So many answers to the one question,

diffuse tiny quarrels. Unlove. Was it 

ok to’ve learned to love (and take pop songs) 

from those I'd spurned? Passing phantoms on the 

road home of onetime partners wronged: I was 

prickly, yes, callous and petty (sorry)

and nearly cried for what I'd whispered once

but the wishful welling lessened, smushed in

by blocky fingers, transposed into a 

blunt depression. Fooled into believing

this unbearable fall was just a song

one couldn’t listen to except alone

that only meant something to someone else,

I wasn’t ever really cool at all.

“As easily as I once could peep-Tom

from sidewalks’ blind remove, inherited

despair had become, finally, too tall 

an impediment. Domestic ennui

pulled up its chair, pooled with fears of feeling 

precisely the wrong way, relit the need 

to say something when I’d nothing to say.” 

Now these vested dreamtimes: Plush crib-mates bend 

ears to dampen cheek and chin. This long night 

might be it, friend. As in a dream we meet 

on familiar ground; myself, buried

in your comic infidelities, and

you, probing for the earthworm’s other end’s

secret tunnel beneath this roused quicksand.

My brother, who would then descend metered

glass sheets (apparent once shattered in turn)

to core the ramped snow at the northern face

of the eastern abutment of the Church

Street bridge over the Naugatuck as a

meteor strikes the sheer face of the moon,

disputed clenched austerity during

the unsupervised span from 3 o'clock

school recess to 5 o'clock work recess;

was free, suddenly, of the blemished rail.

A surprising interval – aqueous,

achronal, quietly resonant – yet

he's gone quick as knob-strung baby tooth, and

secreted between pillow and mattress.