Wednesday, November 25, 2009

You Will Come Home

To press charcoal
into diamond
is to rush
what takes time,
patience,
pressure.

Like writing,
the process
is messy,
your hands
get dirty,

and most times,
it breaks apart
just as you thought
you were getting somewhere.

But once
in a long while,
you will come home–
face filthy, teeth
moon-white,
a diamond

nowhere
to be found–
a lump
of charcoal
cupped
in your palms,

perfectly

broken.

Monday, November 23, 2009

Honda CB 350

I shoved its dying there
too readily, the rust
only beginning to gnaw
at the teeth of its gears.

We both rattle a little
too much, our threads
wear down,

we become jammed
and simple force
will not move us.

Some spring day
we will be brought out
and coaxed, persuaded
into forward movement.

Parts will, in time
break, be discarded
and replaced, like new.
The tools will clatter
like windchimes.

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Our Bones are Set

Our bones that once
stacked tightly now
are set with pins
and plates against
each other. The desire
for self-destruction
is staunched, as bleeding,
only by pressure:

these nails keep us steady,
but drive through us, and we
occasionally splinter
with the blows.

Monday, November 02, 2009

Counting Scraped Knees

They say the body
recycles itself
every seven years,
and that dust
is 90% dead skin.
We leave traces
of ourselves
everywhere,
and I have left
two-and-a-half selves
in my home town, or more,
counting scraped knees,
and burned palms,
from lessons
still unlearned.

I have also abandoned
half a self to the beds,
lips, and arms of ex-lovers,
and though at times
I feel like the parts left
behind were vital, I know
whatever is lost grows
again, and when
the photo albums are opened
I will rise from them,
hovering, ghostly,
from fingers of sunlight.

Crash

The apartment was bathed
in sauteed scents. I loved
cooking, driving, springtime,
and you. The air was crisp
as the engine started,
leather stiff and creaking
like my knees sometimes do,
engine rattling like my own
on a frosty morning but warming
quickly with the application of
fuel and patience. We all need
a few minutes to remember
how to roll with what rumbles
underneath us. The headlights
turned the street into a tunnel
of seen and obscured
and I did not mind
my inability to see right
or left, because forward
was the only direction
I was pointed in.