It Could Have Been You

Hellenistic, you put your best foot on the polished wood floor. Beauty so broken out boards break. The smoothness comes from the legion of slaves before you bowing and braced with their full boned denials and soft tears. But you don't think of these things caught as you are in your mirrors. How they hold you harmless and return your loving gaze oblivious of anyone else. How could it be any different?
When last night there were these tears for how far you had yet to go and how you weren't going to make it onto the pillar barge, tonight there is only a living glow; you couldn't make the team heading out for the slaughter but you could set yourself up very nicely with flames and ladders of your own device.
I'll show them all you said to no one.
When it's quiet you always make the best vows.
And softly underfoot the polished glow regarded your after image with something very much like love, though if you had been watching you wouldn't have called it that. The walls, too, warmed to your passage in ways they hadn't to the thousands before. The air thickened with the moment as the murmurs trailed with rumors and admiration. No one could burn like you. No one else made such fine aroma of their flames like you. No one like you.
It was said in whispers and nuance as airy as the two toned breeze miles from here by horses and reeds in unison that your passage could not have been without that slight that so consumed you on that night. How that night had to have you pushed so far beyond by all the skinny knees and elbows of boys fighting to prove they belonged on that barge. How you had to be shoved down with your tear streaked faith broken. How you had to be stripped of everything you thought you were by that brash and heartless bang clanging their own pans louder than you thought they could. Your gentle art had to be torn from your hands and trampled and it was right that not one of them even looked at who you are, blinded as they were by their own boister and choler, their own jangle and wrestle, their own holler and wasted.
Their destiny was to perish in a loud and prideful effort for someone else and their crooked proxy of imagination. If you had made it then you would have lashed out in agony when the fire swept through, you would have called with the chorus to the gods who were too busy blasting each other with rockets and flares. You would have charred with no aroma but flesh in the sea of flesh and riot, colors of smoke and coal, colors of turned over earth.

One Liners

You find yourself
Caught that way
Trapped by sex
Endless entertainment
Cars that can't be fixed
Lawns of stains
Laundry piled
Toilet seat up all day
Television always on
Thinking about you
How you need me
That way
To remember what
You always wanted

She Listens

She went out looking for inevitable music
thinking this would be easy, like listening
to moth wings cross fields of light without
the sky getting cloudy with desire

She had in her hand a small marker of odor
she hoped would help as she made her way
through shoulders of shade in the depths
it woke as she drew closer to her desire

When she rose up across the long grass
her face aimed at the sun's trajectory
full of knowing her ears were taut
ripe to bursting with the trill of desire

Oh open to me she sped to her song
as the music of her yearning came
from leaf and shadow from secret water
to spell her with lashes of desire

She went out looking for any other
to make her haunt the valley older
to mark late heart in green harmony
the date her ears reclaimed desire

The Eddy of Keep

That unrest put some money down on Spring
called me up (used my name) with a list
heavy like the forecast and gray

You're going to have to walk some more
if you want to find all that's been hidden
because now there are a lot of leaves

I wanted to sit longer
and let what was on do me some more
because without it I feel so hollow

That unwant was growing more than predicted
and the consequences were stacked
even when the last play had been made

I kept looking for your meaning
knee deep in what used to be and caught
up in the eddy of keep going

I was holding the salt grinder this morning at the table as we talked
thinking about the Mediterranean Sea and potency and the law
and your eyes that are letting you down slowly as you age

and the fear that keeps you company that used to make so much noise
but now just rides alongside you in the passenger seat
with the name of a messiah or the absence of one

Remember when it used to make sense?
Before the brainworms set in to make their paths cross so near
the hurry of trucks mostly but some cars still want to go too

near the faces that peer out like faces you know
like snatches of meaning that want things that want kittens
and handjobs and hatchets and love when their bodies

fold here here and here and you fit into this crook but not
that one's and when the bed is cold you toss about and listen
to the off key singing pass just under your window

always now late at night where it used to be early in the morning