Rainy day.
Rainy breeze.
Malaisical trees and tent-tarp leaves
Snot it’s not snot
Deciduous, how dare you dye? I feel cheated
of August, like a raincoat in the shower.
A second mug of coffee, my horoscope reads
like it did yesterday. Something about the clairvoyance
of a fiscal year, copious aphorisms, a fetish
for the present participle, or at the very least,
“Living! Living! Living!”
I hear a phone buzz and cannot bear it.
Calm down.
Count back from two.
Recite a song:
“Tidy my vices neat in line
to the beat of a nursery… chorale?” Yuck.
Language is filthy beneath a prolixity of cloud.
The rolltop I write on knows this and grins, its frame
hammocking with homonyms and weight,
masochistic like me.
“They’re always reelin’ in a big honkin’ fish
in days like these,”
said you, charmingly,
never neglecting to admire
heavy-duty raincoats, colored
the dirty yellow of sunflowers (your favorite),
though I can only picture the fishermen with their grey beards.
“Let’s get something to eat,” you add,
your stomach gurgling obnoxiously,
your belly button so much like a seashell, which,
when pressed to the ear, sings of the salt-dried beach.
Rainy day.
Sockless feet.
Repeat, rinse, repeat.
Sickening, thickening
With skin like an overcast,
I dangle my limp fist into the first of several
well-ordered vise clamps
and as you might’ve said it,
“squeeze ‘till the wrigglin’ ceases.”
Can you tell me now why
Something and nothing
hardly even rhy-
me, even as I tighten the space
between their flesh?
I know, but say it again please,
I wasn’t really listening.
Nor have they caught anything on the docks.
“Not today, not today”
they say, justifying an uneventful weekend
and the wasting of bait.
It seems so childish, yes, but
had it not been for my dead-fish hand,
I might’ve felt your name, an absence of sound,
and read to you
this nothing of local, day-old news.
Rainy day.
Rainy breeze.
Malaisical trees and tent-tarp leaves
Snot it’s not snot
Deciduous, how dare you dye? I feel cheated
of August, like a raincoat in the shower.
A second mug of coffee, my horoscope reads
like it did yesterday. Something about the clairvoyance
of a fiscal year, copious aphorisms, a fetish
for the present participle, or at the very least,
“Living! Living! Living!”
I hear a phone buzz and cannot bear it.
Calm down.
Count back from two.
Recite a song:
“Tidy my vices neat in line
to the beat of a nursery… chorale?” Yuck.
Language is filthy beneath a prolixity of cloud.
The rolltop I write on knows this and grins, its frame
hammocking with homonyms and weight,
masochistic like me.
“They’re always reelin’ in a big honkin’ fish
in days like these,”
said you, charmingly,
never neglecting to admire
heavy-duty raincoats, colored
the dirty yellow of sunflowers (your favorite),
though I can only picture the fishermen with their grey beards.
“Let’s get something to eat,” you add,
your stomach gurgling obnoxiously,
your belly button so much like a seashell, which,
when pressed to the ear, sings of the salt-dried beach.
Rainy day.
Sockless feet.
Repeat, rinse, repeat.
Sickening, thickening
With skin like an overcast,
I dangle my limp fist into the first of several
well-ordered vise clamps
and as you might’ve said it,
“squeeze ‘till the wrigglin’ ceases.”
Can you tell me now why
Something and nothing
hardly even rhy-
me, even as I tighten the space
between their flesh?
I know, but say it again please,
I wasn’t really listening.
Nor have they caught anything on the docks.
“Not today, not today”
they say, justifying an uneventful weekend
and the wasting of bait.
It seems so childish, yes, but
had it not been for my dead-fish hand,
I might’ve felt your name, an absence of sound,
and read to you
this nothing of local, day-old news.
