Get your
Empathy off
My skin, your feet out of
My grippy socks—you two-way mirror
You freak
ǝɯ ɟo oʍ⊥
:noʎ ɟo ǝuou s,ǝɹǝɥ⊥
:uoᴉsᴉʌᴉp llǝɔ ɟo ɯɹoℲ
ʇsǝɹǝɔuᴉs ǝɥʇ sᴉ uoᴉʇɐʇᴉɯI
pɐǝɹ I
Get your
Empathy off
My skin, your feet out of
My grippy socks—you two-way mirror
You freak
ǝɯ ɟo oʍ⊥
:noʎ ɟo ǝuou s,ǝɹǝɥ⊥
:uoᴉsᴉʌᴉp llǝɔ ɟo ɯɹoℲ
ʇsǝɹǝɔuᴉs ǝɥʇ sᴉ uoᴉʇɐʇᴉɯI
pɐǝɹ I
Mournful
Ghosts of mist
Float lazily silver
Through neat beams of streetlight: New moss
Softens
The sidewalk
A stag alone in the parking lot
Eats from pharmacy’s tree
Some dim star falls:
Satellite
Stars at
Fiesole
Above gold Firenze
A caraffe, olive oil, and bread
Alone
Tables
Vacant and still in patient rows
Between the heavens and
The city of
Dante
wet fuel
giant scratch-offs
cigarette packs: rainbows
anthropologies of litter
candy
credit
two men cranking old slot machines
arsenals of soda
a beer walk-in
no air
I stare
At one minute
Becoming a new one
Do you play by your own rules, time?
I glare
I ask
Do you slow when I’m not looking?
And minute on minute
Unblinkingly
Time nods
We were
Two vanities
We had the tension of
Two mirrors facing away from
Each other
Had we
Exchanged our bodies by magic
With minds in opposite
Faces, we’d have
Been fine
Standing –
Actually
Looking around – inside
Of some withering memory
Can prove
Scary:
Parts and wholes all mixed and mangled,
Branches where limbs once swung,
Boiling solids,
Tattered
Liquids
(Were furniture)
Dim in the living room;
Red as blood because it is blood
((Not real
Brain blood))
Close friends and strange people twining,
Combining, but all wrong.
And finally
It’s gone
cats’ eyes
blood succulents
rain from a cloudless night
a dead fountain full of pennies
cave mouths
old malls
some dead man’s last annotations
rousing to a grey day
wet plastic bags
snakes’ tongues
okay
anxiety
means i worry and i
chew my cheeks and overthink but
it means
i choke
at the moment of truth i choke
and i will always choke
count on me i’ll
walk off
haunted
houses have ghosts
who try to scare you out
or christian demons who kill you –
just kill
you dead –
but my parents’ old, wooden house
stopped short term memories
from forming be-
tween rooms