Falling Through a Chair Without Pants

I know why
this chair holds me up,
keeps me from falling through
its tattered corduroy and wood and foam,
just as I know why
I need pants to go outside.

But once, just once,
I'd like to fall between the fabric,
into the space between things
and customs and what should be,
a naked, descending angel,
and be free.

Parallax

The sun lounges on high,
reclined,
resting its legs
on ottoman clouds.
I watch it doze,
drifting off myself,
in a hammock,
the gentle river air
caressing my hair
and cooling my cheek.

For you the sun is already sinking
from its reverie on high,
to stalk the street corners
and lurk the alleys,
its last shady dealings
before crawling behind the world.

Parallax,
a different point of view.
I wish you could see it
where
I am.

Little Child

He pulls the blanket taut
against the tucked corners
to his shoulders, his neck,
his chin, his nose.
Eyes framed by cloth and hair
scan the twisted hands and fingers
the moon sends grasping for him.
His heart thrashes in his chest,
beating against his ribcage
as he finds himself cornered
by the unknown.
The startled scream is answered
by his mother
whose soft lullaby and gentle touch
pulls down the shades of his eyes
and the fear from his mind.

He presses his face to the door,
tracing spirals of grain with a finger,
and looks at the shoulders,
the neck, the nose,
a face framed by the circle of glass
and deadbolt and chain,
and twisted into a grimace
by the long beard, the long cloth.
He feels the safety in his hands,
the soft click and gentle weight;
the metallic reassurance
pulls the fear from his mind.

Yesterday's Pockets

I set my alarm for seven
but wake up at eight,
running late by the time
I crawl out from the covers and,
because I forgot to pay the gas,
freezing my balls off
as I scratch them

and step haphazardly between mounds
of clothes, stopping to feel these socks
and that shirt
and pulling on the first pair of pants—
do you really need to wash them?
they only get more comfortable—

and head to the bathroom,
curl the tube from the bottom
and scrape the last bits of paste
across my teeth
and skip the shower
because there's no time
and I forgot to buy soap
and my pants are on already, anyway,

so it's out to the car
and put the –

so it's back inside
to look on shelves
and through drawers of envelopes
and pens and bills
and look through piles and pockets
and finally,

finally,

it's back outside
and it's in the car
and it's starting the drive
and it's listening
to the crackling new-gen voice

preaching the same ol' same ol'
of finding Love or God or Happiness
like they're as easy to find—
and keep—
as keys in yesterday's pockets.

Ten Seconds of Eternity

It's narcissistic,
an artistic masturbatory practice,
hanging the faded memories,
memorialized in splattered ink
and smeared graphite,
upon the walls of my room.

Stories of childhood and death
and innocence lost
like it was written in a notebook,
only to be misplaced in an attic, or basement,
under a box of fading baseball cards.

It's narcissistic,
an artistic masturbatory practice,
immortalizing the mortality
of my life
in these stories of my memories.

But even ten seconds,
just ten seconds,
could be an eternity in memory,
if only you could recollect it all—
to describe in enough detail
the smell of jasmine,
the fields of oaken brown
lapping across black lace,
the taste of raspberry on her tongue,
and the beating, pounding, drumming, sloshing
your blood made in your head and chest
as your legs wavered with the fluidity of water
at the end...
If you could describe
in such perfect, minute and encompassing detail
such an ineffable moment
to evoke the same feelings,
the same throbbing, enticingly despairing emotion
in another,
then you would know eternity.

But to know it as only ten seconds
is to know the deepest,
most substantially wrenching regret.

And so, while
it's narcissistic,
an artistic masturbatory practice,
I hang my faded memories,
memorialized in splattered ink
and smeared graphite,
upon the walls of my room
in an attempt to hold onto
some piece of their eternity.

The English Professor

He is blue flannel, set off
from the white walls and
black chalkboard and
dusty drab brown blinds
that stand righteously between
us, the students, and the midday sun.

His hands punctuate each sentence
in wide arcing gestures—
periods are thrown like a dart
and commas shined like a jewel
and ellipses plucked like grapes
from a vine in Piedmont—
and he talks of Emerson and Thoreau
and Whitman and the wonder of nature.

A student's notes rustle and fall
like leaves of grass in the wind
and he rises to shut the panes
and block the breeze.

Not Hearing

It was the 60 Hz hum
of a light bulb, hanging
over your breakfast table, the nook
where you slice your grapefruit
and write in pen the answer
to 7 down.

It just hangs there, humming, lost
to the back of your head,
behind your eyes and red and gray stuff
where song lyrics and friends' birthdays linger
and wait to drip down
to the tip of your tongue.

I said goodbye, but it was lost
in the crowd, pilfered away by voices,
word by word, and stowed away in wool pockets;
another forgotten hum in your morning routine,
eating grapefruit and writing in pen the answer
to 9 across.