BLIND GAME

Who are we without conflict, but slaves
to the cesspool of habit? Like the scorpion
hoarding the last hot rock in the desert,
like the seedling growth gripped beneath
the shell, like a three-card monty game
full of singularly empty vessels, set by
the blind dealer to an endless carousal?

SISYPHUS GETS A DAY JOB

In the old days, they would have called me
a paper-pusher, but now it’s only data; rows of shifting numbers and codes, weightless, mutable. It’s like an infinite ocean of light
I keep forcing through a spigot,
hour after hour, day after day.

But it’s OK. I get OT, full bennies,
and a little girl a few cubicles over
I’ve been putting the eye-fuck on.
It’s good to have a change
in your life, y’know? A new routine.
All things considered, I’ve never
felt so free.

FORLORN

We are shadows leaking into the greater whole, knife-thin mirrors spinning on a dime.
You can taste our emptiness, wafer-crisp and insidious.
We are gone, no spot can hold us for long,
like the memory of salt near the edge of a vast ocean.
And our own limits become the kind of time
you can tell our lives by.

CONSTRUCTION

At the thick-misted East River dusk, dogwood buds overhead just opening,
five high-rises across the way in Long Island City, where there was once just one.

Old Megalopolis’ fresh crown,
uneven and thrust up.
Oh, his will is our will, to break
and unbreak, and never be done.

Just then, two birds trill back and forth among the dogwoods. Another construction
set up, debriefed and sent running, already making room for the next one.

THE WHISPER’S PICK

You intrigue me. In the ghost halls
of meaning, you strum a singular tune;
a blaring, redundant binary code
that roughly translates as,
“I have embraced myself.”
And so the circle is complete.
Love, a vacuum of containment
shared with no one. You seem
an ideal candidate. An overripe fruit,
plucked from a grove doomed
to re-zoning. We could fill you
with something so beyond yourself,
you wouldn’t know what you were missing.
You could stare at the stranger
in the mirror, and not even come up
with your mother’s maiden name.
You could become your own chalice,
the blade of our conscience,
wearing the same clothes, reborn.

STITCHED RED CALLIGRAPHY

I am your accident.
Press your emblem-fist
into the soft wax of my chest.
I want to open
the lung-colored box,
to hear your secret talking,
to shift through the sulfurous
prairie of nerve endings
and bring back a message
that might have flared and died
back there---Can you hear it?
The signal, already decaying…

JUBILATION DECREE

I already feel lighter tonight, transparent.
A wordless jubilation is pumping up through me
amidst the tumult. There is something to be said for this. It is dizzying, champagne-hazy, like when I used to slip naked into my neighbor's swimming pool
at night, arching, breath-held, through the deep-silvered waters--though I am receiving word that those
memories, too, have been declared forbidden.