The (de) Composition

Imagine Life.

Like stiff, crumbling toasted bread

With a tendency for softness at the center

And butter.

Butter yellow like sunshine on windy days.

Imagine Life.

And imagine what follows.

Not Death, but something more real.

Something more real.

Writing and Editing are entirely different talents

(I know because my Teachers told me so in classrooms with painted walls)

But Rewriting

(They ignored explaining because even Teachers get scared)

Is not for the faint of heart.

How can one try to alter what has been written

-Something Permanent-

And expect no trouble? No complications?

What happens as you cause the words to detach from their prison of paper

And float away into the narrow space between O and its tiny 2?

Where do they go? What happens to the sounds

You’ve displaced? And flopping around like dead fish,

The ideas uncompleted?

Rewriting is dangerous!

I’m not convinced it’s even possible.

Best to lay aside the whole thing and start anew.

Best to lay aside the pencil because it’s permanent.

Best to Write carefully.

Decomposing in the forest

Is my book of lyric prose

Page by page by page by page

Returning its borrowed words

To the poetry of rosy leaves and stark limbs

Like broken toothpicks and shoeless shoelaces and only one earring

Who cease to Be

But potential for something else

Something new

Something not made not broken not

Absent.

Something.

the House

I entered the front door without you, but you found me on the way.

If I look you in the eye,

you will see I’m nervous

and I am not sure

                                                what to do.

I desire

to lay down in the beige velvet flowerbed

(before the house was empty it resembled a couch)

and soak in the peeling wallpaper and large wooden doorways with

doors painted white on only one side.

The naked wood glares like an exposed secret.

I am scared you trust me too much.

Behind me

the lovers,

                her hand in his

                she leans in

and he leans back

in the dining room like a wide portrait in the

wall of the living room

with its sitting chairs of dark curving wood

and my bed of monochromatic flowers

wobbling in the breeze.

The velvet smells of ginger and chocolate.

You seem somehow different from the day before,

your silhouette against the window.

The brass chandelier

                three crystals short and one electric bulb teetering dangerously off to the side

relaxing its arms and dripping lazily to the floor,

growing roots into the hardwood and stretching out through the room,

produces oblong clusters of crystal fruits.

There is a time when things are supposed to be right.

When the clock hand clanks and the footstep falls and the

air

squeezed into the room like water

suddenly comes bursting out the windows and the

wall seams and the

one-sided doors.

But I am afraid to meet your eye

and prefer to huddle in this growing forest of obscurity.