Anecdote

Sometimes at night
the world gets in.
Moonlight floods the yard,
the shadow opens a window
where the light from the house falls.
Something in the tree line.
Fear jarring my clay heart,
cast like a bell, sounding
distance. I could run
but where to, I am now
an island, portless. The dark sprawls
and yawns; I think:
If I am parallax between this door
and that window, it will think me
an army. Now. Calmly
I should destroy the stairs.
Please let my finite light prevail.
If not, then
I hope the jaws close like doors.

Atrium Car Ceri

descending the hill

through the vascular night

glide twin halogens,

systolic dark

edging their light

spasms then closes

reflexively behind them

as though a wound.

We fear the slip of signatory
animals: turned, as any word

into a state of something more
divested: oceans are apt,

pouring forth as attributes
exceed the name,

to blind, and masters to follow
butchers, open-mouthed,

as if half through singing.
The name is strictly similar

for animals; of mouths, what clears
throats for swallowing.

Colophon

I would fill the journals
you've left to me as gifts,

perhaps the slim one
bookmarked by a knife

which cleaves to or through
the signatures depending

on the weight of bound material
and hilt as balanced over a door

I leave ajar. But.
As the knife

turns the door in,
sometimes the air resists,

the book falls
face open to the floor,

the doorknob severed.
A trap for game; though I am

a solitary animal I can hear
the warning of the words

I will not write:
All hinges on me. Some alarm.

Aggressions make way
for material,

as often a knife is used
to turn a door.

Self bound and blind,
the catalogue echoes

the master, who dives
for worlds, forwards

following the guide
of the thing he drowned.

Other Prosperos have drowned
a book to make it sing.

So I stay awake all night
watching the third worldly tide

(darkness) recede
and catalog everything

with my peripheral vision
and its superior eye

for divestiture. Or
as an oceanographer

diving in a bell, delivered
from sensory deprivation

by the ringing in my ears,
nitrogen bubbles, paroxysm smile.

I cleave to passages/ leaving impressions
but never permanently/ at each moment
altering the alert/ a red object cannot stay
as such but run/ to soak to seek the thing
that had left it/ Mouth: offered
pauses and water/ for pseudonyms