UPTALK
1
The old station
I’m in constant
reference to
has tracks
no flash along
can change. It
tells me: no,
your eyes
aren’t all, in that
mirrory crew
at work on the corners.
I looked. They were
still at it, as if
like-mindedness
had put them up
just so they’d
drop their arms.
2
I was all for
the one driver
whose green truck
gleamed,
standoffishness
like the traffic’s
that I hurried for
the hum
I felt in me.
Rather:
I couldn’t unfeel
the qualm of
his horseshoe earrings,
silver high heels
he carried in one hand.
It’s difficult
to be invisible
3
when you can’t
disappear.
My problem was
I could, almost
on cue. An arch
fades to travelers.
I only host
a squat man,
his pink hotel.
My words:
in and out of
beknightedness
as well, although
I don’t see dust
whipping the braids
of that early
a.m. woman
4
whose hairdo
I recognize
dazzles as she goes:
With you, I’d love
to level, however…
When she vanished
I came back to
my mouth:
yes, yes, yes
returned a redness
to my self-same shirt.
I take it off
to put it on.
Or didn’t I go
beyond that now
to the after-
thought
5
I know air is
to people
who don’t sing.
I understudied
them. I flipped
some switch
to sigh just past
the him.
He reached.
Shutting some
window
changed his face
into a glare
I thought had
only one move:
subsiding,
backwards,
6
into me.
I’m sounding
the same. Whatever
has recourse
to a brick wall
does, in the
interest of true
touchability,
fall back to that.
This thuds.
I can’t mishear,
take too long
to have at, or
don’t I tend
to. That sun
crosses me now,
here until done.
IT'S NOT ABOUT THE THROAT
1
Eye to eye
he offered. Forward air doesn’t open
just
any window. A bed’s not evidence.
I don’t
say this man’s mine and
in time, me
without coming too close to
an open door
that exaggerates. Wanting takes
more than what’ll fly:
I whined at his touch, which
did increase the ante
of a place
he asked to go to, or toward.
2
To say wind
works my lips. So warm day
does, in
my extent of waiting for that
wind.
Whatever scatters me.
I can watch
some video play my mind
for what it’d
look like: my face
into softer down.
Where is there to
want it? How about now?
It’s not like, he said,
this is what the end is for.
3
I came to
the right morning for no
other list:
hair, sweat, a grip, some
lash of
a disclosure. I talk more than
is
perhaps necessary.
My head and throat
vanish. The sun
is repetition
of the sun as it would vanish.
I go into a slump
on the bed in the latent
intent of a do-over.
4
He can go
all over.
He’s got manners.
He’s reserved in a
low-key way.
Engaging. Extremely.
He is
ambitious, but veiled about
it.
He bursts out laughing at
the ridiculous,
acknowledging how
divided he is from
himself. Facing a self
makes invisibility.
5
I could
say no, but
my body’s lacking
becomes its bottom-most step. I
hear a warning:
a passing truck picks up some can at
the same time
the next day passes without
a sound,
and the next. Don’t forget that
wind
is upside down almost the mind.
Night comes in with no
other body: longer,
cool, anonymous, discrete.
6
I look down:
zooming out is a mistake
because it shifts focus
from my hand.
Which is now a fist.
Now not. The mechanism of
distribution
will be taken care of by the sky.
It’s less blue
and more people, by
my eyes:
the previous clouds again.
He
lays on his back in the pack. I
look on, off, all afternoon.