I believe I have moved
beyond the shouting now.
the lines are nicely blurred,
the corners rubbed smooth.
cohesion, let’s be frank, was
never my guiding principle,
the better to watch
and count where others name.
the shouting was a gasp of air,
not of a man held under,
but like someone passing a mirror
in a cobwebbed hall.
—
Nineveh
gazing out at the rain
only seemed to make it angrier.
he is still to learn
how tempers fray in the tropics,
how tin pleads
like a parrot in a cage,
and night crawls
under a rock with the lizards.
you cannot live here
with your nose in a book
now matter how hard he tries
something is always tugging at his sleeve.
this is his one revelation.
he knows eventually the rain will stop
because they built a city here.
The text that never comes
it is the blanket draped
over an old piano,
the dead bird
still clutching its perch.
it is the stone rolling
down a deserted hillside,
the cat purring
as the needle goes in.
it is the sound
of dust gathering on a book,
the funereal hunch of the uninvited,
the arrow quivering above a sleeping head.
it is the picnickers trying to beat the storm,
like waders suddenly drowning.
it is the question put to a dying man,
the lone comma on a bathroom mirror.
—
Gothika
having exhausted all topics of conversation, the group decided to take turns reading from an old book. a candle flickered, of course, guttered while the leaves chattered at a dark window. the shadows were long, the alternations comic between the high-pitched and the sonorous, the joker of the group casting the only spell of the evening, rendering a passage of Victorian nonsense sublime. his pink tongue never once touched his yellow teeth as the girls cupped their faces and the men sighed and arched their backs, scratched themselves like dark windows in a storm. rings began to form around glasses smoke curled like treason, like the mis-timed joke the joker paused to let fall
and bury under the wry leaves of his telling.
