For Small Things
In honor of things like a dollar in a secret pocket, animals who weigh less than ten pounds, humans without significant muscle mass, a flirtatious half smile from a stranger, short poems for a small audience written over the course of one blistering week in July. The scrap.
****
For small things, always looking up,
I’m looking at you.
****
Sex, wrapped around morning’s coffee,
thinking for the man sitting next to me on the train, let’s compare notes.
****
When the wallpaper in the kitchen was new it was too bright.
Clusters of insistent cornflowers announced themselves,
it was tacky, so, it was only while I was learning
how to make chicken stock that
I realized how benign the walls were and how
in the company of carrots, celery, onions and a whole chicken
brought home from the grocery store that morning,
the tiny holes in my skin opened up to the steam of it, and the cornflowers
looked cool and small, like chips of ice in a desert.
I wanted to hold them in my hand.
****
Whispering in your ear, I want that, so that we grow slippery with runoff, it feels like little c christmas, with snow melting, your face smells like it, your hand a pinecone, the dog licks me off of your hand which withers on the floral couch that used to belong to someone’s grandmother. Someone’s grandmother answers the phone in Dayton, Ohio to a gruff voice demanding money, two hundred dollars. She writes out a check for fifty dollars and puts it in an envelope on the desk which she will forget to send.
****
The sink is a mausoleum where basmati rice, bay leaves, and slices of orange lay in state,
eggshells linger in a cold bowl.
What a mess we made last night
in the kitchen,
in my bed.
Contemplating a knockoff Mason Pearson brush in my hand,
my patriotic face; my whites, blues, and pinks.
Perversity lies
fallow under my skin’s surface.
Invisibility feels like shit
until I find I can flip it and spend it like warm cash
found in a pocket you didn’t know you had.
Hard end THWOP against my hairline, self inflicted hairbrush wound,
summon Marina to say fuck you.
****
Walking up Avenue A, street corners all look the same to me, equally unhappy.
I gleefully stuff an unusually small banana / penis in my mouth.
It’s center is rotten so I throw it out.
****
In the middle of an ecstatic fervor, broken cries and unintelligible speech, I came to see myself from outside myself as a thing, a manic animal worshiping at the alter of your hands, neck, tongue, and was afraid.
The walls are lime green in my spiritual center of truth and feeling.
What if I spend an entire life searching through stacks, flipping pages, looking for nirvana again? That’s fear.
But right now I’m just a poor voyeur, looking at another you through a glory hole in a porous wall.
You look happy and
I miss you.
****