Flirting

"I'm electing to go into
mental gymnastics."

She thought that was silly
and laughed at him
in her head,
but all he saw
was a bright red spot
near her cheekbones.

He took it for an invitation.

Night

I'm a cannon in the wind,
wrote the blind poet,
though he could have said,
I'm a cannon of wind

and meant more with that
image than anything before.
Can you believe in me?

Please, he asked,
can you believe in me?

And people did, and they
got close to worship.

But little happened after that
and he remained a blind poet,
directing the wind
here and there
and all around.

Like a sad song, or a dream
unfulfilled, he spit words
into a fan, watched them
come back at him
and caught them
to turn them back again.

Would that he could create
a uniquity,
a dream of something else,
that meant something.

Nightmares

I'm the sound of a fan
in the middle of the night

when you wake up
to the small sounds
of your heart beating
and your fleeting desires

creeping by the bubble
of sleep that surrounds
the fragile psyche of you

in the dead of night.

I dreamed a dream
of me being put
into a full-body cast
for the sake of art

and those around me
promised me they would
do the same, but I never
saw it done.

So I was frozen into a cast
of myself and put on display
for three days while art
matured into something

worth being.  This scared
the living shit out of me.

And I awoke trembling.
And found I was still free
and went back to sleep,
a prisoner of my dreams.

Inspiration

She writes a little note on the back
of her hand.

"I'm a teacup in the wind."

And sets out to be the greatest,

the most simple,
the understated believability
of a generation.

"Will you dream me a genie?"
she asks to the night sky
and it does, a dragon,
to light her way in the black
cold night of exhalations
without inspirations.

I'm a dreamer in a wild world,
she writes to the dreamy star sky
and I'm not anything less or
anything more
than that.

"Will you believe in me?"
she asks her sad old man
of a boyfriend, who sits
and thinks
and sits
and thinks all the time

of the dreamy times of autumn
and the dreamy times of spring

in a silly small world
that used to exist

but never will again.
She writes and writes
and writes and writes
and it comes to very little

but it all means something
to her dreamy thoughts.

The sun went down on the world
and she ways always happy,
in a frightened
high-pitched
sort of way.

And dreaming of Saturn and Mars,
she watched the stars twinkle out
and the dragon lose its fire
and all the sudden, the quiet
lay awake the way quiet does
in the middle of the night.

And inspiration began again.

I was a schoolchild
in early autumn

waiting for the bus
with my mother.

In the early morning
light, it was there

yellow and hard
and terrifying,

a beast equipped
to rip
me from the womb.

I stood, my red
plastic lunchbox
in my hand,

a freshly made
bologna sandwich
with white bread
and mayonnaise

beginning its trek
to first grade.

I cried
when the doors
opened
to swallow me.

I forgot
when they
opened
to let me out.

Starting a Fire

When you brought me back from the hospital
I saw you in flashes:
sitting on a chair,
eating too buttery quinoa,
turning on the microwave.

You were busy.

I was an otter
in an oil spill.
I slept and woke,
found you were gone

and slept again.
You woke me up
again much later when
you told me I was grumpy
and I laughed the whole way
home from the train
and found I needed to create
something pretty.

So I put up a tent
in my room and changed
the sheets on my futon
and strung Christmas lights
above our heads because
I couldn't quite get the stars
to come out on my apartment
ceiling.  You were tired
but loved the thought

and we slept under the sky
of my room, folded over
and under like a matchbook,
and it felt,
for an orange moment,
like we were the last
two people
on the coast
as the sun went down
on the world

forever.

Wine

“He makes a Merlot,” she said

unconsciously running her eyes into his

and laughing there at the collision.

Awkwardness died.  He laughed.

“Merlot is a combination of two kinds

of grapes, but I can’t remember

the rest.”  He hoped a bottle 

was waiting for him 

at the end of the conversation.  

“You wanna take a walk on the beach?”

she asked, not really thinking

the question would be something

worth kissing over.  “Yes.”

He smiled

and wandered into her footsteps

laced his fingers with hers

and sewed them together

by brushing the sand 

from her knee.

“You don’t need to do that.”

He smiled

and laughed into her eyes

sparkling in the purple ocean

like two grapes just picked 

from the vine.  How he longed

to see them ripen with age,

pressed and emptied of tears

so that joy

made up the rest of it all.

“Two kinds of grapes,”

he said, leaning closer.

“Yes,” she breathed.

“One is never enough.”