DOLDRUMS

Night comes in a slow bloom of abandon. Our words can’t contain the bigness of rooms. Our rooms hold failure nicely. I didn’t ask for this. [We ask for so little of what makes us up.] Remember the coffee table was always dirty. The days ended in a sloe gin fizz. I was never afraid, except of your death, which would come one day thieving. How can I hold my hands in a perfect cup? I squeeze the sides together until it burns. Could I hold water? Could I rupture? We’ve been here before. We know this juncture. The photograph of you swinging a glass door wide. The evening ushered in. The slow bloom of voices carried up from the street, and no answers to the pressing questions, the ones that could carry the story forward.

BADLANDS    

Prior attempts to typify rely heavily on absence. We read the reports and get stoned. A lack of feature can be defining, and yet. Say eroded. To bone. Taste the roof of your mouth. The two tongue taps. The rich red clay. There’s chalk in our blood. In the soil, coal seams. Fossil rock. Outlaws in the valley town. We get down with our badness. [Difficult to navigate. Difficult to love.] Barefoot and boozed-up, we kiss bottles then pitch them. We know the future. The dark of the ravine. The whistle, the smash. In the nothing that follows, we flex our badness. It fills us with heat. We could let it define us. We could let the desert.

NIRVANA    

If you change charged particles into radiant beams, does it mean god? If you go to a party at the Soho Grand. If you wear your mother’s wedding dress. When I get there, there will be right things to say. [Learned things. Like thank you.] There will be maps transposed on maps transposed on maps. This one plots for stoplights. This one plots for lost things. Don’t be afraid of confusion. [Confusion is a permanent state.] There is an art to being gracious. [Say bless your heart.] Everybody do the collision course. Everybody super collide.

BREATHING CAVE  

I come here when. The bridge to nowhere reinvents itself [resurrects] as a dam. I need to feel the air in both directions. I want to say it passes through me but really. It’s like water punching rock, full of threat, then gone. Like urgency then what remains. [Echoes.] As in respiration. As in river and more river. I come here when I need the breathing to overcome me. If breath denotes life, then this mountain. It’s all I want to think about. These airstreams. This massive lung.