What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow

Out of this stony rubbish?

The beginnings that shape our endings

Like red earth in our hands

Youthful, yielding,

Still

Our education in foam

Letters and numbers on stone walls

We are puzzles.

Solve us.

And when we were children

You and I

And generations of mutts

We waited for a many-wheeled vehicle

To give us an opportunity

Granite hallways a maze

Congested

Library texts a salvation

O City city, I can sometimes hear

The rush of creek and waterfall

From which we drank unadvised

Not poison but

Perhaps something close

A neighborhood

Teeming with children

And other withered stumps of time

A denim coat

Sentience in odd places

Dummy in the living room, horrific

Violence in black cardboard

The bleakness of ineptitude

Spinning a love story

From bales of hay

From sea to lackluster sea

Unplanned pandemonium,

Flawed diction

These fragments I have shored against my ruins

To erase one self and create another

(I did not like it

I do not like it)

Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.

Blue lining our streets

You are with me at last

Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours

A novelty

Inspiration in windswept evenings

Our shoes stained, mud and water

Our hands black with Astroturf

I beg (too far)

Let this never be lost

It will not come to that

‘My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me.’

For isolation is sickening,

Quietude murderous.

Cracks in my porcelain

Spilling

Paint on cheap canvas.

Never such a calm calamity

We who were living are now dying

With a little patience.

You are here but I must keep quiet

A world of our own

Violated by those who would cry

Who would curse the wind

You are here and I must speak

I do not know whether a man or woman

Not for the first time,

I am something else entirely

You ought to be ashamed, I said, to look so antique.

Some nights feel eighty-five, some six,

Some both

Weary yet not calloused

Calloused yet naïve

Spilling

Hiding is futile

I didn’t try hard enough

(leaves no mark)

What is that city over the mountains

Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air

It has come to that

I’ve realized too late