happiness is a scheme

there is a map of cypress on the wall

lips painted green and a hand to hold

if you were born there you can’t go back

                             it’s just too dangerous

                                    you have responsibilities   to us

                    and heroic is a relative term

                                        just as memory is written and then learned

                                      a sense of justice was somehow earned

                                           because stoic, too, is a relative term

                              

little doses of bad timing

the child was stillborn

      that was more than he could bear

tiny little fingers

 black matted curling hair

why doesn’t it breathe?

took a long time

      and he could not forget

how life was an advantage when

  the air was thick and wet

why did it take so long to see?

the most ordinary things make marks    in time   mistaken for a memory connecting broken lines   move the past to the beginning   forget the history    can you explain possession     can you turn and look at me 

the rest was made up

       like the book he wouldn’t write

talked through pages

   needed more light

what was the difference in ‘had to be’?

this is after

                                                                                            a simple    thinning   rain

                                                               made meager of example

now the memory was stained

little doses of bad timing

Woman in Street Clothes, Portrait of Ellen Andrée, 1879, pastel on paper  Edgar Degas

the eights say things that no one else asks you

math rock is a comedian stepping on his laughs  just a figure floating   fast   pick and past  jick licks last the russian novel tuning with a bullet wound occipital lobe   vestiges of hope  from a time we could cope we counted on things solid gold  the end of rainbows that weren’t all that special on their own but put together  minds are blown   LIES LIES political party platform ties  accidents of history by furniture makers drug takers  in ginsberg’s sanfrancisco  but what the fuck did he know   singing and shaking  a blue black tornado  great plains potatoes shiny shirts and drug abused pinwheel fast exhumation blues    snake fingered hands bottle neck pride twenty two years of fucked up insides  headed south to hungry mouths dilettantes  make all the doubts   fifty star placemats at jonathan’s house of breakfast smoking section  ice cream scoops of butter fool  he’s the kind of man who would do that to you  run to born  salley shirtless de la puked on soft soled shoes  wait what was that the roots   don’t be afraid of the obvious the lot of us up against the wall on the SG call it’ll break  if it falls you can glue the headstock but won’t be what it was   won’t be the same   it’ll sound just as plain but never once leave your ark to explain how the onetwothree rut of the early decade makes every attempt to pre-tend you saved enough time truth or money to finally sway the world the curls to look your way    the lines end up closer as the page starts to bend i’ll be your brother just don’t condescend you can suite it or theme it  the chapter comes after in the highways and try ways of impending disaster   can you smell the nitrogen  can you believe the chewing gum   it lasted a minute longer  than it had to   you see the eights say things that no one else asks you

photo by charlie waters