Past-Perfect-Impersonal

Dear you in all poems that is forever unnamed: hello again. 

I believe in you and you have defined in me this age of witness. 

I, too, was born into a wicker chair surrounded by laser beams,

hoping for the least strict of virgins.  Strange, us both so afflicted

by this illness’s fluorescence, and, how, from its post-morning

confetti, we stagger like shadows longing for their authors.  Would

if I could, other, but I am approaching you like static, masturbating

my heart in this strophe of light.  There are many versions of how

I fell asleep vandalizing your gardens, but I beg, could it be, that

all of them are true?  What is it you’re unable to surrender and please

may I have that, is how every love letter can be summarized.  Another

is I am sorry we both fell for the ideas of our grief, but even that fails

to explicate how you hold me from the edges as we dip past everything.

There will be no way to undrench the oceans, but is it possible we might

become those clothes we can’t recall that one time we never met?  and how

lovely to imagine all these bones in my ear existing only for the possibility

of you saying hello in forty different tongues, rather than fearing some dumb

bear’s invitation to dance emerging from the darkness, we both so delicious.

In my simpler tongue,  I am sparrowing for you, though I should warn you

now:  sometimes I sleep face down in the world, others, face down in the ether.

Eight Different Types of Plaid & My Blackout Theories

Enter us, lovely, you true machines, and trace

the shadows with your scalpel into one more thing

we’re stealing.  Forever, and unmercied, these own lives

elsewhere, and the hope to fold some paper seven, then

more times, while in our veins, this new viscosity.  One more

thorn for the beloved, and a balance upon this new mist.

Being a person is quite difficult, especially in the face

of a tape recorder.  All night I could hear you speaking

about this recipe for breathing, but all morning, there

has been nothing but the heavy breath of this song.

(Dear Paul)   Vermont Stars

Not one thing, this night, will lie to you.

The clouds, hiding their purpose beneath

the stars, then the stars, hiding their light,

beneath their unshamed reflection of lightning

bugs.  They, too, dance like the recombinant DNA

of a lost God,  there, at sea, searching for his name,

again.    Here, upon this bench, we have no reason

to be so alone.  I’ve needed you, quite desperately,

to be a silence. Here, loud, and how the rains begin.

This, too, may be seasonal.  Extravagant.  Misting

beyond the dreams we discussed;  drunken, then

triumphant, as at dawn we trek large, separate ways. 

How we part so haphazardly, as though our risks

could have been less tragic, then tap-dancing a

dream of safety and its snipers across our one, true light.