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Gently Confused Smile
Blank pages scare me; I fill them
so they’ll stop staring with that look
like they know the feel of my hands
and I’m supposed to smile back at them.
I sit in a room younger than me with books older than me,
and think about the quiet way the chair’s legs merge
with the floor, like the threads of a spider web
to make things cyclical. There’s irony in the way we try and put trees
back together, filling hacked up shelves with moot-tree books
as if we’ll see anything outside our eye-lashes.
The red carpet grins with its crocodile teeth, and tears too,
and asks me: What color is the sky?
And I tell it green, because what difference
could color make if you can’t feel red?
And now, now I smile at the window, or mirror
if it’s dark, not smiling at the window
but instead at the sand, it’s made
of, that I recognize from that first
night on the beach, when there were no blankets.
There are always Machiavellian staircases
waiting to be stepped on or slid down
to make you think you made a decision.
2 sets going up to: women’s lingerie, old cigarettes,
voices that cut through your head like a saw, and false-teeth;
one set going down that leads back to the smiling grey carpet,
hacked up shelves, windows that won’t recognize you,
and chairs that remind me of the cyclical nature of spider webs.
I’m starting to understand the importance
of a local, an American idiom
and now. Now I feel fine with blank pages
so long as I can see the lines pushed through
from the last words I put on the last leaf.
Things That Need a Second
After Keats’ ‘Ode on Melancholy’
Your breath to become
a frosted puzzle of crystals
when blown onto a coldwindow
from inside. Regretting
something stupid you say
to someone whose picture
of you probably doesn’t matter
as much as the cigarette-smoke
still
trailing
after
the
last
word.
Eye-contact with a stranger
whom you hope will wear that smile all
day for that microwaved moment.
Train-doors to close and take away dice that’re
still turning. Reading the last word
and punctuation mark of a new favorite book.
The wave’s rainbow which we’ll
turn to a child’s smile when they learn
they can make them at home
with their thumb and a hose.
Getting your nose broken. Crashing
a car. For perfume to go from perfume
to a kind of gravity. Getting comfortable
with flowers. These things aren’t death,
beauty or time they are things that wake us
and, I imagine will one day
put us to sleep. Not excuses for being sad
or happy as I reckon this is less like
being hot or cold and more like a nice-smile
or the alphabet, but just, all the same,
things to washout with wine.
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