Atmospheric Pressure

The cinema and the lights,
the arm around the waist
caught from a barroom midnight.
Shrugged off, “As if that’s what you say?”
quite ashamed like you’re seeing me naked
and I am and I say you name.
There are worse things than hormones raging.
I got in a car accident twice,
one of which was fatal nearly.

Waking up and you’re up
and my shoes are not my socks.
I forgot I’m wearing long underwear
and my other underwear is somewhere
and you’re making me coffee
set to drip as drops begin dissipating.
An impacted result tuned
to intimacy issues peeling.
A church bell announces bad news always.

Work your shoulder blades
(a galaxy of white giants exploding)
into constellations too close
to resemble the shapes
for which they are named.
And in the stratosphere of your car
(still driving us somewhere)
I’m not sure if this is that neighborhood,
I can’t remember names anymore,
I felt this but you looked different.
It was you in the dream
except it wasn’t.

These democratic notions,
my fingers on your spine,
imagine grains of grain
conjoining rock-particle wet
droplets heralded
by an early-spring rain.

Forward Talk

Between forward talk
be more assertive
worked out in circles
i’d like to be burned
is an unfulfilled patio
buy the bigger hat
of objects
i could go for that
on top of one another,
the clouds were too fat
a mass of question marks ask
why and who’s there?

The wind went
where a possibility waned
then lost one for a second
as a memory of mushrooms
drag into a forelock--
I cried at your funeral
I felt closer to god
Amen
The open ceiling
brushed stroked mysticism
and the pews we sat on.

Large cities and their newspaper
publications people could still get
but would rather read
through a phone
on a train
that smells a mix
of your twin bed,
armpits that are too ticklish,
and the barbeque I ate last night
for breakfast.

When intimacy issues peel
louder than a sonic boom
flip them again
until they become something new:
A rush of river trees
humbling circadian
horripilation.