I’m amazed we haven’t crawled off by now.
Later we could go back and cross things out,
that way we wouldn’t know where we came from,
the shapes we asked to be bent into.
Sinatra’d be okay again,
mother the same distal approximation,
the sea still trying to spit it out,
and pictures of just any old kittens.
Sometimes your sleep is different than mine.
I can’t catch up.
I don’t know—there are voices tangled outside.
Wind wants to make me correct something,
the refrigerator says something needs to be pushed
further from the sun.
Out where the sunset ends, they’ve installed a graveyard
and where it rises, some automatons bash together
mellifluous metal tubing
imparting a festive contusion
to the usual calm disaster of getting out of bed.
To find out why life has this glass sparkle
at the end of a dark hall.
To find out why the paper skeleton holds its hands
demurely over its crotch. Did it fall that way?
To find out how we fell.
There is a name to wake into and music to sleep through.
To find out where the blood comes from on the towels.
Old friends, I believe your betrayals were inadvertent.
To find out if my heart is really unruined.
Father, are you out there
or was your corpse accurate?
Something happened to me when I was young
that I don’t want to happen again
but I remember the first smell of ocean,
when the family got out of the car in Jersey
to buy peaches. The road was sand.