The diversions and pastimes we found
could be splashes of colors like a torch of
jewels buried in the loamy field, flecks dried and drifting through the fog sparkle fiercely twinkle with a furious and unsettling beauty.
Part II
The landlord removed our chimes from the antique door bell.
I used to look at the empty house next door, but the city tore it down.
I buried the wrong cat in its rubble.
The extra plates and linens,
Our photo albums, everything in shrouds
Cobwebbed in silence.
(How could they know)
Okies blow across the last decade
In kind and in spade,
My neighborhood made.
The shadows on unused plates never grow darker
Nor lighter.
The linens crumbling next to an old air mattress are
Joss paper.
Because our odious catfart legacy beguiles and sways, buffers and decays our minds, we adjust.
I get my news from the letters spilled from the soup on the table.
Exactly not here, these words cheered.
Eels slithering back into the sea
from an ice locked carcass
of a zebra, they have more
social interaction than I do.
I bump into more people than neutrinos, especially never.
And I squeezed and clawed my way into this unusable necessity, pure flow
On a river pouring into the sky, Diasporas, Estrellas, vines creeping into the fog of a new dawn, sadness as boat,
- You row sorrow below you churning darkly, gripping the oars and they divide the ways, hidden sleight of fate give way, displacing the body into forms, eras, tongues and states, rising and falling
Channels roiling in whirlpools from your dripping paddles
Molasses on a chandelier drops and sizzles making caramel crisp carapaces on blowers with hangovers awake with bloody eyes, and I see my seventy-one jobs undone
Like evanescence upon a deeper clock with completely different hours
Like a 2 x 4 or a book, one dumb, one verbose: from trees and tannins, of amber and canons,
I don’t know anymore,
Yet anymore remains the more,
Like piles of edible California Rolls.
………………………………………………………
I remember poetry, the lights, the cheeses, good times, yes, but was I happy?
Was I going back to the kale-eating lizard people of Gondar empty-handed?
No to both, and there would be a heavy price, in fact, it was
About the cost of eight edible California Rolls.
Fifty State Banana 