The Brittle Page

August 28, 2017

 

Preface

They are drowning in Houston.

There is the flashbang of lightning.

A worried dog is saved and another drowned.

The less you have, the more you notice.

Ceiling tiles dripping with water from above.

 

1.

Under the stars

there is a blue sky

and beneath it

a corpse.

It’s approachable.

 

2.

Let the green in

and let it shine in

like a glare

like a blinding knife

opening new space.

 

3.

Their hearts like rubies

are stolen roughly

and then to sit in shadows

a thief’s pocket

soulless and parachuted.

 

4.

It is stale the way it sits

and staler the way it tears

and stalest the way I taste

but the slide down the throat—

a glistening tactile, verdant.

 

5.

To dose on berries

the way we overdose

consumption wielding itself

that giant ouroboros

before we sleep.

 

6.

Or are we awake?

Or are we away

for the last time

bludgeon to temptation

landscape itself fascistic?

 

7.

The dust creeps to circuits

while I creep to a circus

the mind flashing lights

strobes persons made

so we lean to the lively death.

 

8.

Is there no such thing?

Is there no fame?

Or perhaps I’m obsessed

with landscapes of obsession

fame as one long vista?

 

9.

Black plastic and brown smudges

and the lament I hold before me.

Let’s corroborate on cruelty.

The nature of stains and dirt

forwarding a love of appeal.

 

10.

I dream of doomed fields

the spools of rusted refusals

and the quotes of dead men.

Children, women, men surround

a campfire culled from gasoline.

 

11.

Where does this marionette dance?

Or too from where does the hunger stem?

Skid marks across ugly carpet.

Ripped clothing left unmended.

Amidst wrappers a cerulean note arrives.

 

12.

Indented jaws smoking with sunshine.

The heat we have come to love

leaves us sitting in the corners

blessed with foaming throats.

It is tough to blink these images away.

 

13.

Tripped up upon shells

and laces and leathers and plastics.

Throngs of collision,

mixed curse of materials.

Bullshit carried in the brine.

 

14.

It was the wincing that got me.

And my falling against the tile.

Thirteen hundred blank faces

morphing of each other.

You watching this temporal decay.

 

Post

Waiting for an evaporation

with clothes stinging

needles folded in

and we are exemplifying

holding the lifeless close.