Paper Dolls
Thrown
like a harpoon into time’s hands
each holding a pair of scissors the size
of a human body
here we stand
there are two things we use:
First is ink-
its promise of immortality
the echoing laughter of children who
run barefoot in the night
holding lightening bugs hostage in mason jars
not yet aware that the scent of freshly mowed grass
requires an act of severing,
all born from
the healthy marriage between
creator
and paper
Second is blade-
what the coffee grinds said to the egg shells
in the confines of a landfill
to dig penmarks out of flesh
to peel away pages of our paperback lives
to extract droplets of liquid gold from fireflies
and bathe forever in it,
to say of what lives
in memory:
“this does not exist”
Life
rolls out like a luminous
scroll
adrift in the black chasm of time’s passage
some of us cannot retract what
we wrote
instead of erased mistakes,
we carve clean-edged
holes
to take out the trash is the
rebirth of a
mosaic
maybe
nothing is created
only borrowed
and we are children
cutting dolls out of magazines
learning how to trace well
the permeated edges
of the ones
we
love most.
Sensory Threshold
Right now,
you are breathing.
It is working.
You are fine.
One time,
the man in front of me in the checkout line
at the grocery store
held up a gun and
took all the money from
the cash register.
The clerk let him do it
stood still
looked at me
and said, “we are being robbed.”
After he ran out the double-wide
automatic doors,
she scanned my eggs and my
clementines
she said, “how are you?”
I said, “I’m fine.”
I took off my head
paid for it
and left it on the conveyer belt,
a gift for the next customer
a wrong and a right, a death and a birth
we keep the world in balance
we cover diamonds with dirt
we throw leftover sandwiches
through
the broken windows of
abandoned buildings
straight-faced, we say we are okay
while a stranger draws blood from our veins
you walk home in the rain and crawl
into bed next to someone you don’t know
but
you recognize his face
because you married him 30 years ago.
Between the sheets, right now
you are breathing.
It is working.
You are fine.
Achilles Wears White Nikes, 1999
Homer wrote:
“The gods envy us”
They envy
us
because we
are
mortal.
I envy the black Nikon camera dangling
from your neck
when you jaywalk in the city
at 4am.
And I collect red flags
on the 8 mile path
to your front door
open me
with your tongue
consume.
“Everything is more beautiful because we are doomed.”
The next day
in the shower
I pick up the bar of soap
and carve your name into it
until it bleeds all over me
and stains the walls & the drain
and I am
choking on capillaries.
With your Nikon 360
you capture the whole scene.
Photojournalists
flock to L.A. to see me in a sterilized tank
of red liquid.
I grew fins.
These modern kings measure my
red-scaled limbs.
“You will never be lovelier than you are now,” you say.
I envy the
dead beluga next door
and the soap bar
and the Christmas lights you hung yourself with
last December.
I’ll keep you between
the slits in my gills, friend.
“We will never
be here
again.”
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