A Logical Explanation

gives nothing away, no reason, no rationality but I keep reimaging a phantom half-life, my once-upon-a-time life – so light-as-air I almost missed it in the awakenings of early morning coffee and toast and the solitary trek to the first train and the soft evening’s return home brim-full of skies that spilled rain upon trees and roofs and empty parks that ran all the way back to a childish irrationality underestimated in the suburban undergrowth, an obsolete way of being, a serendipitous long-long-ago when we were above and beyond happy had total control over the background music – a logical explanation of our time/ space/belief in nothing before everything – snakelike swallows itself up and ends nowhere and everywhere in our city, our home, our room, our wide-open windows …

This Summer the Rain Told Us

water falls because it must and there is always too much or too little wrung out of cumulonimbus, raking the eaves of exhausted buildings, leached through drains and gutters and lakes and ponds choked with grayling perch and trout and roe and reed and the weed-knit bodies of suicides and the murdered and the accidentally drowned still down among the bottom-feeders and we are afraid monsoons usually arrive too early or too late and rivers cannot catch up, no matter how far they come, no matter how long the run-off at the mouth where tides are predictable and the ocean licks them up as does the moon whatever it told the rain and this summer the rain told us all the things we never listen to.

Out of the North Wind

a voice you almost remember –spit-soft vowels, introverted consonants curl the tongue. You taste the strawberry ices of childhood, bite through the city-wired synapses in your brain that blur the murmurs of the multitude and listen closer and closer to the whole human zoo – singing while white skulls rattle and roll around their last days, while bellies ache with unfulfilled potential they drone dank lullabies and lie awake humming the animal that furs their bones and you’re blown back. Before your throat was cut. Back to the first time you opened your mouth, howled at the crumbling moon.