Mementos are the strangest things. Sunday in a sachet, Monday they're a shrine. Warded by my candles like a presidential guard. The last of the stones you gifted never skipped. The french fries from that final meal together— why you chose McDonald’s you couldn’t say— but I’ve heard they’ll keep a hundred thousand years. The pair of mismatched socks, each with a mammoth hole. It was the last time you would laugh. Toes like the heads of turtles pushing through. Now hung upon t

An hour in the gallery was more than enough for you. We only know the goldfish when the revolving door gets stuck. People watching people watching people. In the canvas or the marble or the woman pouring coffee in an urn. It seemed so sacrosanct— a place you cannot sneeze; and we pondered which was worse— the itching or the scratch with a pruning saw. Why is it only art when in museums—not the shed? The mice Automatistes. The woman on our heels, caked like Tammy Faye. Perha

You’ve come to the point where everything’s either/or: Incense up to God. Wisps from cigarettes. Either way it curls, like the tail of a Manx at play. Where else could it go? All that moves is ghost. It’s why we have to blink. Nothing to do with moisture or the dust. Your marble was a croc and not a cat’s eye. When the bully said he’d won you simply nodded, assenting to the A-bomb of his fists. You appeased like Chamberlain—they never left his side and blacked your sockets.

Every stone is different. Even snowflakes can’t compete. What does & doesn’t linger with the melt. I challenge you to find its doppel- gänger. Like a face you’ve seen on subways—then never spot again despite the birthmark on a cheek, mirroring Richard Thomas, or the crater in the visage of Dafoe. We write off scars as ghastly—yet the zenith of what survives. Just ask Joaquin Phoenix, lifted from the embers by his cleft. There are flecks upon a stone— like stars they look al

Wars have raged on every single continent but Antarctica. Our children have been murdered on every landmass— save Antarctica. Antarctica’s exempt of taxes, of shady flimflam men. Even plagues have stayed away. My dearest Emperor Penguin, your kingdom is truly bliss. Paradise is never where it’s warm but where it’s cold—and not just any kind of crisp, but the type that rimes your beard—like stalks of winter cattails poised to snap— not the Santa sort of whiskers— he’s up in t

The 555 prefix was never real. Reserved for every show & movie made. I picture my mother calling Cary Grant, or maybe David Niven in the night. I might have dialed Jaclyn Smith myself, who would have passed me off to Farrah, my saying something daft about the billowing blonde of her hair, the swimsuit on my wall, and then a tone like an electric razor, humming as if the one that’s used by Bond, ask him if he’s ever gone by Jimmy, what’s the secret to getting girls—directing m

No one else’s landscape will be exactly the same as yours. Either the water's gone downstream a micro- metre, or the rocks have aged a grain in the sands of Earth. Or maybe the Nikon you've been toting weighs you down, like a feather & a camel’s back. The caboodle will have dominoed by then. The clouds have strayed the length of a fruit fly’s wing—in your half-Planck hesitation. Your hands have quaked a magnitude minus twelve. A duck has shook her head of excess wet, a sing

I’ll stop before the start, its lines ubiquitous, knowing I can never catch my breath, no matter how it waits around the bend, faithful as an umbra under sun; or the other excuse I hold: the stench of suffered sweat, laurel of green & glory to make me itch, weaved like a crown of thorns without the thorns—defenders of the rose, inhale the waft of angels at your peril—the scratches aren’t worth it; or maybe it’s the bullet that is fired to a blameless sky—perhaps it pierced a

These are not my hands they are my mother’s. Fashioned while I floated in her grotto. A torso like Laurasia; every limb a language in its drift. They are small. They are delicate. Tender as a nurturing tongue— the soothe of her evening song. A man should not have palms so silked & supple. It’s a woman’s watch I sport around my wrist—since it’s the only one that fits. It wasn’t hers— that was entombed about her carpus in ‘89. Mine is just a thirteen- dollar knock-off. It rem

I never would have pronounced it Myeengun when I was 3. A name needed to be mono- syllabic, in the utopic “Summer of Love.” There is little I recollect— and wouldn’t—save the T of tangerine. I remember our philia—thinking it utters ally— bedfellow back in the day. There were 67 left in ’67. School is now synonymous with his death. And I bemoaned a rubber ball against my skull. Just a welt and not a crack. Bequeathed a lasting phobia of lacrosse. For the single year I knew h

Bad things come in threes has been debunked. A deuce will clearly suffice—for maleficence to unleash its ruination: the left/right dénouement— to the goblet of a boxer’s chin; the fentanyl which will follow— gulped with Whitley’s gin. The discarding of the gloves that botched the job. We thought that two had spoke of balance— the drop of the other shoe; a seesaw’s down & up; for better and— the nuthatch on the bough, tearing itself asunder, each wing off to flee their sep

Take my yolk upon you and learn from me, for I am meek and lowly in heart… —Matthew 11:29 It was birthed by every bend you undertook. There in your mother’s garden, hoisting up the ants as if the Rapture. A three-year-old reaping angel. Fingering their antennae as though the strings of a hydro pole—messages in the wire you cannot hear yet somehow see. You envision its wooden T, say it sagged while bidding your father bon voyage. The encumbrance from screaming love into its li

You’ve stopped your weekly visits, the uncorking of Baco Noir, the finger in the cheek we heard as kids, suspecting I've breached a perimeter, which I confuse with parameter, their neither/nor abyss, claim you want to preserve our friendship, as only the ice can do; this affection of another kind we cannot christen, our sibling-like rapport, this anything-but-fall-in-love— which permits a single captive to abscond—cold-hearted prefect, perfect in its judgement, opting for t

Here, in the conduits of our progeny. The house that’s raised in brick. An Oscar on a mantel or a canvas in the Louvre. A published book of scribbles. A pulse in the pith of psalm. It’s not my poem that hearkens love—it’s the blossom on its page along the binding. Its loss of scent to must. Its oblation of the sun for the pall of dust. Compressed as though there’s more it could have bled. Forfeiting every drone of apidae, the imbibing of its nectar—for a quell like the foot o

You respond to my curtains’ close with a galling no man is an island. I was never a fan of Donne, the tumult from his tolling bell a cuckoo clock—I learned to hate the birds because of it. However I’ll acquiesce. His verses are immortal— mine are not— as a result, I’ll become a promontory, jutting into the sea like a middle finger. I’ll surround myself with gators, piranha & electric eels—the jolt of a wired fence; a peninsula’s way to taunt you are not welcome— but should

They say when you cannot dream the madness will surely come. As if the pelican in your sleep is perfectly sane. The duffel in its jaw a trove of onions. Their skins will forge your poems. Metaphors are translucent. The robber at the bank stole everything but the cash. Held it up with a staple gun. Swiped a lifetime supply of stickies. Now paper clips clamp his tie. Inhales the Mr. Sketch as though it’s glue. Elmer’s gave our fingers another epidermis. Remember? Why the bull

But of that day and hour no one knows… —Matthew 24:36 Tomorrow is the most sacred day on the calendar. It’s filled with solemn promise— gleams like the face of Moses, stepping down in awe from Sinai’s cloud. Even Sol can’t mirror its brilliance; Sirius surpassed in glory. It comes with sweat & blood, marking doors as if a Hebrew dwelt within, to be spared a first-born son. Arrives in stealth like the Angel of the Lord. The altar of Tomorrow will exceed our lamb & wine. A cu

This is the first time we’ve been here since 9/11. The seedling that was planted gives us shade. The toddler who kicked our ball might be a surgeon. The ins & outs of brains. The infant in a stroller’s given birth. Maybe that is her behind the swings, pushing both her twins who’ll live forever. You tell me I’m mistaken. We were here in 2010— albeit half-an-hour. The sun had melt our lollies. A woman who was pregnant said hello. Her stomach like a wet balloon. Her child by n

They say you shouldn’t swim if you can’t see the bottom of the lake. Four steps out and fog below the surface. You respond in kind with murk. An earthen appellation? Cannot be called the same as what’s in water. And what will you call me, darling, as I slip beneath the sheen? My toes which feel the slime you’re clearly convinced we should not touch? My chancing Neptune’s cleansed it all with purging breath? Air is not the air that’s under the grade. Where the stones which y

It’s the full moon that is boring, you orate as you set up your reflector in the dusk. Its vanity of look at me. The crescent is a judging karambit, one for the end of days; a reaper of galactic grains. The half-moon speaks of balance, a cosmic yin & yan. Its meld of frump/enchantress. The radiance. The acne and its aftermath of scars. You add you speak of Luna not your face. And then when it’s abstruse. The shroud of modesty. Or hiding what we envisage to be there. A dusty,