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.

Confabulation

I made you
out of the gray matter of my mind,
bit by bit, ears and nose and smile,
arms and legs and eyes.
I made the memory
of you and me.

It may be just me,
but it seems that you
(I hope you don't mind)
are more beautiful in memory.
Those green eyes
and that smile!

The smile
that means more to me
than anything that could reach my eyes,
even one from the you
in my memory,
in my mind.

And in my mind
you smile
at the memory
of chasing me
so that you
could see my eyes

with your own eyes
when you blew my mind
when you,
with that same smile,
told me
that my memory,

my faulty memory
of our first dance to “Pale Blue Eyes”
was wrong. It was “Lean on Me.”
And in my mind
you just smile.
Just beautiful, smiling, laughing you.

But that you,
those eyes and that smile,
is only in me, my mind, my memory.