Boring Little Creatures

I would rather see the hand clasp a bottle than

a weapon, though sometimes a bottle has been

known to make a weapon.  I am too young for

peace, and this I know is a fault.  But it won’t be,

I think.  Only, I mean, don’t think of me as those

banners.  Ads and tools of information.  Weapons,

damn it, they hardly kill but say, there is nothing

left to say.  A bottle, though, as you drink, catches

spitty lips in level action.  To put it down is to pull,

ever slightly, a small vacuum for the mouth, all

the while you may have some things to say.

A song has ended

I can hear this place thinking.  Coughing 

and creaking.  There is nothing spectacular.  

Just drapes and a table arrangement, 

which seeps after the edges and grows wild 

against its pattern.  But I am letting the coins, 

papers, bottles spill, so if this is encroachment, 

it has gone beyond me—it is part of me.

And indeed I am the only hollow thought

about this room.  I am the least likely to fill.  

Not to say I am empty.  Only that my eyes are 

two narrow bulbs, which scatter and ruminate 

and then, apt to automatic, scatter again.  

Somewhere, from another room, a phone is humming.  

Fist fighting nights of shepherd clarity.  Separating 

flimsy flings and clumsy knuckles.  A crooked neck, 

a growling belly.  The only difference between 

children and all those blues singers is that all 

those blues singers have forgotten what it was 

to simply sink their questions.  To will up 

their leviathan.  But to wail that greater beast.

Say One Thing

I must, to tell my fellow men.  But I know better.  All we need is someone who is seeing the same things, convinced of the same version.  Who trips at similar twists.  It’s a million different vestibules, each word for this.  It’s the ones who say nothing who have got nowhere to hide.  

There are the things we do, all for the thing we are.  But it’s repetition that latches on with pit-bull grip, shakes us out from sleep where we invisibly picture the reciprocal question who dreams just there beside us.  Our fingers sometimes pinch in the cold composite chain-link.  

But we are kids swinging tandem, leaning backwards, after all.  So over, slides our closely skimming playground, upside is down.  Under, glides our feet, and for a time we’re merely chasing that flick that strums our spine.  It's when we first get up, we really think we see.