event horizon

i imagine stretching out
comically, like a cartoon, like taffy

feet just lines of paint streaking to the singularity--

boy, what would that feel like?

hopefully nothing:

if time does the same thing

maybe my nerves would never fire.

i'd see myself scraping toward a dark threshold

for 80 years, and die of old age, never again

feeling my feet. and even 

those 80 years: were they?

outside my perspective, maybe it was

a millennia, or a nanosecond; they talk about this in movies.

as for me & my mind, i think about this pretty often:

not really black holes, but

other people: how you might be

stretched out like geometry, eyes wide with fright

and it might be year 67 out of 80 for you

even though it all just seems "didn't that happen just

last week?" to me.

or the reverse; i'm fixated on a moment,

some conversation you've by now forgotten,

that one time way back seven years ago

still feeling to me--and me only--like earlier today.

anyway, i'll demure.  speak softly, wait for you

to reveal your own event horizons

because i never know if my yesterdays

were your last years, or seconds ago.

january 2022

sad

I like to be sad.  I cherish the sincerity of it, the privacy & otherness.  Silent grief is a pain I trust; it is a trunk I carry on my travels, filled with memory and longing, filled with the last remnants of loves and voices long since turned to silent dust.  Sorrows are the lost treasures of my fallen empires, the ruins of my forgotten histories.  For me, to grieve is to touch again some lost, bright joy--sometimes the only joy I know.  Grieve, and be alive; do not numbly die.

specific monsters

we are specific monsters

to those we choose, otherwise

charming, magnificent, gracious

human beings, laughing & kind.

or however else we think ourselves;

and when we cast off these thoughts

letting some specific person have us:

the real monster underneath:

then intimacy couples with hate,

for why else would i ever be so cruel

as to let you meet me thus?

we choose our victims carefully

from those we love the most--

here, beloved, now witness me

and i will be a monster to you.

October 2021

Somewhere in the middle

The subway stops
somewhere in the middle
we dismount in the dark
feeling our way along
in a world between worlds
—we were never meant to be here.
But here we dwell, now
in caves of our own design
we light fires, hang blankets,
write on the walls, find water
make this disaster Home,
these strangers Family,
these habits Life—but what if
one day, the lights scream back to life?
What would we do? We cannot go back
but to stay would be a farse.
So we wait like anxious beasts
for the telltale roar and rush,
for the subway carried on its path
leaving us scrambling behind
trying to catch a life
that passed us by.
In time, we think less of this.
We were never meant to be here;
but slowly, we forget it’s so
and shape ourselves to fit
the world between worlds.

September 2021

Deserts

Somewhere on Google maps
in a desert, a pinprick in the sand ocean;
western China, I think—
weird beauty waits for satellites.
If I were there, in person
I’d probably be cold & thirsty
wishing someone had paved a road,
grumbling. But here: aloft, peering down
like some homesick cloud,
I see the pretty desert moguls
kept hidden from mankind, until
they invented cameras, and spacecraft,
internet connections, and late nights
full of nothing to do but find you
sitting still, invisible to those nearest by,
a secret majesty on the Earth.

September 2021