These ghosts were beautiful people once, now

they’re fairly counted sheep; not even real. 

The long curated favorites fade. Instead,

a wounded sense of suffrage, buzzing fear,

and grand demands are all that are relayed

when spiting me you turn your head their way.

How many weeks post gifting should I ask

them what you really wanted? How long gone,

that perfectly good doll, till it became

clear – it was the ghosts were truly haunted?

A scream, near enough to startle the rich 

nobodies who'll next live here, urges we

sound those same ad hoc détentes, regarded

by that same old, red-eyed, digital clock.

   What did we, gone to seed, do to sour 

   those dozen bad apples set to spoil 

   the whole bunch, rank fruits without stone that treat

   reproduction like consumption alone?

The sallow meats, bread flocked with sentient moss, 

ripe berries reek fleeced via impassioned 

imposture leave me the plain brown measure 

of my loss: Whole potlucks down the drain like

toothpaste caps or mindlessly knocked into 

the trash and swallowed by the garbage truck.

Crimped wants misfeed while these, my shriveled nuts,

monuments to all that a grown-up male

can willingly forget, are shooting weeds,

leveled once they exceed the walkway’s ruts.

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.

Someday you'll remember that this Right Now 

was a better Right Now. Those big feelings,

squeezed into small places, walled by fruitless 

accounting and exuberant faces,

opposed low ceilings. What if we could go

back in time to before I dropped your mug 

or forward to a rinsed pastoral since

you’ve let it go? We’d come to our senses

like up for air; after a justly hug 

themed walk-and-talk, adopt a non-silly 

way of living. You’d stumble on fewer

yesteryears (self-harming after the fact)

and I'd learn how to stem this crude wanting

and what that means for our prismoid future.

These samey days and nights popped uniform

from ice trays, stirred together in a mug

make baby food; gone by blent with to come.

Once, as now, I sat playing on the rug,

clockwatching, hoping secretly to bore

my children but they just came back for more.

It was, but is no longer once I say

“cleanup time”; like how I’m not late for work

but I will be when I get there. Going gray

in mirror only, readied in the dark,

I chase the ever-leaving train and hum

a lullaby whose words I do not know.

Much as I am, I’m sad I’m not more so,

but you can’t say I’m ever late for home.

Lank tears of recognition, purgation,

repetition. Pocketful of mixed seeds

fondled and forgotten. Warm-welcomed weeds

awaken in the cleft as sidewalks rise

and fall and rise atop a prodding toe.

Shoulder to restive shoulder, black cement

cobbles are unloosed from their settlement,

sprinkler water moves in great black veins through

fine dust. Tears run as far as the jaw line,

sympathy for the hummingbird spent, eyes

closed so fully that it seems without them,

touched for the sake of later relation.

Follows pepless step, taproot testing brine;

another puddle glances the dank hem.

The breeding suite’s one porthole makes up for

the insulary murmur of discard

chute, nutri-station, sonic cleansing wand:

Her reflection, gazing back in weaving 

triplicate, starred, upon triple-paned fused

silicate, a cracked tourmaline Beyond,

at herself gutted, forms three Fates fated

to issue from a single grieving; rules:

“You’re fine. Now... just repeat that evermore”.

Oh, if only it were impossible:  

Her mate-match, reassigned, before leaving

advised, “You can too hold on to what you 

lost. See? Someday, maybe we’ll be mated

again. Waiting is easy.” But it’s hard.

“Lethargy set me down a blue infant

in an inch of tub water. ‘It's hard to’ 

mostly meant ‘I don't want to’, and how could 

strength, having never been one of my strengths

(my wiggly arms only good for bathing 

fruit and sorting baseball cards), serve me well

in the fraternity of the impaired?”

“Springtime rears and I start to miss my friends; 

put out feelers. Not hard to find, I suss 

my reflection in the windows of a 

passing bus; I look all weird.” To what end,

these underpaid pursuits? We all work hard 

all week to spend our weekends lost in thought,

left the hell alone not loved and bothered.

Spotlight on the Navajo throw. Other 

nighttimes. The bed against the other wall:

“The cold, having snared the blanket from my 

shoulder, is getting colder; coerces

me with stranger’s hands. My bedside rubbers 

fold.” Slave to labor, treasures he can't lift;

a father’s public persona cries his 

need for a private life: “Older now than

Dad was when he was my age, I can still

see clear across the leafless park and track 

a single snowflake through the streetlight light 

without getting out of bed.” The sunstruck  

brick wall – buff, blush pink; framed by sash and stool

and blind – is a window in its own right.

The baby is good news hollered sleeping

lightly as my wife and I gape shaken

in our briefs and nightgown, feeling something 

like two run-down strollers, decorated 

with those stony daubs of desiccated 

apple sauce, like scabs, whose dozy seeping

cargo blithely eschewed bibs. Bothered shifts

the teething kraken; floorboards wakened back

trills elicited from the monitor’s 

louvered slit gills. White noise applauds the cat

retching somewhere in the darkness over

the radiator’s fills. Now the kraken

begins to scat; curtails; begins; or’s that

just the electric fan practicing scales?

As cloven love signs separate Christmas cards,  

precious potsherds spider every meal and

beggar apprehension like a poster

for a concert that’s already occurred.

Cloven love, tendered like a cup of tea, 

remains a hand’s length from small outstretched hands

while intent stains the methodology 

of real neglect very dark green. What gulf

might be allotted in between, yet cleave

a disarticulated locket? Fruits

that settle far apart, if near the roots,

can make me want to tear out my own leaves,

pore through sheddings for evidence of growth. 

Then again, it’s my chore to rake the yard.

Update: I thought that if I really bore down, I could maybe maintain this one-sonnet-a-week pace for a year, but having barely made it to the 6 month mark, it’s looking like I’ve got to scale back. From here on out, one-sonnet-a-week will become I’ll-post-when-I’ve-got-something-so-check-back-periodically (nothing this week).

"I just need to know: Does the dead wasp mean

no anything, anywhere, anymore?"

"Yes and no. Failed and failed, we always won;

still - the dead wasp stands on the windowsill.

Read this several times, but read it quickly:

I saw you downtown; it was someone else.

No place smiles like you do. Your kindness 

is up early, prepping allowances

like breakfast pancakes. Sometimes I wake too

in the predawn, trace our sweet signature

down stairs to humble beginnings, kind words

from an asshole ex-boyfriend, ripe bromides:

You need to need to, and know you need to

and you'll change, like me, majestically."