I do not want the sharp shapes of sick, of dying, diagnose me.

I do not want leaving, and being left be at the center of me.

I do not want all the bitternesses, the second guesses, the stone

            of experience without post-script consuming me.

I do not want to want calm without clarity,

            the city beneath the soft salve and slavish haze.

I want to lay in a whole chapter, a word-hoard of sense.

I want a sifting, a picking and choosing of sound or soundlessness.

I want my sameness, I want some sweet alienation-

            enough to make moonscapes out of leftover moon rocks.

I want a language that ripens in my lifetime and hums in my family’s throat.

I want to see everything, over again, first, last, and future.

I want all the suicides of a day, the syncopation of thinking, 
                      the fullness of arriving.

V.

Our ship
           slides warm and wasted
into the sea.
           Now, a new hovel built
by mud scratchings and the whip cold
           keeps us here, howling;
kept and waiting tongueless
           in the tangle-land.

IV.

By the pool,

With the meat of cherries

And chlorine in my mouth,

Skin sun-plastered

And young, impatient

My fortune of memory

And fable future

Suspending me

Still, safe,

the anxiety of new.

III.

The breeze
is earthen and smells
like camomile-
those flowers
yellow, dried, and seeped
into waiting throats,
desperate for home
lacquered in honey
and bitten in lemon aids.

II.

wound clouds,
scraps of drift storm
move like beasts
across a graphite plain.

Over the city they migrate
the disentangled motion
allowed to the sky.

And myself,
the city, slick river,
cars, sick grass
crumbs of glass:
all nonsense,
all gone in an instant.