RUST

Rust

We rebuilt the steps to the tool shed

in a warm October when the spiders

were bad, but between hewing

chunks of Ash and felling fresh logs,

we forgot to look into that kind of thing.

Eighty-eight legs scattered from a hidden epicenter: black, spindle jointed.

Pricking and tickling sun-lit skin and hands, each moment stretched as if

the hourglasses on their bellies slowed time while sticky feet ascended me.

The reddening tub’s remaining club foot had long since been buried, maybe weighted

by the rainwater standing tricep-deep in it that day.
The murky stuff that saved me.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Spike used to frolic, kicking up dust on the hill behind Grandma’s house and in front of his own,

braying at squirrels and their cousins, playing with me and mine,

tethered to a stake by a chain long enough for him to stretch himself, enjoy a modest freedom.

The fire ants erected monuments in the front yard and side. These Spiked menaced

when walked past them, gnashing teeth and destroying an edifice before a tactical retreat.

In a July we awoke to uncover their plot. Fresh mounds arose far from their origins.

Subterranean corridors mapped pizzicato revenge.

Spike ran in circles from invaders granted access from that rusty chain via grounded stake,

ran that chain into something Gordian that tightened around a tree and his neck—

the stout oak yielded a firmness his flesh could not match.

So we found him
 Strangled, stung, choking. Stuck.

i wrote a poem so who tf cares about at title; or, the second scoop of pre-workout.

i came home to help Neil pwn some fools but he snore/jerked
when i opened the door and wiped the dribble from the armchair,
and i knew instantly that i should have stayed to teach Nina to shoot bp.

she swayed under that jasmine shadow somewhere,
and the eyes beneath it flitted to me so often:
there's your problem right there.

now i'm hiding from sleep.
now i'm watching a mascot dance-off.
now i cant stop texting my ex and i

know somewhere deep i'll never do better than her.
Neil's gonna propose to Molly sometime this spring
and all I'll do is be worse off than i was last spring,

and lonelier.

puny human time

 A full moon hid behind a cloud bank.
Near the horizon its oblate reflection glimmered
like a portal to heaven. The waves threw innumerable
tantrums at the yielding shore.
Grasses stood as tall and straight and sparse as sentinels.      
I asked them what they were guarding, or whom.
The surf bid me hush and
The waves continued their battery.

I await a response, but the grass, and the wind, and the sea, and the moon
speak so slowly, and I haven't got forever, 
like they do.

living to be a quarter- century

We wander down backways often, speeding out of ignorance
towards an a address we only half remember.
Something with a six in it, we agree.
There's an anxiety in our tremulous bellies
like report card day or touching down after turbulence. We
outpace it. We call that Progress. We turn up
the radio and down the windows,
we forget we don't know don't know where we're going.
A quarter is half buried in tobacco shavings and fry crumbs,
warm from the ass pressing it into the charcoal fabric.
It has ridden these old roads before,
Slid and bounced around their curves and potholes,
etched memories into itself, compiling annals;
It has internalized this scarred history, become rugged.
We dig it from the seat cushion and flip it.

A quarter's swan song is singing,
undulating on the granite, is ringing;
I chug a keystone heavy, eyeball it's mathematical decay.
Eerie above the chants and jeering flit the overtones.
The empty harmonics echo and qwaver at the edge of perception--
the terror of knowing my mind's to weak to harvest the fear and
my liver too mortal to filter it.
I slap the coin into my palm and chuck it out the window.

You reel and titter in the hallway, maybe hoping to echolocate,
the way you read once on an eastern healing blog,
maybe hoping, like me, to discern a pattern from the chaos.
An ancient beetle twitches its vestigial wing.
You can't make sense of the image, commit to consider,
 tomorrow, the past's effect on the present. You never get around to it.

irony of mirrors

Foreshadowing: green, I gleaned once,
from a series of graphs,
is the color most absorbed by a mirror.
It is more accurate, then, to call a mirror green than the silver my gullible eye insists.

A drop of blood trembled down through the steam to the porcelain and
ptt
like the snuff of a tiny candle.
You and steam both settle continuously:
It onto the hard surfaces of this bathroom,
you into the razor- nicked mediocrity
of not seeing yourself.

I am misled by myself singing.
In this lonely room, before a sheathed mirror, murmurs swell to screech,
through the steam, seem a barbaric yawp.
I cannot see the smallness of my mouth.
I cannot hear how puny my whispers.

reboot/reflection, or forgetting to be afraid to write

Peek into and out of a drafty window,
Fully knowing its brittle protection:
Navy drapes hang, crooked, cruelly
admitting midnight and streetlight.
Crane and peer for some relic or talisman in the empty cul de sac--                                                                              
Roving eyes glow in the dimness and roll
Like a mad dog's, but there is no lather or fuss, only the hush of the draft, it's whispered imperatives.
And the memory of once translating that rush of air into power, or verse.

first world problems

it has been months since i read any of my own writing, and more months, still, since i put ink to carbon or byte to screen. it's sad, really,and i feel like noone can be responsible for this travesty but me. if you dont make time to practice a skill, you lose it, and my second degree eats at my every waking hour. responsibility that i never knew, work ethic that i never needed, dilligence i could hardly fathom, all are stuffed into my tired mind like some overtaxed finger food. even now, writing with a purpose that is intentionally purposeless feels a sham: i am the burnt out husk of a would be artist with too many needs to have time for wanting to art; words either escape me, or being scavenged, they discard their power and their essential magic to wait for a more practiced hand into which they might unlimber their weight.

the epiphanic is not unknown to me now. at high speeds and/or under mental strain my ear or eye will catch on some tinkling thing, and we will wonder at it together before it flits out of some window or another, lost. perplexed, i concede defeat to melancholy reality and the strength of its manifold succubi.

and all god's people say so the fuck what?