give me long enough and I’ll get over it
O Geologic Time, spare me this.
I don’t have the energy for it.
Tell me it will be dust, then lakebed,
then shale, then dust again.
high school friend’s older brother
drove fast
thin like a whip unfolding
or a roofing nail, sharp
warned me about all his friends.
I made you this mix
It’s an oblique love.
parsed and mostly imaginary
little gestures
a leaf blown a certain way.
the why of it
I return to love as a subject
because it is amoral
and antisocial—a beast,
with only itself as a burden.
Romeo and Juliet lived
He always wondered about Rosalind,
and she never forgave him for murdering her cousin.
That’s the trouble with all-consuming passion.
It burns everything up, and it burns out cold.
Pressing boobs against the glass of a closed window
He tried to pick me up at a party,
and I deflected. Then I saw his video
dancing in alt drag to minimal techno.
I chased him around until he moved to NY.
Never after
Wendy grew up, as we must,
but the clerk she married didn’t do it for her.
Behind her eyes she saw James
his cruel hook and dead blue stare.
It wasn’t the proposition, exactly
Though it was that too.
More the crying
And the fumbling
with the handfuls of singles.
Flying Dutchmen in the Night
Stay at sea. Uncertainty is close
as can be to what I want.
The shore for us
is almost always a shipwreck.
fuck your storyline
I’m not the whore
who lures you out of the forest,
Enkidu, Wildman.
I’m the whore IN the forest.
