PIANOFORTESMAINL-Y

my wednesday is grumbling in a different way;
nightishly fixated and pale

somewhere a drizzle pulls expectantly
on the drying corners of lips
and, absently elated,
i picture honey tears
as viscid and binding for even the most
nervous kiss on a cheek

sing to me:
whisper until your whisper
humbuzzes a melody

make it and yourself a blanket,
and melt me to sleep before I realize
that I am breaking all of my rules
for someone else

Vivified cogitation at half-past ten,
the untied infinitive knowing
(it isn’t mine or to me)
later by the minute;
and more chronological, too:

Ordered.
To order sequentially
something,
certainly no genitive of possession,
is ordering everything
and ignoring the linguistic ambiguity

And each compartment is
just as cognate or derivative:
genetic or sonic—
a scruffy lineage of the
aboriginal conjugation:
amo, amare, amavi, amatus.

It is uncomfortable
that this is somehow unpretty
and anti-poetic, even—

I should stop and content
with the first principal part.

It’s spatial, this stroboscope:

Somewhere pre-existing
but non-anticipatory

It’s that all these sounds
have always been, and,
without rearranging,
just superimposing,
they are a perfect symmetry of coincidence

A tertiary laboratory:
an ecstatic batch of natural noises

Unpredictably repetitive;
a cyclic mutation of rhythms
and harmonic palpitations

Eventually you’re just in it
too deeply to deconstruct
the individual elements;
a non-negotiable quicksand
where even if I could pull out a leg
(and I cannot) it would only be sand
and there’s nothing to pull from
without pulling away existentially

A valentine song:
To love, the real paramour;
drunk with mystery

After twenty minutes or so
other voices agitate the quiet of this sinister point;
I pretend to look away,
convinced by the conviction of my apathy

And I am platonically thinking of a song:
‘Prelude to a Kiss’

Months are a long time to hold out
but taking back my sweater (even the thought)
made my stomach watery and chilled

I bought it when it was comic and bright;
that summer-plum violet
smiling vapidly and sweetly along with me:
an insouciant July conception

Now the color feels distracted,
uglier, though I know it hasn’t worn much—
just cluttered where purple coagulated to brown.
But it really is exactly the same in describable quantities.

Maybe it would be better to
look out the window (so to speak)
and spy on new jumbles
instead of dissecting faded colors

Really I know the threading is the same,
and the lascivious gurgles are imposed—
I’ll still hold out on washing out the new smell,
which hasn’t changed at all.

I spend the deliquescence of childhood listening to the tka-tka-tka  and thinking about which I prefer: Ticking away from something moments ago or ticking toward something seconds away? Both seem morbid enough in the right cynicism—it must be because of the apathy—again, the question is youth fleeting or adulthood imminent; both, I suppose. And so neither is very appealing, and I feverishly digress, hungrily fixating on sensory immediacy—80 degrees Farenheit, gluey humidity, arms heavy with veins heavy with blood, pleasantly sated—and that tends to be enough.

It helps to imagine that daydreams coincide;

That the garble of projections obeys the same tide—

Think of me thinking of it and it being mine to think.

And yours too, please have this congruent feeling:

My misted breathing

So let us then go, me and my conjuring,

Patting my own hand as if in tandem—

            Spiteful genetic tragedy

            And I’m afraid this is no less random

And I know and I know,

            Rusting and decomposing

Yellow and watching you go

And there it is again:

“I am more upset by notions than happenings”           

            More concerned with wanting to write all of this down

            Than the nonsensical whimper. But you know:

I saw song kiss bells

On the shadiest grass

            That night;

I saw the subject turning delicately and perfectly

Oblivious to how picturesque it all was,

            And I unfolded, and still do.

And on what I was sure would be

The very last night, I wrote:

            “The only one who knows how awful I am,

  Or maybe I just don’t want anyone else to know”

But I thought that was too sorry

And scribbled it on a torn-out

Notebook page

Only to weather that suffocating corrosion

            Each time I found it again

            And now the tattered page is thrown away

            But I am still finding and findingandfinding…