as I write with one foot
stuck in dark mud the other

unresponsive for reasons
I can’t discover lights

flicker throughout the day I’m
more full of fewer thoughts with

air enough for me to ascend
the brilliant sharp mountain

I have kept my pockets empty for
I have kept my back straight against through

years of small work and I
see the check on its way

before I’ve ordered it’s my fault
I should have gotten here as soon as

the neighbors finished dancing
on our ceiling and the sky

changed to business casual blue so with
my knuckles sore I crack another nut

but what if one thought survives
somehow the pressure of space

as the small stones crawl from the sea
wall after the grey is gone

and we work into the overhyped
night sponsored by what you would rather

remember a castle visited
through a dream that always asks too much

still searching for the new sound for so long that the trees we planted in the wild days have made it to the other side of the desert and at night we hear heavy fruit drop sonorous into still water but this is not enough there is still a hair unreachable in the throat in the morning we find the ruins of another city it must have been spectacular with those stones in the sky

the difference between scrap and fragment wind
in the rain in the trees but once I’ve walked up to
this cliff then what maybe later in the day an aching
back full of whisky isn’t the best time to start but
well this is getting too prosaic so get the clipper &
the magnifying glass there’s only one place you or I
can start and that’s with these badly drawn feet
bleeding into the stones of the sharp here & now

Sometimes you start
with a blank page other times
there’s no choice

the world before
you were born

prefers a simple table
salt, pepper, a clean glass
still water and when
voices rise

walks out to the balcony
thinks about the cigarettes we
smoked and flicked without though

we would never imagine
doing that today with all the

in the air and settling
down into the roots of your hair

you hardly need the stones
as you walk into the lake