All the way back in that hallway

My voice strains with composed desperation

I need a decade and a home to even speak of dinner, apparently

While nanoseconds seep through every crack of my face

The distant apartment imagines me disrobing in it

Mud is a fine cause, it formed the men we mention

So we like to watch their images blur and speak

In the far reaches of our homes we can become ourselves or each other, but here, at close quarters,

I study the hand straps in the train car until they look like miniature nooses (this takes 20 minutes)

Watching a room disappear is a form of light exercise

It takes light to wash out the room, the watching

Helps us down the hallway to the sink

Washing the face flattens its chaos

I bend my face to my friends sitting in broken thrones I “let” them borrow

A proper confession makes use of all the furniture

The table is better worshipped from the floor

See how it rises to meet what it holds

I kept my love at that level, where my elbows found resting points

It took a very long time for the need to move to arise

Then I had to wait to be ready to obey

My patient master took my cold hand

Made me write this line to leave this room

To stomach a bunch of bad chatting I won’t be improving upon

Since the worldview must match the paycheck

Genre is for writers so generous that their gift

Speaks for itself and anyone who touches it

But it’s not like form is a hoard

I don’t own it because I use it, this is more like a sketch from a fading memory

That further obscures things

No light would define

Without changing the color set in that surface

The record of the damage inherent to the gift

But it’s pleasant to tan, to become faded or filled

With the gradual decay or slow progress towards explosion, parallels of life and its source

Make a mockery of the dream of sitting still

The lesson of a single injury

Replicated in poorly performed chores

The room in which the notebooks live is noticed

In its profusion of occupants choking out its empty song

All my potential seems to be in that space the shelf is taking up

If I take it to the street to better confront the wall

I might take up sketching and become ill at ease

To learn how poems fit in rooms I must work in many different kinds of rooms

Or save up for an imagination

Purchased in installments sized to prevent an overdose of freedom

That’s no different than oversleeping as an adult

To have less time to choose one’s obligations

I’m just happy the world’s turning

And the edge bends to rest beyond sight

Studying that light makes a few good lifetimes or filler phrases

Words have every right to be empty

If they are caged up in towers and trying to rest in the clouds

Holy and apart

This notebook knows about what can never be

While I stare a long time at what might happen

Waiting for its obverse to prove something obvious

An egg hatches because I was too depressed to take it from the hen

The less of an explanation for a birth there is, the more

Room for the new one to make it up

Which they will only do if someone is following along with interest

I can certainly be or find this person

Since a similar favor was done for me

Over and over and over and over until

I figured I ought to thank everybody by

Making somebody else happy for a while

Any feeling that fits only between two or three people

Looks holy and is safeguarded by

The space that anguished women make and fill

Scrap of a dress scratched out

By a hoarder hoping for an archive

Total focus and constant production

Leaves a man empty, pesky, and fried

Still plenty to respect if you know how to look at it

After all, you take those same eyes home to yourself every night

They must make peace with all four corners in order to close

Tomorrow is a test of generosity

My dollar doesn’t go as far, so my dollar’s less important

What could compel me to compete

As long as the library is inexhaustible and I am only distracting myself

And not spreading happy purpose like a member of a system

My parasitism

Feeds on a temporary agreement between

Concrete reality and imposed structures

Melt like sugar at the touch of a single tear

If only my brain were as open as these windows

Which are never shut even when they seem closed

All night my eyes scan my eyelids

The room captures the season and imposes it upon me

The air is honest about the weather

I forget my methods of deception as I continue to breathe this honest air

Sniffles are tricks played upon me

I make my mucus travel up and down my throat and it never chokes me

I make myself sick in sympathy or fear

To make the days less precious

Drain them of green wonder

And hide from night by drinking streaming colors