January 21st, 2015


Guess Again (4:39) , Thom Yorke, 2014

skin over bone

fingers in the eyes of the enemy

But still,  it was not nothing I felt when i saw
the way the falling night rested in layers on the hills.

gradient blue.
The texture of wood siding.

All of my nightmares are in the garden.

And in locker room bathrooms that go on for miles
and every single toilet dirty - a dove with no branch
on which to land

My mother never knew how much I hated the
thick blue black of night sky - how it stuck in my throat
in pieces, like the voices in my head which would repeat
always only the beginning of a sentence slowly,
from very far off, as if talking through sleep.

I want to go home and curl up on the foot of my mother's bed
even if she's only watching the evening news
and folding laundry.

My mother is the smell of baby powder
and clean, gently worn, flannel.

Suddenly I am crying in Starbucks.

Perhaps it is for the stranger who smiled at me
four weeks ago and died today. We looked into each other's
eyes and neither of us knew she was dying. 

The wild stallions of my heart make a mess of my
chest - a muddy, bloody beat, just beneath
the knot in my left breast where the stress
settles in like a cat, like the fog, like the blue
night resting on the hills.

Skin over bone, mattress against skin: this is how
we break through ourselves.

All the boulders are rising to stretch
their stony backs. Tiny bits of moss
and dust drip from them.
They crouch again when my head lights
tumble around the corner.

The field is iced over and looks like a lake.
The lights are seven times their size in this grass
ocean; the jagged shadows bite my lip

these days I live just down the road from plans I've made
and abandoned.