Found

These were all found while I was going through some things. They're from fall of 2007.

Unexpected Fall

The bugs should be dead.
It is November, and the first freeze
of the season should have killed them
off. But I am getting bitten, sitting
outside in a sweater, sweating.
One bites me on my forehead,
and I'm reminded of my loneliness.
I am a great well, and I am empty.
Do they not know it is November?
The crisply cracked leaves let me
think winter is fast approaching;
I see visions of blank black branches
marching up from under deep, smothered
lakes. But these mosquitoes show me
spring can come in autumn. What great
God am I to ask them to stop biting?
Why should I begrudge their confusion,
this ancestral longing to drink
the stuff that makes me run?
But I flip through faint voices on pages,
my makeup sliding down my neck, thinking,
"The bugs should be dead..."

Heater Cold

Here are all the stars strewn boldly on the ground—
man's desire to make his own heaven, held tightly
on anonymous mattresses and in stacks of slightly
solid moans. Singing, we're here on the backs
of each other. Weaving in and out of the concrete,
we search for soft somewhere in the metal. Why did
we build it? Fortresses, hardness to enclose those vital
organs we guild with patina so flimsy, a skeletal mass
like a viral infection. We mimic the body.
We search for the place where the feminine thigh
slides sublimely into the round of the back, obscuring
our desire with a contour of charcoal—flat masked,
as if we weren't the apple, at our core all the seeds.
Here all the beds are made hospital corners—
what would we do without the mess
of sex, the dripping proof that our insides exist?
I want you to know that my thigh slides sublimely, albeit blemished,
into the round of a back, some back like somewhere
blurring this box. Melting my skeletal mass.
Let's climb the stairs to the roof and stare out over
the meshing of stars blocking out all the sky.
Let's jump because clearly here all down is up.
Man's desire to make all heavens different, blindly forgetting
he's just one.


Compassion


Strangeness,
in the back of my head like black diamonds.
I know you. I was you.
I am you.
I have the same small crease in my forearm.
I know better than to burst the bubble of illusion
by studying your skin--
it takes precious light to make every pretty photograph,
all this faked falling down stairs.
Nights made more fabulous by memory,
or horrible disasters that weren't half bad.
How many times did I cry to forget that I'd laughed?
Sparkling ice, tinkling like giggles in the back of my throat;
they were really stones, blocking my esophagus
from sobbing, cold but not melting.
I have the same pictures.
I burned them when they developed blank.
I miss you already.
You think you're still here.