Tell Me Something New

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

Past the Failure

To forget is to remember something else entirely

blankness has the feel of endlessness,

we cannot say how deep the coin falls

until it hits.

So forgetting is to say there is something on the other side,

a bottom to echo from.

Sometimes I forget things I never knew.

I exist in the darkness,

falling before there is ever a bottom.

The way you catch something in the corner of your eye

and spin to find

the street emptier than you left it.

 
 
 

She visits still too much, dressed in aromas

of fir needles, mango, mold: I still get lost

knowing she’s close, me not getting younger

or more conscious. Sometimes I fantasticate

I’m broad awake: her witchy presence waits

for me to jump into her arms, but then she’s just

an incoherent ache in sleep’s freaked scenes.

I feel her frosty nitrogenous hands and wrists

vaporing nooses around my head and feet

and genitals, conjuring my drab hair

into a party bowl of oiled, desirable locks.

She makes me nervous, but what would I do

without her? So long as I can’t have her,

I want her and this alarming manic frequency.

Then again, who wants to wake to change,

its pulped, smelly suit of meat, drawing flies?

My night-watch hot girl, moon-maiden, mom,

let me get just one night’s sleep without regret,

released from your foxy ticklish fondlings,

your latest smell of windblown fresh-cut grass.

-W. S. Di Piero

Evil is Me

We’re our best alone

Without the distractions of girls

And posture

When we can huddle

Semicircled by the television screen

Spitting into each-others faces and

Complaining about how little

We approve of everyone else

It was as if I could not know I saw it

Because I had never once in all my life

Not seen it. It was an eland.

-Randall Jarrell

In a Heap

"IM ALONE" screamed the man
into the night
"SO AM I"
the moon replied

Was wintered in
unmade of stone and what-
not
-Lisa Fishman

Lumineers

She’s a tease,

tears her skirts off

one by one.

Really?

Drops her petals

as if she could always

make more.

It’s tiresome.

We know

what she looks like

naked.

On a cold night,

we can see forever.

-Rae Armantrout

Rich men buy art

Poor men, crack

And I’m addicted to

Star-light

mist doesn’t fall

straight down

it lingers in the empty air,

floating about the

late evening when

everything else has

gone to sleep or

paired off to

kiss repeatedly