Correspondence: 1

To Whom It May Concern:

Tonight is like driving in cars for miles.
Tonight is like being suspended between.
Feeling is something that I do in private.
I am moving fast, but not fast enough.
The past isn’t dead; it isn’t even past.

Hungrily yours,

Sensible Architect



Dear Sensible Architect,

Sensible, as in shopper?
As in, petite with soft hands and mild-mannered corruption?
Staying still does not mean that nothing is being moved.
I’m afraid that one needs more than sense to make something stand.


Forthright & Frank,

________________________

The Canyon, The Audience, and The Stage

Heavy hoofs of commitment shuffle through the night.
What you can’t see can’t stop you from falling forward;

The bravest of us have thrown stones & felt along the edges with our palms.

________________________


We play it through.
We play for keeps.

________________________


The gape of this mouth will not be made to swallow.

We dot lines across the nighttime sky and hum in the darkness.
We look the gifted horse right in the teeth and cross our fingers.

The Willing and The Accomplice: An Aboutness

It’s not so much that she ingests the whole compendium,
but that the pieces she is exposed to stay with her.

It is in passing that she notes this exchange.

What is this skein that sits on top of the world
but embankment, which holds the willing forcefully

to the turn. These pieces with their hard stops
make her feel ill, a body heat which cannot be made to quit.

The willing cannot account for these remains,
the ones which marry the idea of a queen bed

and a lone cat-call before the door is shut for the night.
It is this unwillingness to go on that the willing wonders

about. What extends across the river other than light
and the picture of scent and what it feels like to touch?

Somewhere knotted within these civilized systems
there exists an other with opposable thumbs

and an interest in stationary. A possible place—
something to settle this. Who is this accomplice, this idea?

Intimacy From a Distance

Who can say that the sun has got it right
just because it finds its way through closed windows?

The sound of water means something is being cleaned;
The sound of water here means something is being cleaned away.

Candidness is a trap.

We amass vestiges, then give them frames.
What came before double edges?

Everything is moving water, concave and wordless—
Longing is a deceptive lens through which we see only ourselves.