“My love is sweet,”
you say.

Well O.K.

I’ll gobble you up
like a Hostess cake
I didn’t really want in the first place.

You go bankrupt.
I hoard remaining stock in the attic.

It makes me ill to think on it.

Sweet is sweet.

Instead,
feed me tannins and
Suck my mouth dry.

Who are we
and how did we come
to be these bodies
in this place?

What right do I have to feel unworthy,
worthy?
What’s worthy?

How can it be authentic,
when I don’t (won’t) feel?

What if my authentic
steamrolls yours?

Therein lies Suffering.
Unless, I guess…

I am you,
you, me,
your Suffering’s mine
(and Joy)?

Because I act, not of body-feeling,
but tugged by invisible
threads that tie

you

to

me.

Your reverberation in turn:
jangly-staticky-urgent-mute.

Fish bone in my throat
pricks
sticks
and disapparates to phantom feeling that I
swallow
and swallow
and swallow.

The handsome man discussing freight from Missassagua is loud.

He interrupts

the gentle creaking of the luggage bins,
the sweet steel-on-steel-swoosh-rumble.
The train cries: “I’m here, I’m here!”

He doesn’t hear;

nor see the gold glow broken
by streaking shadows of swallows diving down down between rows of corn
miniature from lack of rain.

What will his barge carry?

Containers of cream from the jerseys out to pasture?
Red barns filled with sweet hay?
A mountain of Queen-Anne’s Lace?
Blue flossy clouds painstakingly piled?

A hawk on a wire calls my attention, but

Covetous Voice

quickly restakes his claim.
Shop talk marbles plunk into blue upholstery behind my head,
together with certainty
we plunge predictably forward.

… inspired by responses to a series of haphazard library bookstack photos I took last month and a timely note from Mr. Tan.

The air is hushed between going and coming.
It’s still.

A chill 

trips down my spine and hangs
on the air.

It’s heaviness 
drips
off my fingers,
off
 my blue suede moccasins
into a puddle under the desk
where I would be working
if it weren’t for

the big space
between
one thing and another.

Fill the room 
with belly laughs to keep from sighing.

My virtue is not patience, 
but what is good just
won’t be rushed.