Dusk

The fluorescent lights in Rite-Aid
cheerfully pummel my senses. It’s 4pm
in the Quabbin milltown, in this January where the sky
holds tightly to its snow-stash.
I’m here buying laxatives, because it’s come to that:
everything is backed up. The government’s shut down,
my spinal cord’s frozen, peristalsis is a memory.
Even the clouds are stingy now…

Broken

…How do people do the things they do?
How do they build and stack their plans?
Their blueprints dazzle me.
I’ve lost the key.

The ornaments of adulthood
were expensive. I saved up for them
with my allowance. Learned everything
way past acceptable deadlines.
Now they’re all falling off my tree at
once and glitter bombing the carpet;
and the shards cut my feet
so I’ve started walking on tiptoe
as the walls of life contract
around me…

Northern Lights

…I want sky and clouds
and the white squint of light,
not this hollow gray night
rent through with a whistle
but the salt truck came again
today
and yesterday too:
my shoes crunch on the crystals
collecting in drifts
and I’m tired of running
past shanties and tracks
on an electrified bridge
trying not to step in the cracks,
and wishing I could just
get back home
to you…

Moonstone Heart

you warned me of your delicacy,
but I flipped right through your preface
and saw into the moonstone eye
of your heart-story, like aurora
borealis, silvery contrails

of heroically falling dreams
streaking and shifting in blue turns
as they tremble and singe in the atmosphere
of a dense planet, over polar magnitudes
where entire seasons are devoted

to the exclusive practice
of darkness or light—…

Bauxite

…Aeons.
Asleep in an amethyst cave
under a canopy of stars:
a struck geode, my skull’s soft cockle forms.
The shore evolves —
rhythm wet, slowed and cooled,
water — salt — moon —
shroud.
The pointillist smile of stars.
On the black shore,
bauxite — giant crystals,
opaque, white, and sandstone —
cacti of calculus,
tall mothers of the tide,
pale in the moonlight…

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