萬里
“Every day for the thief but one day for the owner.”—Yoruba Proverb
every day for the thief
you awaken upon an onyx belly, RGB 53, 56, & 57
night stirs the bitten mountain’s thunder snap, spit quick
pain rivers down an over-slept neck or is it just the world
as the body huddles and the heart reaches out with leaves in its teeth
language in its claws, the mind launders the rewound back inside
the laundry up the hill, whispering
how often you count the hours, the morning slide between rain and shadow clocking, the sharp stick of light clack beneath your nails on gravel, breath a calculus solved on a tongue, the rodents and crickets sing
hymns as you turn away from the sea
the grass grovels beneath a prostrate sky, your life an upturned bowl of porcelain goes black and brown
every day for the thief and the owner awaits the drowned
night shoulders bodies from underground
mourning lullabies steal nibble words that well in the shower cold and late, weather debates
the steps tangent from corner roof to cornice slide, the tile mumbles over the grout and the pane
of turquoise you ran a small finger along, the tip of the streets and the infinite, vain
word locked behind a door, a coyote caught in a turnstile and the clotted fur in the jaw’s mundane
unbuckle
you became green when loss grasshoppered up a shoulder blade
your child hawking on the playground’s merry-go-round
as each parent sang “here we go round the mulberry bush” in stacks up the block
a fork rather than a knife and you tried to be
every loss, every coin in the washer, the cats on the sheets a moment for the thief
stray dogs, torn flipflops, scent of licorice between teeth, toes that conjure spells
in the sand hidden from fact and the glue of beeswax
the thieving a way of a day in a lost homosapien’s life
the day you died, I broke up with poetry
tore up the signed pre-nuptial romance of words
acrimonious syllables gone bleak down Bleecker street
the hated, the grotesque lug of languor’s carnival in rhyme
the carnivore’s craving composing approval of metre’s crime
while all along we walked and walked the dog to death
in the shape of blood and scribble, poem after poem after poem
I made a retreat for higher, steadier ground
but teeth still rot
no matter the acrobatics of mind or with a steady pen
nets of construction veil debris, detritus abandoned the lot of you
the gained body, the surgery line tracking up your chest still angel-white
the scars reappear, the songs reassemble
all those lines, lies and lives, the sentences eliminated
the birds the light kept alive appear on a broken sill
the going kept longing and the kept-going unpacked
in the departing light the birds clammer and clap
death, do you forsake love now, with a good heart and bad eye
weeded when it turns the corner, strays behind a scent, gets tossed in a pot
a castaway blue night picks bones upstream and deposited form a motte
for the world and where you and I
dragon away a saucer of tin-can hurt and cups of stars and chipped teeth sink and sway
rust and rainwater scatter, love and despair fertilize beneath us tangled in May’s hair
