It’s one thing to be hopeful and to be full
of feathers is another and it’s a third to
conflate the two and do fourth things
even survive being thought of?
Five fingers on fire close into a metaphor
about how we’ll never, never ever, never ever.
The smoke above the hospital is beautiful.
The smoke above the hospital was beautiful.
Above the hospital, the smoke looked
and seemed, its seams dissolved
into memory which is a terrible way
to tell time in the cold. I misread
the “Creve Coeur Camera” sign
of the shop beside the supermarket
as “Cri De Coeur Camera” like it is my job
to misread signs. Something beautiful arrived
in a helicopter, something beautiful left
forever. Here we go again, against,
aghast. Something in us floats, floated,
our feet dragging through future ruins.
I know, “something” is an ulcer
on any reaching, making intelligence
but the ulcer wants what it wants, to be
something after all. For an awful whale,
a moment tries to beach itself, it does,
I learn Tomaž has died
then it is a magnet of terrible power
when I know for certain Tomaž has died.
I convalesce, selfish as a branch punished
mildly by wind—Tomaž lived! and will,
but it’s only the kind of enough
nothing ever is. I feel I am being
ironed, and it all only burns. I feel
the subtraction machine subtracting
my maneuvers. I feel the abacus
in my brain, that accordion, finally.
Finally licked into char. Five. Now any chair
I steal into for any length of time
has three unsteady legs. Cri cri cri, etc.
It would be a swell time to have a handle on
any methodology for rising into the sky,
a really great time to turn into a bird.
What a time! the sun is out and it is snowing
and I am as close to being a plastic sword
as I ever have been. How I would love
some toddler coming into their tongues
or some beloved ancient to sentence me.
How I will love the sound
of my own final clatter, but
only if it comes when I am tossed aside
to signal the end of hostilities.
