Sunburn

I.

On the stairs

a wasp

(I think it is only one)

has,

on hot days,

made vicious angry

vibrations.

I had thought

that we had

an arrangement.

When the little

bastard

planted pain

onto the top of my foot,

I swore

loudly

and continued my plodding

with

my left hand around a bottle of rum

and my right hip supporting

a three liter box of wine.

They were taken to freezers

or refrigerators,

and to avoid further throbbing

I found a box of Arm and Hammer

baking soda

in the door of my kitchen

Kenmore.

I had to clean dirty dishes

out of the sink,

then prop my five small toes

and their base

under cold water,

then bathe it in

white powder.

Like a miracle

the rhythm subsides

as fault-line cracks emerge

with drying palliatives.

It does not hurt now

but tomorrow the swelling will

remain.

I won’t

hold it against

him.

I

would

probably

try to sting

me

too.

II.

There is a crack

in the seal

of the bottom right

corner of the door.

The floor

is littered

with

clothing, books,

and my movie collection

Chairs stand

and the directors

of an orchestral

voodoo rite-

they call themselves Man Man-

invoke a legendary set of gods

as the cheap speakers

pulse.

In one

(no more or less)

chair

she sits

with a book

of Bukowski

(a dead man longing for escape).

After a little while

even cheap wine

bursts through its skin

and tastes as though

it were

a masterwork.

Mine rests

in a

glass bottle,

originally made

for a low-fat, creamy

mixture of coffee and milk.

I hold it

with two fingers

in front

and a thumb behind.

Soon

I will find

it necessary to again

go to fill it,

all 13.7 fl oz.

I am quite good

at this.

It is perhaps

to be expected

after years of practice.

Her toes rock with the music.

Outside of the deep

bricked

walls

of my home

a city bus

rumbles

until the light

changes.

It will be back

at some point.

III.

They are tearing my building

down.

There was a woven welcome mat

that would be encountered

when the stairs

were ascended.

Once.

Over weeks of wind

it was buffeted,

elementally spun

to a point

slightly closer to

my door

(cracked seal)

than to hers.

A well meaning

stranger

or possible

lover or friend

kicked it,

yellow and red threads and all,

until it sat

squared to the ceiling

on that concrete

portal to my cavern.

One day I had tried

to look

out of my kitchen window.

The glass was obscured.

I’d never been curious

about the view before that point

and so I was surprised

when there wasn’t one.

My neighbor

(I don’t know her name)

one day

brought the mat back

to her doorstep.

When she moved away

she packed it

with the rest of her things

in the back of a U-Haul van.

They are tearing my building down

but there are pieces of it

that those bastards

can’t have.

Oil

It is disconcerting

to feel brilliant

when so many mad persons

appear to view themselves

in much the same way.

The schizophrenic with a sailboat fetish

the brunette with gashes on her wrists

the balding man with a love

for French existentialists.

Certain ideas perish

after reading books,

slim like prayers,

that tell the truth about doves

and the hidden cost of smiling

at the dawn.

When simple solutions

are proposed,

their appeal is palpable.

The offering of trite absolutions

often hums in the fibers of being

with a special resonance.

Everything beautiful

about the ocean

is also repugnant.

Mostly people only enjoy it

because it is not utterly

stained

with our blood.

It has instead a more relentless

decay,

the gift of a very old forest

as it turns the salt to water

and then back again.

Olive trees live two thousand years

and write so few poems.

By our typical thievery,

whereby we squeeze all

the life

and increase

from a land that time has turned

to desert,

we can understand

those gnarled trunks

and their tide-slow dance,

and the way that it feels

to be a genuine structure

in time and space;

to inflict the stricture of scripture

and re-imagine modern horrors

as near-eternal absurdities.

In some odd way it

is intimated

that moments are preserved

by painting them

to canvas

film

or darling little

binary packets.

Images are made

continuous

and etched

under the sun

and the moon

and the table lamp.

The myth of preservation

is itself

a myth

born from lies

about truth.

With a yellow flare it claims

that a photograph,

skillfully taken,

will whisper

heavy-tongued

into an unsuspecting ear.

Faint wisps of raven-worshipping hair

were emphasizing the bones

that under cloud-white skin

told bold tales of barely

hidden skeletons.

There is a chronic inflammation of the soul

which Pascal

(no great anatomist)

has placed in the midst

of every man;

and presumably every woman,

although he didn’t specify:

it devoured Nietzsche from tail to head

and left gashes in Keats,

made Vonnegut ask horrifying questions in public

and told bad jokes

to Thompson

from the depths of drained shot glasses.

He said that they were searching for God.

Her eyes had the look

of the doe caught unaware

in the early morning.

Her iris,

with the palette

of Gilgamesh’s Hell,

was standing as a tantalizing

query

as to what

the morning mirror

shed its light

upon.

She was looking

elsewhere.

Out in that distance

were the worries

that die in the spring air

when the land rises up

to choke the empty threat

of snow.

It is

impossible to tell

if she is

full of breath

or dying of a hollow chest,

but perhaps she is neither

and is instead

laying at an odd angle

for repose.

This dart of intimacy

finds its own end.

In the morning birds will

sing outside of my window

at the sight of the sun,

or else

the airy touch

of one another.

What do they know that we don’t know?

What are they singing of?

But you cannot take a picture,

with point-and-shoot or purist’s rig,

of grass weaving itself to the wind,

or old warriors nodding their heads

at the rare few who have managed

to live through these many years,

and say that you have given

the story of what went on before.

Although we know this, we expect

them to explain

the crushing death of a nation

with a boy,

face bloodied,

being pulled from under rubble,

or else the legacy of murder

from above

in fields where

only children and mothers

found their graves.

She is digging salt in the world beneath a world.

She is in the bed of a man she’d like to burn.

She is saying that she’d rather not.

She is sleeping in the marshes and waiting for a ghost.

What does she know that we don’t know?

What does she know

that we don’t know?

Which dark secrets

has she laid under stones

in the shadows?

Does she know why she’s alone?