An array of discarded touched once fragments. Speaking but not read in evening ashes, divining augury of hard dusk.
Unsat the cobweb lo in the crook
of a straightbacked chair
a sterile knifedge horizon across the bank of opened doors. night nude comf’ort. wending fleeting brushed viscera.
See past
eyes dimmed by warming and spindled saturation
behind lights all gasping wet throated lights all bled through the sheer vapor
setting red to deepest fading antique lampshade swept
dark orange grainy vision extra oxa cloud of dangled gauze
down from nomadic night canopies pressing out the dark made to always dusk
light always wispy yellowed fingerprints
whorls in the powder solution follow us over skins of burgundy velvet breath
senseless air expanding beyond watermarked faded background for comfort.
As for days the same day on end as senses never stopping.
Rushing air shook off false particulate
dusk and turned up our collars to the sidewalk
the dry multitude of night, the all blinking and vibrantly straight
silvered seas of points
come like pools shimmering between brilliant edge round rocks.
——
Specimen Slide: squared edge ribbed greenness of scientific glass
slid chipped beneath turning metal clips
and held fast rapt at its press’dness
and a fineness of cellophanic thin sheet
blotting fluid and the matter of circuit down
legible and transparent to the base.
Glass on a Desk Blotter: all spread out evenness and display nature
slide press’d enframing a moment of
arrangement, compositional like a penny walk
naked juxtapositions now come together as
singularity evades time and sees through
at one layer, tinted and overlaid and impermanent.
Interrogation: a mirror is only polished glass to see
back what is from us to it, a two way
mirror now replaces it and our conception
of our body and make up and environs
is given the shape of the outside world,
all that we have traveled to get to
ourselves, and we are enrapt and
press’d in love and need to it.
Everything glistens blue from the window,
even the yellow switched lamplight, through ice dimpled paper lamplight,
falling off evenly across
the laminate countertop, injection molded telephone,
stock blucollic by bed to bed by
the struck nylon quilted edge of the long sided bed,
projecting up the oval crown bent across
raised fleur of felt flattern paper
to the receptive glaze of the refrigerant stricken ceiling.
These floating at the sparkling frays
meeting wet feeling dimness
and these shimmering one by one slink away
through shadowed inkrun trickles
passing low bearing fogs of a silver dawn.
Pulling and face first to space first
contract the back end now as many million motel
spartan same room same cold noise lull lull over
all snores
bring beck bounds project all I see lens now eye lens.
this room that we’ve sat in, on the floor as it pulls itself between the frames of the parted door
is our space of all movement and growth as our hands skirt the coarse surfaces like a chime rising from dark plain depths to roadside florescence
the green night is cloud laden on sidewalk arcades of windows with parted curtains windows with pulled tight overlapped curtains windows with slung open curtains as green seeps across the sparse floor where we lay
the moulding of wall where we lean and the tile lattice we pull ourselves across the stillness when we make it still falls on pressed wood low cabinets like breath dust
we’ve sat in this room and skirted fixed croppings of stability peered into corner’s grates for days on end and lay on piers rising and softly tossing in the side lamp light.
I heard you sitting in the doorway and around spindlelike legs rising high above shagpressed scruff I saw you sit in grey light between blinds scoring shadow on your skin from blinds hanging like masks in window ports to move stable rooms.
I see you in this room with me, slumped oblong at wall groin and me stretched from the low lying green to the dark spot where we have felt pavement where my hand reaches to.
At the second level windows hanging in the volume of the vaporous stars casting yellow through matted screens against many painted tenant walls. And walls reflections hold the night as captive to be read as stains when the silver sun soon rises.
Los Angeles has the cruelest morning, slipping through the empty predawn streets in the tightest time of year, stripping the coats now cats beds to nestle. I’m away so much of the time. Hermetic spring by now oscillating fans are spring breezes and the refreshing showers of Atlanta are hot afternoon bathing stepping across cat litter scattered on the bathroom floor. And my bed gets hot when I lie there ’til 2pm. When I’ve been sleeping on the futon for days and not waking up.
low wall corners grey striated smudges where cats have struck their sides so many times
This room is too big everything feels groundless and distant like a poorly stocked thriftstore. The table and lamp next to one another look useless, there are cords stretched across the floor rising up to outlets, tan on a semigloss white wall. The room is Green River to me, too big each piece of furniture each trinket in the gift shop each home in the town is afforded with too much space, and no acknowledgement that that place is where it actually belongs. But for some reason there is a sense of striving to find a place within this vastness, each room in this motel has summoned a balance, a catalogue of elements, that seems so programmed to perfection, that deficiencies can be found listed on post-it notes outside rooms. Yet it still feels empty. The air in the rooms and hallways smells the same as it does outside, warm, dry, and unbreathed. And this room, with its stretch of mauve carpet, its pockets of furniture legs meeting the floor and its white walls and ceilings, seems so big, as to swallow up the town, as to leave me as a spectator who is just passing through its endless migration.