that clouds are cities of unmouthable
decisions or a tea of argonaut
leftovers a dogsorrow of train
timetables for an under-inflated
life in a book I once trapped over it
said it was time for his eye to be plucked
out to make room for the new vegan junk
food smoothie place and crickets who never
ask why the abandoned architecture
shambles to a dented alphabet and
the wind while you were away rewrote the
endings of all your short stories to warm
up this salt in the shipwreck’s eye rolling
clouds to smoke trees soon will learn to laugh
Tag: trees
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it’s often the way when days are
less generous with their light and
walking the dog in trees furry
scents and a noise near or far you
choose to ignore those little hopesfor the weekend with green softness
over the lawn insects float or
dart the breeze that might keep me up
tonight I know it’s not your faultyou know the darkness catches up before
summer gets going I should stop
saying you know you know anywhoo thelast time we met you were spitting
in the eye of some hurricane
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laughing down the hill there were several
signs of immanent danger as well as
crows in rented trees we tried to befriend
though later on in her career she was
able to discard the bags of shinytrinkets collected through years of service
to a thin industry and flex a rare
power despite the high price for this kind
of mirth so shall we return to the trialor see what the fresh ads want us to buy
I longed to grow those tiny trees into
little models of majesty but inmy glued apartment the light I could just
afford stumbled over cracked sidewalks and
-
the persistent question of what
to worship as more trees are downed
and we turn a corner search forsome snack catch a whiff of ourselves
though the tired stomachs of our
age could not completely digestthe story we’d been saving for
the kids when they ask which won’t happen
as they were only ever conceivedon hotel stationery now lost
to a dwindling apartment where
no matter how we tried to livethe light in the entrance slowly
filled with the bodies of small flies
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Fragment 35
wanted. And I wanted all
the toys. There was always
some commercial or catalogbase of this house here you see where the original foundation was laid and this line is where builders had some kind of cozy dream 100 to 150 years later or it may have been a fire or perhaps something we have no language for or understanding of and so if you look and keep looking we can steadily unravel how the building grew from egg to newt through adolescence to senescence not of course quite the same as looking at an old tree its dependable circles always circling but perhaps like a person in that we do sometimes grab
that would feed my greed for
new garbage. And even if I had gotten
all of it, would I have felt any better? I think wehold to the love of a season and bolt it on to ourselves hoping it might give us another internal closet a bigger bathroom a better view past those irritating neighbors from a tastefully ornate balcony but we also need to be aware of what we’re building towards and what our foundations are made of but yes maybe it would be simpler to keep the trees in mind and start the whole thing over from the roots or look at the growth of a quartz crystal if it’s a particularly dark day with some drizzle in which you want to
know the answer. And then I think,
in the past, when I’ve gotten something
I had desperately wanted the excitementfeel a bit of brightness at your core the feeling that you too could become someone on your chosen stage and when you speak people drop their phones and look in your direction maybe our example needs a quantum of precision in order to neatly fit in the hole left by the puzzle pieces whose homes we have already discovered the right void needs the right bit of the garden shed and that tiny edge of cloud that makes it pop and the deeper green of the grass in the background however we must start here in the mottled foreground
wore off quickly. So I don’t know that I can blame
my childhood. Maybe this is the way I’m builtwhere we stand and the simplest way to go about is sometimes all we need I think well no one likes a know-it-all and that fact has led to irreparable wounds and bruises yes all self-inflicted but what is it that you fear some unkind remark or the sound of nothing who can blame you but somehow we have to find a way to keep letting the world know that we’re here and still waiting for the secondary elaboration as promised in several recent communications so can we touch base on that first thing Monday morning please and thank you
or programmed or whatever. But no
matter what the cause, I have to face
and come to terms with it.[And click here if you’d like to take the plunge.]
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Here’s another section from Fragment…
and our time is up so please throw the book mark away and reabsorb the book the queue for rebriefing will be on your right and the airlock two doors down on the left and you may enter there if you have the proper stamp but no we haven’t always been so formal you know back when the place was run by the gazelles there were trees growing in all the courtyards and curious snakes and lemurs feasting on the various fruits that dropped all year round while we learned the vocabulary if not the grammar of the mighty river
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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
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Excerpts from My Autobiography
xxxxx
once the image has life an emptiness says
it will always be so I stare into the distance
blind to trees and flowers
begging to be born but the refrigerator hey
are we doing stream of consciousness
cool and the snow gets sharp in these
huge piles in the back of the lot
days later my handwriting
starts to rot never to recoverxxxx
suicide off the table you start working again
with a miniature saucepan and the clock trying
to rid the mind of all the rules you’ve
made &
feel your hand tight around the thick
rope now only good for that
silly exercise you lovexxxx
away from the neighbor’s dog
across stinging fields we grow
smaller so slowly we don’t
notice until grasshopper parts become
our yard sticks and blades
of grass jostle and topple us in this
dream-familiar landscape we
learn secrets of slow growth, the rootlike
lineages of wormkind and a love
of the sweetness that writhes up from
dark earth and we long to pass
it on to our children who have
grown monstrous in the orange light
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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
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Sunday afternoon while light won’t stop streaming past the sudden silence of unbroken bare trees and what apologies to make while the ink dries and the thinking machines reset in the year of our lady redacted
other animals 