Afloat

The pull is insistent;

the pressure enduring.

Though her best years lie behind her

and her best memories lived and forgotten

her hands move leathery into your wounds;

tired and rough,

they set your bones,

there where you ache tender

And you, capsized upon this bed

shivering all through—

a wreck, run yourself into the walls

against the high cliffs of your room

still desperate to see run aground

the voyage of your name.

The pull is consistent

but no matter.

How can she touch you?

She shackles you

with her calloused hands

and slings your shattered arm

but you do not feel,

no, not deep, deep beneath to

You and the heartbroken sycamore that became you

The lightning that split your trunk

the thunder that hammered your chest

BEAT

BEAT

BEAT

the wail

the crash

you

breaking

beat

beat…

But she

does not rise with your emotions.

She does not suffer with your indifference.

She has no pity for the ruined few;

the pull is persistent

and unrelenting.

The frail boards and timbers that worn you

she patches in the back.

You know: she tells you.

There is no mending that is gentle;

no love a caress.

Nothing will save you from the whine

of your slow-churning regret.

She grabs you, and seizes you

and you cry

those large, round tears.

In the language she teaches you, putting splinter to splinter

you are scraped together

and do not sink.

Jade Rabbit

The suffocating sun, the sky shutters drawn shut

your cold cold hands

drumming out in the dimming brightness

the moth

flitting like eyes

Back and forth across the bulb

Make shadows you could not know

The gloved erraticism of inertia,

the lucidity leaking from yesterday’s booze

Dried and dull, cigarette butts

Cough hazily as the night.

It would have been so much worse

You know just as well as I—

The moon, long and pale and immortal

The moon, long and pale and lost to you only

In the morning to come.

Syllables

A boy, and his severed degrees of escape

His father the dour brick maker;

There was nothing so concrete as his doubt—

His mother, dead of heat exhaustion

shivering through to her dirtbed

And quakes in that space still,

Turning her grave

His sombre, silly violin

The sudden, sullen rain

The songs end half-played

In that dubious construction his home

His grade school teacher, with his flushed out faces

Always slurs his speech;

But a boy accents the things that matter:

In this language family is one syllable

and chocolate is three.

Armour

You took your father’s armour, when the time came—

You, not one who was unprepared to fight.

But when he saw, how great the lamentations

That never reached you, vanished in the night.

Armoured and armed; your comrades did not know you

(Those self-made men, each his old father’s son)

But you declined the son of heav’n’s distinctions

And left behind the battles you had won.

When you returned home, you arrived a hero

And in the dust that shrouds your father’s grave

Traces of his smile still lingered. But your sister,

She fell for the guy she pretends she can save

And every day your mother worries her waist smaller

There are things your father’s armour cannot take

(Your best friend says nothing, but you know; you know)

Though your mother keeps it polished for your sake.

What good is it, when you know she wants grandchildren—

What good, struggling in heels at the singles’ greets?

At night, you (you, of all people, can it be?) are afraid;

In your nightmares you take the well-lit streets.

Far

It’s raining, but it’s not far

eating out, for a change of a pace

the dash to the street corner

the droplets in one’s hair

the cars splashing by

no one can pay the rent this month

no exceptions

but no one cares

they barely paid last month

and they’ve all forgotten.

It takes the old measurements of lengths

to know a kilometer is too far

It takes a walk on the night darkened beach

long hard looks from the bridge

the lifeguard glancing in the wrong direction

It takes rain, but no one cares.

It takes too much to become a person,

a real person

one whose body they will fish from the sea.

How one marginalizes distance,

the core of tragedy.

God, how one falls;

need to get one of those medication boxes

that old people use

to know which to take each day.

Time—

it’s a living anesthetic

numbing all these sojourns of suffering

It rains, but it’s never too far to go.