Memory Lane, or haven't titled a poem in literally a year

“Damn, is it the fall?

 Time to revisit the past”

-Aubrey Graham

This is just to say I’ve breezed by the old place a few times now, each more quickly than the last. Each time the crunch underfoot was mushier. But then, so am I. I’ve heard tell the fountains still spurt in the garden. I had no time for their antics then, when we were filling the halls with semantics and dared drape our dusty hopes over the dinette as if to protect it. It was cherry, and in the refracted light thereupon, chubby gnats twirled and died. There was a susurration once. You remember— there under the small, kind moon I compared your beauty to, we gripped one another, each other’s attention and breath. 

Anyway, the light was harsh this last morning when I passed, in a fog. Streetlamps still lingered, and (dare I say) malingered, effervescent as memory.  It smelled like nutmeg and the  blue peal of a toddler in daddy’s safe sweeping hug. I shuddered and quickened my pace. 

This is just to share what I heard the neighborhood kids say, the ingrates:

“Only risk that cul de sac in the growing seasons, when the spindling bulbs shade the gravestones. Listen in the underwater of July for the drowning of all hope among the anemones that bush out and up to the cement gazebo steps.”

No respect.  They google our names, read the etchings in the tree bark we’d forgotten we carved. Read them for fossils. We all stood in the moldering leaves the last time, too far from the filigree to see any detail; a plash stirred the silence and they risked a look to where I strode away, behind them. A call: “Hey mister, what happened here?” 

Safe sex

Lay in bed and pinch your own fucking nipple and rub your rough hand over your taut chest and quiver, inhaling.

The fan and the memories make all parts of you harden and shudder except  the soft heart and wet cheeks.

Writhe  among the sheets,  alone.  A hamstring dares to cramp and you wish for it just so you might feel a thing tonight.

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.