You are Designed to Disappear

Sinuously, the clouds
refuse to flatten as the day
dies off.
Rough the way.

Someday, you’ll have
to ask yourself
what you’re worth
to the rest of us,

your inability to navigate
too obvious when you can no longer
ambulate straight to the ATM, a short stint
from the car door.

It swings open.
Someone might offer to help,
which would be worse. What
gets disbursed is chump change.

A man tries to back 
out of the bank lot and cannot,
the clutch grinding as he veers off,
sidelong into my side of the building.

Serpentine

What keeps you on the planet—
absurdly orange flecks peppered
against a blackbird’s wing—
a sunset that took everything
down with it?

At eye-level,
the river is nothing
but current. Around newly-fallen rocks,
it winds its way through darkness
and harbors no illusions, having already

been ravished at the edges
by winter. The sun
rarely came, or barely stayed,
waylaid by shadow
that kept most of it out.

The evergreens branch out, reach for nothing but 
the everlasting. In quiet,
the river is swept along
by moonlight, into the mineral depths
from which it will never come back.

The Darkest Apartment in Alphabet City

Marginalia

The day is a desert
I coughed up all night.
Down the hill
a dog barked into the darkness.

At some point, the story of your
life will become a ruse someone
resorts to when the conversations lulls

and he feels, in that bareness, exposed:

–remember when?–

and everyone assembled turns an ear
to a narrative that, as it unfolds then, mitigates, makes sense.


Yet never to include

the faint blue vein that pulsed through your forehead


and which no one ever remarked upon

or seemed to see, rushing like


the river to the sea

you felt without relent

   as it carried you away.

Apart from all Else

Behind the low line of houses,
you can hear the traffic
day and night if you listen,
though it is not as atonal as it
sounds, at first.

In a room beside the freeway,  my uncle bummed a cigarette
and as he flicked the borrowed lighter,
fell into a rumbling heap
of a grand-mal seizure, that electricity.  He
did not cry out. You can
only survive so many–this was his third.

Heavy morning mist weaves through
the evergreens.
Graveyards line either side of the road
that winds 
down from the mountain
into town
where the lights are.