More Mystery Than Magic

 very cold. My small
and spastic last
kiss was like making
a noise to make sure
I was there.

Your quiet
mouth was only
space -- a kiss
reversed and kept
inside to bite.
-Graham Foust

Am I stranger, or they?

These retail nomads,

Fine silk foraging

In mall microcosms.

Building a Mecca

From hand sanitizer

and the kiosk glow

Am I just one among them,

My ancient wandering

Another bustling particle?

Stairs spiral into elevators

A woman carries her dog,

And leashes her little girl

Santa sings in November

no errand errant of purpose

we all shop in our own ways

some for pieces of red meat

others for something to blame

Future Memories

 What’s left of my battles and my turmoil

is in my seaside cabin: this roiling air.

And yet it’s what’s outside that makes me shiver.

Not the ocean coldness — something heavier.

-Kutik

                                           

 Social Nights

Fading, gradient midnight.

Upside-down heartache.

Head full of city snakes.

Scraping at the sky,

The night creeping by…

Stop/spit/gag.

Rubbish rhyme, clumsy language. Static party sounds, the brain falls into disuse. Patterns start to form when all you want is chaos. The universe is always disrupting, taking pot shots at expectation.

Falling through last night into this morning. Clinging to a migraine and muddied memories; Someone else kissing in the rain. Living in the space between drinks. Watching a million miniature plays unfold.

But then you came in and took the room away from us. Beautiful blackhole, swallowing matter in a storm of lingering gazes. Talking about distance and distain before disappearing. You moved among the animals and I was wet dust, pinned to the floorboards.

These ancient veins, this broken bit. This night needed you before it quit.

Post SF Blues

It’s not you that aches

It’s the lack of filler

Jelly donuts sucked hollow

Emptied out piggybanks

Desire is a dirty word

So I wander Sunset instead,

Dragging on my heels

To rough up these shoes

my coffee seems broken

And im arguing with billboards,

Desperate and dull

Like IHOP upholstery

I’m only likeable

When not around,

Some slimy politician

Splattered across tv

Leaking faith

and losing hair

getting dizzy

with all this gravity

Reverse magnetism,

Personal polar vortexs

Collapsing time and space

To be nowhere all at once

It takes a madness to get better,

That, or some thing called exercise

I’m crazy because I’m crazy

Not because of you.

Summer after summer has ended,
balm after violence:
it does me no good
to be good to me now;
violence has changed me.

Daybreak. The low hills shine
ochre and fire, even the fields shine.
I know what I see; sun that could be
the August sun, returning
everything that was taken away –

You hear this voice? This is my mind’s voice;
you can’t touch my body now.
It has changed once, it has hardened,
don’t ask it to respond again.

A day like a day in summer.
Exceptionally still. The long shadows of the maples
nearly mauve on the gravel paths.
And in the evening, warmth. Night like a night in summer.

It does me no good; violence has changed me.
My body has grown cold like the stripped fields;
now there is only my mind, cautious and wary,
with the sense it is being tested.

Once more, the sun rises as it rose in summer;
bounty, balm after violence.
Balm after the leaves have changed, after the fields
have been harvested and turned.

Tell me this is the future,
I won’t believe you.
Tell me I’m living,
I won’t believe you.

-Gluck