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.