Gamey Altitude

This dining room is mouse bin dusty.
The staff’s a bunch of old egg-eyed buffoons
with yellow heads and chalk hands.
What would it take to get a glass of water in this dump?

I signal one of the geezers
and persuade him to pour me some.

When it comes out, instead of ice
there’s a couple teeth clinking
around in there.
Not human teeth—more like the molars of a tiger,
an ocelot, or some other of the large cat
family.

Of course, I’m none too happy. I curse the waiter
and his elderly mind. In response, he points at a nearby table.

At it, there is a sitting man. A traveling salesman, I’m told,
with rotted rubber shoes and sewn shut eyes. He’s deaf
the geezer tells me, and hands me a card.

“See you in the afterlife,” it says.

Night Of Abandoned Planets

Big-headed, crying babies
of previous
nights haunting
worlds
of ice--once romantic
vistas.

I sit in a plain white chair and wait
in my father’s pajamas.

Wait for the object of my future
to arrive, roly poly,

in its ill-fitting summer suit. Wait

for the snarling animal to sniff my limbs and lick them clean.

I am

A

small, murdered eye in a box. Clothes
pins worked around
my various openings.

Someone, of course, invented me. But their
tracks have been thus covered well. And

the identity of this scientist is so distant, it

isn’t even there.

Pinochle Time

It’s when you realize how basic you are.
How much you really need.
Bravery, yes, but also
sadness in all these little choices,
the trivialities.

When our minds are unnecessary, or simply unused.

In the pinochle time, the milk
drinking time.

In the waiting to fall asleep time.

In the breakfast, lunch and dinner time. Fruit
salad time. Time with no noise. Time with
ice and a straw.

Time waiting for test results.
Time that
reminds you it is there. The time in between

visits to cemeteries.

The time we spend catching our breath
at the tops of the stairs. Or removing nail polish,
or celebrating holidays
like Thanksgiving, and New Years.

The time we think we lost but never had.

Spent studying geology, dissecting a piglet, looking
through a telescope.

Mourning.
The time on a mountain. The time
of war, envy or jealousy. Of our treacherous

stabs at love. Whereas, most of us,
our love is so imperfect
it does more harm than good.

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.