Too Infinite
Gliding ghostlike through raindrop curtains,
eventual hearses rub lovingly against each other
in the evening traffic, and somehow
I think of you—
gold-flecked and indiscriminate,
waist wrapped snug
around mine, ergonomic
cock-tangential, jig-saw loving;
how you fit me into the Bigger Picture
used a crowbar when needed.
Then I went off
to get a degree
in self-critique and
white guilt and
long-ass train rides to
foreign places like home,
and it’s not often now
that I think of you like this,
except for when,
frozen to the so earth
to peer at star-marled sky
with swirling heavenward vertigo,
I’m caught
between looming earth follicles
and their shadowy pincers,
squinting dizzily
at lines of newly lain
tarmac crisscrossed chaotic like
a map to some ancient catacombs, before,
blinking in opiate streetlight calm,
I walk back to my
10’ x 12’ shell.
I blow my nose so many times a day in the winter
I think I’ve lost pieces of myself in tissues.
When I’m sick my snot feels like wet sand, and
I tend to regret things.
You used to call
a lot to tell me when
I was being an asshole,
I told you to stop. I kind of wish
I hadn’t, your voice was
pedantic and plush
and I could lose myself
in your starched white complaints,
like hiding from death in hospital sheets.
Before rolling out of bed
and into the dark churning ocean,
I check my pockets
to make sure they’re empty.
Yeats was right—
no center holds so why not
submerge me in those centrifugal waters
(you know they say saltwater is great
for open wounds)
and drop me breakneck to serene depths
to find facedown oating like a live fish
(or a dead man)
something exquisitely weightless—
O, to be wrapped in that old wet coat,
drifting through night leaving no note.
