as you slowly make sense
of each small emptiness,

every letter bringing
you closer to an answer 

The couch was trying to digest him, slowly eroding him into the leather’s forest green. The cushions were what he imagined whale skin to feel like—deflating whale skin—and he giggled as it slipped against his skin. He giggled at the crowd of clones with their torn flannel and bare feet, clutching coffee mugs and cameras.

How your footsteps echoed in the empty halls
how you filled your plate with vines
how blue jays shrieked away the afternoon
how I followed you like smoke
and became mist on the surface of a lake

How your footsteps echoed in the empty halls
how you filled your plate with vines
how blue jays shrieked away the afternoon
how I followed you like smoke
and became mist on the surface of a lake 

It is raining on the serengeti,
darkening the dry trees, lighting

the grass as a season of dust
falls loose. down on the plains

he is muscle and teeth,
he is mane and bone. he is instinct

and simple will, his own dark beauty 

If cobwebs wrote love
poems, if children were born
in abandoned churches, if it rained
in department store
basements until the dust
on the metal shelving bloomed
back into soil, maybe then
i’d remember you in crowds

maybe
if the ivy in graveyards wasn’t
so hungry, i’d believe in
a difference between transformation
and loss. but i’ve changed
like the books in the back
of the attic: i’ve yellowed 

There was always somebody calling down to us
from a window high above
saying “get the hell away from here with that ball”
saying “you break my window, I’ll break your neck” 

Shit, Mr. T. can eat any
thing, any damn thing.
I’m throwing two brown eggs
in the iron pan.
That’s it, two damn eggs, no toast.