A high school mash note’s stammering lust.
Father and me, shirts and ties, snapshot glare,
and somehow graphed into that air
a young man’s foolscap poem when a just,
loose joinery of words was all that mattered.
But then in last night’s dream, she (mother, wife,
mash note’s love?) tells me a box holding secret life
has been shipped, enclosing sounds I haven’t heard:
a wind-harp’s warp, words yarding across staves,
fluty sounds ribboned to sad, screechy tunes.
And things: a wishbone, ring, whatever I crave,
the heart-hollows, the cannot-do-withouts, the whens
and whos, the frayed veils between death and here...
I packed this box myself. I packed it full of fear.
-W.S. Di Piero
The past pumps through the walls,
My roommates belting along like they’ve
Experienced any part of it
Inside here, the television hums
Even one mute
I follow sports for the sake of disappearing
Existing elsewhere
Sometimes I’m so tired I return to the noise
Chandeliers and nicotine don’t bode well for despair
try to see through smoke and suck in glass
it requires being alone to work up the silence to go out again
Reverse the order of life and discover A Palindrome
In the fabric
Bedding is as thick as the fellow who falls into it
