dreadlust

dreadlust:

age's end staring us in the mouth

Arlington high rises as precursor

to Mumbai, to Rio;

dystopia, dystopia.

i lifted her onto my tongue like food.




the little animals will be alright;

Sudoku drowns me in disbelief

and i'll bet the party lights aren't lit

at Dogwood in this thundershow.




dreadlust--it fills us full

and then consumes.

i think about an algorithm i haven't written yet

same as books, as letters, as promises

before i fall asleep.

Some Dark Arc

here in the middle of my life it occurs to me

this would be a convenient time for it to end, the arc

has reached a nice conclusion: born, celebrated, fallen.

it would save the trouble of rebuilding anything

and only a few children, i suppose, would really notice

how this degenerate they did not know as such

no longer haunted earth. otherwise, i guess

a parent or two, some siblings, a few clueless friends

would sometimes pause and grieve a minute before

shrugging on. you could see a therapist, they’d say

if i explained the convenient situation to them: as if

reframing, as if tricking myself, were change.

no, maybe i should anyway. but laying things out

here on the table, as it were, like a surgeon’s tools

i sneer at the lack: of sex, of company, of community,

of purpose, of meaning, of plans, of hope.




“what the fuck,” he whispers and climbs

over the banister very conveniently




in an imagination, which perhaps counts

as suicidal ideation—you could see a therapist,

i tell myself, but instead i light a cigarette

and gird my loins. be a man, watch the kids,

laugh like none of this is starving or suffocating me

here in the middle of my life, which is the end

of some dark arc.

bar monologue

there’s nothing to say

at this bar—

well i’m just going to force it




it’s hard to pity someone

who’s doing such a good job of it themselves

i said once, about—

well, i realize now: myself.




do you (who? nobody would) remember—

never mind.







7/3/24

but ghosts leave scars

say we rolled you flat into a board

and imagined the resulting grain as natural
or even, insultingly, disposed of you
once your noble heart had formed a liquid stone
and let it harden; say we threw you
somewhere to rot and disappear: well now
some poet one day will appear—maybe today
who will see upon this concrete wall your grain
your life, your victory over years, the tendrils
of what waters once passed through your veins:
this poet, i say, will mourn and celebrate you then
with all the fervor humans feel at the feet of trees

The Tidal Wave

The tidal wave, which changed everything

rivulets of water rushing inland, up hills,
marking out fresh new valley walls where
once there had been shopping centers, for example,
stilled into an infant shoreline I could stand upon
to peer across the shining water flats, vast
feature of a suddenly foreign landscape. Then,
not all at once, but with lapping incrementality,
drip by drip the pools withdrew back to the sea
or seeped into the porous ground, to leave behind
only mudded evidence of all it had destroyed
and myself, no longer gazing on a sea but
merely standing somewhere midway up a hill
of no particular importance.