Vacant nights without compression of sleep,

crutch of irony, touchstone of motif,

climax in one’s own circular brainwash

undermining postdated peace of mind. 

Torrential spare time, wasted debating

the usefulness of unsparing debate,

sums with the cadence of vacillation:

stay with me stay with me leave me alone;

courteously allow that I must sleep

uncuddled by one who’s having trouble

uncuddling, who when I go take a leak

alerts the presumptive neighbors, shouting,

   “In your scant absence, I am loving you;

   love wakes!” through the cold plaster of my pique.

Sagging walls built who knows by whom or when

squat in icy creek, centipede birchwood

zoetrope beyond highway trash collage

on the cusp of glacial restoration.

Sagging walls, built who knows by whom or when.
   Road a curtained whizzing, around just-deep-

   enough-you-could-get-lost guerrilla 

   campsite in centerless clearing, morning

   tipped more than one obtrusive deer or bear,

   snuffling, against our tent. So deftly 

   did we shy headlong into placebic 

   muffle and darkness of our sleeping bags

   we couldn’t, until they were gone, be sure 

   whether or not they’d gone, or what they were.

Anticipation of the punishment:

The punishment. The punishment meted

a diffusion, oddly disappointing…

Will you call my mother? The sleight-of-hand 

punishment has parceled its glimmer-work

and out-transcended adolescence’s

unrecollected textual vacuum. 

Whether from myself or from all of you,

my secrets… those absurd tufts of pubic 

hair nearly comical in contrast to 

exclusive tan lines, discolored privates,

sex’s effect on the presexual,

the sense of a dissection folded and 

refolded... are nothing but sexual.

It was the rain, I guess, or private flux

I trod: Two cents I wasn't meant to hear

exchanged burrowed deep into my pockets;

upset my damp, complacent certitude:

“Should I not have said I miss them/him/her?

Rather, should I have said I miss us/you?”

I don't have to feel bad, but I do; worse

for taking the stairs too fast, staying on

amends dredged from the bottom of your purse:

How else could I pretend not to pretend 

that you can’t hear me when I'm all alone

in our apartment, to be glad I could 

not be, just like I'm glad that you happened

on me instead of choosing someone good?

I can't feel my wedding ring and lose it.

Did I lose it? Is it on my right hand 

(sometimes I move it to my thicker right 

ring finger when it feels a little loose 

[from the cold – finger shrinkage] on the left…)? 

I've lost it (...because one time it flew off

my left hand in the shower and I was 

stricken; positive, as I listened to 

it ping around the tub [I remember

my eyes were closed. I must have been washing 

my face, I guess, or hair], that it would fall

unrescuably down the drain)! But then,

there it always is. As a precaution,

I shove my hands deep into my pockets.

Forward or back, the time machine wasn't 

   truly a time machine, it could merely

   bring you to a past or future present. 

Time machines travel through time, not through space.

   To find our old favorite diner, I first 

   had to visit the new one in its place.

“I’d like to go back and…” before I say

   “try it over again,” I waver, for fear 

   I'd do it a second time the same way. 

I’ll revisit the things that could have gone wrong 

   but didn't; leapfrog ten years when waiting

   to learn from the same mistakes takes too long.

I’ll give it all up to go back again;

   then, I’ll have nothing, not even my wish 

   to give it all up to go back again.

Arriving trains announce loud times to come;

on departing, they drive their sound with them.

   Paralyzed by the urgency to move,

   you've encountered a station you hadn't 

   foreseen, and its radical harmonics 

   could explain the beauty, clear if distant,

   fixed upon the face of every stranger  

   on the train. But, if you’d joined the elect,

   in eternal life’s excesses, passing

   your train's true destination, only you'd 

   yet to be informed of your election,

   why would, on such a favored subway car,

   no one look in your direction? Why are

   their faces less beautiful than before?

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You feel you must be rid of it* and so 

you rid yourself of it and either you  

painlessly forget it, just as soon as

it's rid of, and find it wasn’t truly

essential to possess it after all;

or tidily recall it, even though

it's rid of, and find it wasn’t truly 

essential to possess it after all.

*What is it? It’s just as the weatherman

predicted: It’s wildfire spanning

the plains from the gilt edge to the very

beginning, sirening a grinding halt. 

It’s your sex life, caving in and crushing

its own past with tart revisionism.

Could it have ever been enough? Yes. No. 

But close enough one day out of every

and never-together still more ago: 

The sore sport’s awareness-without-remorse

of the cold toilet seat (where he could shit,

for once, with the door shut and the dust motes

little snow in the modest sun, thinking:

To be there, crook of the Wife-Neck, breathing 

that good Neck-Air must be a pleasant thing 

to see and hear) suggests he assess the

loneliness of yet before now was new.

Till then we'll be dead once, perfect strangers;

the coming spring presaging the coming 

End of spring, as we’ll claim we always knew.

Romeo: It’s my turn to cry. What if 

your wife forgot your birthday – or your name 

(for just one stunning moment, sure) or left 

sharp knives point-upward in the dishwasher?

Juliet: It's someone to share secrets

with – or about – when we’d had none, only

history stored in his-and-hers junk drawers,

hoarded confessions for the counselor.

The Counselor: Perception of self weeps

for its normal imperfection and the

Bandaid stays damp. Marriage is extremely

realistic: Killing two white doves with 

one precious stone bends full-blown fantasies 

immoral, marshaling brave schemata.

Stratified abstracts: Revisionist stains 

breathe out real-time teams of self-negating 

black ants walking briskly, pausing often...

It'll feel good to get rid of some stuff

(those rumpled sketchbooks). Creating no art

will become my art; contention that my 

shit don’t stink, the big promotion is not

worth finding in the first place I won’t look: 

   A frozen marsh, a hard-edged cloud. Against

   a deliberately wintry mix, dock lights

   fashion an old coat when, upon ditching 

   the illusion, as real as any dream, 

   of progress, we all find out it’s better

   to miss the boat by ten minutes than one.

I wasn’t scared, sitting on the sofa

together when the movie was over,  

expecting to be more-or-less denied 

(accept that it might not be, and it might,

except it won't), in the distant-siren 

city-silence. No, I was terrified: 

Was my victimhood not quite black-and-white?

“You get me but can't have me,” she stated,

“must earn it,” but sooner than I told her,

“I told you yesterday that yesterday 

was long ago, and restaged kissings you 

goodnight were dutifully belated 

prayers,” she fell asleep. The very next

morning she’d aged ten years, beautifully.

She wore the same scarlet hairband each day

regardless of outfit, like a labcoat,

and I'd fallen, charmed by the chant of rote

recurrence I might've loved her despite,

the girl I'd see mornings but never talk

to, who'd then betrayed me with her boyfriend;

our scarlet potential rendered bone white.

Beautiful women in New York – don't they

all seem to head straight for you, like buses

the second you step down from the sidewalk?

I’d like my recurring bit part to end,

please, for the need grows increasingly dire

to weigh the sorrow of sex work versus

the monastic repression of desire.

I set the dial for nineteen eighty-

something; summer; my own sun-baked front yard. 

Park in house-shadow, cricket-din, amongst 

the “wheat” and Queen Anne’s lace back there, sneak in

the house, up the stairs; from Tom’s bed (Tom’s bed;

taboo even now [then]), watch my old self 

watching for my older sister’s school (late

summer? early?) bus to heave its folding 

door and drop her off, through the pine tree V. 

And that's it. I sneak out of the window

(like i always wish i had [now(then)]), set

the dial for today, dinnertime-ish, 

return to find the house dark, the table 

cleared apart from one foil-covered dish.