and the cats

the cereal sounds like sandy bones
this particular thursday and the writing prompt
awaiting is something along the lines
of describe a bird on a limb from the limb’s perspective
but all the limbs that come to mind
are those breaking in my bowl, wet mouthfuls as
entire armies perish in the course of a runny breakfast
and who has time for birds when they’ve shit
so much rusted roman green it’s quite difficult to make
out the faces of the statues downtown, is that
Jackie Robinson or Martin Van Buren i wondered
out loud the last time i was around those parts
if i remember correctly, and what little birds
have done to contribute to our society beyond
dispensing greed throughout the suits and ties forced
to ride the elevator in the morning, instead of flapping
as the horizon gives birth and the cats are sleeping.

The Untimely Eviction of Mr. Brown, Page 1

Have you ever been kept awake by the sound of your own heart? Like a stubborn salesman scratching at the door?

As though every beat ripples through you as a penny in a puddle, resounding like waves circling out and expanding like the ever-blacker universe itself?

And isn’t it peculiar how the rest of the body seems to involve itself? As if to support the growing tumbleweed of sound, thunderous thumps in your chest. It generally begins with the ears, as they project the mumblings and thuds of your assiduous heart through to your pillow like an ill-smothered megaphone. It is a sound that simply cannot be repressed. It may as well be a deaf high school marching band beneath the box springs. As soon as that song takes off, your eyes will follow suit, and crank themselves open like Venetian blinds at noon. In the Sahara. Hot. You will see in the dark as you never have. Each knock and bump of your chest will open a larger hole that will form in your ceiling. It will eat your potentially radioactive glow in the dark stars from 1985, sucking them up into naked space. It will be entirely impractical to close them again, what with the band and celestial activity overhead. But this phenomenon is by no means limited to your head. Inevitably your fingers are tapping your pale thighs, and you have flopped to your back to avoid the megaphones pressing any harder into the traitorous pillows. The fingers are picking up pace, filling the missing notes between syncopated beats, until they seem to sprout minds of their own and generate heat from the speed of their drumming. Each finger becomes an oversized matchstick and ignites, sending you into a flaming frenzy and kicking around sheets like a devil child. You extinguish the flames, but not before loosening every cover of your mattress sheets, so that you must stomp to your feet and reconstruct the bed entirely before you might make a second attempt at sleeping. It is then that the flood lamp of a harvest moon behind the bars at your window begins to build its own case. As you walk to your window you drop the burnt sheets and forget the smell of charred arm hair entirely. All sound evaporates from the room and your eyes would once more be free to close, had they not just been witness to the only thing on earth that might have silenced the largest, most ambitious muscle in your chest.

Before the Hotel Blackout

we held to each other like cuticles to the nail
and brushed the hours aside
blonde hair, straw broom—

words are heavier since,
stumbling down
from the lip
collecting like hail in a lead pan at the floor
to be thawed, refried, and leftover
in stained tupperware casing

before the hotel burned to the dirt
our hands were like water
yet we stood still to watch it
blazing and kicking up light
as if it were already morning-

Not Waste

the metro makes haste
this is modern transportation
hot, dirty cars brimming with short people
and the elderly needing seats
the whole thing sounds
like the first few bars of
Coltrane’s acknowledgement
and stinks of orange chicken

Expose The Negatives

today when i come across the woman
in blue plumage stapled to the subway sign
and cross the metal zoos of market street to grant
where business meets pleasure over plates
of hot lunch and blooming wet orchids
i will write what i have always wanted to write
across her immaculate canvas of a forehead

Top Floor

the quiet of the lights below

our toes

the nothing said

between

us

Negative Fourth Street

the afternoon is growing its wispy beard
as the blankets are pulled up over our heads
and the night tent is pitched as the sun is gently stuffed
into the next ostrich hole—

and i’m halfway up the rungs to the rooftop,
from where we count the street numbers
all the way to the water, where they continue
out of sight and mind,
seaweed hanging from the streetlamps
like mistletoe, or so we assume—

Crutches and Crosswords

bees, a face full—
i wake, clapping two hands to life and coughing
like chalkboard erasers


and when i’m restored
i find that someone spilled sunlight
down the back of your dress,
along the tapered canyons of bone—


they too have been eroded, nibbled at,
sculpted by insistent waters, skin yawning as if to say
this is how you are, and must be.


and the ceiling blades repeat the chorus
drawing you up into the white vacancy above the bed
the most naked of space


again i wake, and even you have retreated
into the corners and silhouettes
of the furniture, hat racks, empty clothing, everything—


and i am the fraction’s remainder
when divisions of dust and skin have settled
the residue of the hard to reach,
awake and absent and sorry.

One, Another, The Last

one sleeps sitting,
the suit was teeth white
long before it was his—
long before the thirsty floors
of the subway filled it like a canvas
with the murky insignias
of the underground

another trudges stacks of stairs
black bags in tow, dark bulging tail—
innumerable cans and shrapnel,
each crushed beneath a different
heel in the red gutters of chinatown-
a nickel each at the end of the line

the last is hunched on a plastic pail
harmonica hands, singing to clouds
i know all of you can see me,
i know you hear my voice.
saying stop pretending i don’t exist,
as pools of tourists begin to collect
at the corners, signals turning
to wash them all away again

On The #15 Today

eyebrow horizons
bow like playing dogs,
archers bows discharging—

the mandarin billboards
advertise like inside jokes
and i keep to myself
however ironic that is

considering how the inhabitants
of the black accordion alleyways
and drifters of the dusk grey towers
scuff their wilting shoes to the
same tempo as my eager heart.

Liner Notes

Let's light this apartment in fifteen watt bulbs
and squint at each other like christmas eve-

so that i can't define you by what shapes you take
outside of the bottleneck shadow and liplines

that feast on the glow of the dry harvest moon
and outline your teeth like two freeways.