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false pattern recognition
We are who we aren't
definitions shaped
then reshaped and still
no land is our land.
I try to spend my time wisely
because you gave it to me
when I couldn't afford it alone,
but I've always had more wist than wisdom.
People look backward and I don't know
how they do it, how they manage not
falling into traffic or city sewers, how
they stare long into the half dark and
cry with their fists or their teeth still somehow
alive at the end of the night. I don't know
how they do it, but I do it, and then
morning watching itself knot into a stranger
trying to remember how to be familiar
with a heart that no longer offers its hand.
And that's something I guess: that I
wouldn't trust me -- as the saying goes --
as far as I could throw.
(Just as well. I'm a lousy shot anyway. Broad sides of barns don't count for comparison when it's the space beside me I keep missing.)
You have this open marriage with papier-mâché
chewing things down and giving them second lives;
they really don't know how lucky they are,
pressed back together in a web of deft fingertips.
The joke is a bad one, that you build and I break.
Not destroy. Destruction necessitates a degree of
certainty I can't even pretend at. The joke is bad.
But it's also true. In your sleep you dream and
when you wake you don't remember but you
talk in your blankets (did you know?) and some
of slumber clings to you, dust motes in a bright light.
I'm jealous maybe. Your smile, unafraid to show
all of your teeth, unworried; people know without
knowing you at all: you would never hurt them.
You would not be the mouth or the throat looking
to swallow everything in a hurry just to keep it;
you would not let the backward glance move in.
(You could; you're nowhere near harmless, but the thing keeps being, always is: you wouldn't. You just wouldn't.)
From the roof the sky is our sky and from
the ground it waves blue good-nights,
waiting for us to go inside where it's warm where it's home where it's a juggling act of intent and result where it's ours even though even still
we are who we aren't,
negative spaces where our ladders used to stand.
definitions shaped
then reshaped and still
no land is our land.
I try to spend my time wisely
because you gave it to me
when I couldn't afford it alone,
but I've always had more wist than wisdom.
People look backward and I don't know
how they do it, how they manage not
falling into traffic or city sewers, how
they stare long into the half dark and
cry with their fists or their teeth still somehow
alive at the end of the night. I don't know
how they do it, but I do it, and then
morning watching itself knot into a stranger
trying to remember how to be familiar
with a heart that no longer offers its hand.
And that's something I guess: that I
wouldn't trust me -- as the saying goes --
as far as I could throw.
(Just as well. I'm a lousy shot anyway. Broad sides of barns don't count for comparison when it's the space beside me I keep missing.)
You have this open marriage with papier-mâché
chewing things down and giving them second lives;
they really don't know how lucky they are,
pressed back together in a web of deft fingertips.
The joke is a bad one, that you build and I break.
Not destroy. Destruction necessitates a degree of
certainty I can't even pretend at. The joke is bad.
But it's also true. In your sleep you dream and
when you wake you don't remember but you
talk in your blankets (did you know?) and some
of slumber clings to you, dust motes in a bright light.
I'm jealous maybe. Your smile, unafraid to show
all of your teeth, unworried; people know without
knowing you at all: you would never hurt them.
You would not be the mouth or the throat looking
to swallow everything in a hurry just to keep it;
you would not let the backward glance move in.
(You could; you're nowhere near harmless, but the thing keeps being, always is: you wouldn't. You just wouldn't.)
From the roof the sky is our sky and from
the ground it waves blue good-nights,
waiting for us to go inside where it's warm where it's home where it's a juggling act of intent and result where it's ours even though even still
we are who we aren't,
negative spaces where our ladders used to stand.