True Love

One brushes the other’s teeth on a park bench.
She spits in the dirt and the man rolls a cigarette.
“I want McDonald’s, I want McDonald’s,” she repeats
and lights the cigarette he gives her.
And as he rolls his own, she combs his sideburn
with her nails. Pushes the hair behind his ear. The sun
remains aloof. And in the background,
a tree gets sawed to pieces. Fed,
roots and all, the trembling boughs, the creation
and the ends of us, to a machine that eats these kinds of things.

Ghosts In The Arboretum

Half of you already gone but
this is where I stay. Fingering
each and every one of you as suspects.

Your souls amount to little more than
collections of cheap knick-knacks, carnival
fare. Party favors. The voices of crickets.

Stuff that I keep hidden

in a box and will secretly arrange
to have buried with me. Entombed like a Pharaoh.

And I will hold up
a mirror
to each and every trunk to see if it is real,
and if it is, you’ll be found out

as the sky rouges over
with embarrassment.

Parentage

You built me from the inside out.

Everything
in me. My bones, my blood,
the pocket that stores my heart
Each resembling
something in you. Or in the ones that made you.

You also manufactured my tomb. Sank
your hands into the flesh of new time
and when you held them up
they were from then on guilty.
What a magnificent sendoff
you gave me.

The bone chief smokes his pipe and warms
his drink. My heart
I see it beating!

A genius of many lives. Many lives
longer
than mine will be. Longer
than I will ever muster.

What is this life you gave me?
Closed between the hands of some
giant.

It is every day
an insolvable universe
enfolding the silk-haired souls
of new human eyes.

Wandering in the jigsaw blue

With lightning hands and clamshell hearts

Our parents. They pressed us through the godly mold. Did they?
Cheesecloth of eternity.

And still when they look at us, we remind them
of nothing recognizable, nothing comforting or familiar

but themselves.