re-post, updated

Come, Summer

it’s like finding a picture
of your mother in her wedding gown.
you want to be there,
 but you don’t want to be
 a bastard.

it’s like concealing the congeal of blood
behind your teeth. your mouth becoming
tough and inhuman as iron, your gums
sick with the sweetness of your own body,
and feeling it knot in your throat
  before swallowing.

it’s like hearing the shrill and distant
why of an ambulance siren,
or the whistle of the train,
asking simply who
  before it leaves,
  and continues to move along
  steadily.

  but mostly it’s like you being you
  under the dandelion yellow light bulb
  of the diner booth,
  glancing up from slate black coffee,
  your eyelashes, gentle
  as the trigger hairs of
  a Venus flytrap,
  and me being me
  across the table,
flat, cold,
unmoving,
stone.

Fleeting Wishes of Early May

At first i thought myself the breeze
through the torn screen window
that rustled the papers on the floor.
So brisk, so sudden,
so carelessly motivated.

Then, the reflection
of the soccer net in
the neighbor's second-floor window.
Iridescent, and holey
in the shifting light of May noon.

Then the spider web,
in the crevices of the
desk in the corner
of the bedroom.
Made invisible until
they are touched,
then lingering helplessly
before being brushed off.

Until it came to me how lucky it is
to be alive at all, as my
gracefully loping human form shut
the window, and continued
dusting off the desk.

tanka for the anxious

I find myself still
taken by stresses. I find
myself, lying still.
Remember! any motion
is a step towards something.