DISTORTION STUDY
in memory / of memory
The poems of fall may as well be the girls of winter. The rabbit may as well be the incapable understudy of clouds. We all bring our shapes to the sky. Train car from which departs two capped men. A glacier coddled by fog. A mass of tissue it’s imperative to remove. We transfer the game to beer foam and drink in the pistol the panicked rose becomes. We give our middle finger to comparison, diminisher of is though is is the bridge connecting tooth to cliff side encased in the snow globe’s mouth. Gah. Is as it turns out is a petri dish, is the entrée in the dish itself, resting like a steak that will sound out its last bloody word in a second. Hold on. Just a second. I’m renaming this ache melt so I can understand the body as affirmation, a mountain more traversable than not. One second. Hold up. My newsfeed is again today a study in the failure to see. It used to be I thought of the classroom when I thought of hands raised.
A PAUSE
Sleep’s hoverboard is bogged down
by waking. What I want to say is I was hovering
over my sleep like a rainforest’s immaculate sweat,
a cataract that turns the air into the laid-out ghost
of every pianos’ white keys—a bygone music.
I am no surrogate for an orphaned gorilla.
The gorilla suit no longer on loan.
Summer’s tragedy is fall’s trend then the landscape’s death-
mask we laud as wintry, as pause’s win. A pause when?
My hands are no longer together—divorced from clapping,
but show me anyway what you can do: unhitch
the celebration from the act. The celebrity
from the flash. Maybe we are all fish sticks mistaking
the sea-colored plate as a kindness.