MEMORY FIX

Do you mean to say that's even possible?
To fill in the missing pieces, to add caulking
to the dividing line of the misunderstood,
to rejigger all the missing fragments
like a cocktail mix on a flight that's
already going down for the count?
To add floatation devices to half-thought-out
rough landings, and to scribble me into margins
where I thought I was gone for good?
Call me a survivor in this scalded landscape;
I want a 12 month trial subscription
with an option to buy back my highest ideals.

CITY LIMITS

Strange, how your blood corridors
match the sewer systems of this town.
How you can call every ebb and flow
in kindness and cruelty, how you’re
already sending back that complimentary gift,
how if you cleared your throat,
you would have nothing to say right now.

The same wind which cracks
pines in Alabama rattles
my half-shut window

My apartment dark and still
only I make
the floor boards creak

Bread crumbs for sea-gulls—
they'd go for my eyes, too,
if I were dead!

ALTARED

All of us bowed and hunched over
the cross-circuited altar, gathering cinders,
left with a trojan horse god-husk of a cause
running on the purest flop-sweat...
Okay, I admit it---it was such a rush!
Getting you that close to the fever-line
of believing! I had a bet running.
Five angels with a suicide pact
against a blood transfusion to open arms.
What are the odds?

HOSTILE MEET

The elms, like stooped elders,
crowd the streetlight.
They’re all about tendriled benediction.
A face is forced in harsh relief.
It’s you, with a key, with a knife,
with an ointment for my knees
blown out during the last war
no one was told about.

I swallow the code entrusted to me.
I could slit throats with the shadows you make.
I’m waiting for your company, cuz
I can’t come apart.
A spore clutched in a fist, a loose thread.
You ring the bell. We’re about to start.