To a dead man’s room

Did you always feel aired out, or
bleated, as in an empty O; pathetic

parenthetic; the walls ringing
for that which they’re without; was it

so, or did the opened space
hold full possession of the loss;

an ocean breadth in which
the act gets carried out, & out.

if they catch us tonight, we hold court in the street, awaiting

the arbitrage of the morning- stars. Plumage of tongues

rattling in enameled cages, grinning warlike as chimpanzees;

we be the dogs that scent
the havoc, electing the weak.

Prosopagnosia

All tomorrow’s for reservations. People ask
for masks and venues to wear them while I
like a comma, scenting bright
pixellated warmth, follow a girl
through nearly hermetic conversations.
I don’t ask her name because
I can feel its memory in clots of braille
on my tongue, a thing known only
to nociceptors on fingertips
and I want to go blind.
All my words are inmates rattling
enameled cages, begging pardon
in sentences from a Panopticon tongue.
I crack a beer with my eyesocket; the cap lodges,
blood monocular. Then the lights go red.
I am costumeless. Decoupled.
Somewhere a train is leaving.
And when the speakers’ volume calves
I drift away,

the silence denudes me.

A Convex Hull

Inward I go mute

teething a thought that gestates
and passes with the gravity
of a kidney stone, under inversions
of trilobite battle formations
lit by the capillary effulgence
spreading from the single lamp
that depends from the ceiling.
The walls bicker and vie
in race of palettes.
In the morning
my landlord will finish painting
and fully translate the room
but now with all the furniture
tucked in a corner my echoes
triangulate and return amputated,
toppling on a dry hypotenuse.
The room contracts to bound
the irreducible space of self:
finite, cutaneous and lacking
in positive pressure it spills forth,
scalar like fever escaping a clean room,

then I have a voice again.

Quarry

The sun bakes the soil
in an earth reduction.
Hydraulics lick clean a fjord
whose limestone tide leaves
by the truckload.
The ground retreats from the sky,
sloughs like scar tissue
from new skin, births foundations
for structures antagonistic to nature;
gas stations risen to the surface
like botfly larvae; stria of motorways.

Or, early, hearing errant things
turn error, the tear among
letters carries you back

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.