ecclesiastes1 Poetry (3)

Old hotel, snapped.
Shattered bridge smiting
the absent roof, rails
dropping wet, down comforters.

Bales of smoke
from the old car lot.
Black wolves blacker
outside the window at
dusk.

A woman, pothole-eyed,
said she knew we were all going to die.
Perched, welcome, an owl on
a known stoop.

Seen through a
child’s peeking eye, or dreamed.
Light and cigarettes, holes in a
vacant silk chair-and-a-half.

All the windows fall
inward, clasping the white
chenille robe with her
initials.

Let's talk about your general sadness for just a minute or two.
It's the end of an era that lasted about five days when you
thought you could see the world bending backwards and then
forwards again. And when it bent forwards it ripped open and
the world's guts fell all over the place.

But now and again
And again and again
It's that general sadness
That doesn't add up correctly.
It's important to take that general sadness
And really make it add up.
Make it Good on paper
Make it Good on all accounts
You've got nothing
Nothing without ink on paper.

Deeply it’s genetic, of all not knowing the bite taken out while you slept in your dark furspot, my same dark furspot a cradle ago, a rub rub in a hot drum. But for you it was curled, busted iron and smoke like breath.
You’ve always been jealous and the things we laugh at are never the same, parachute pants and botched surgery, things at garage sales made out of hair. Barring what we promised in the dark of winter when the electricity flew south, there’s hardly a strand left to tie us back, nothing
that hasn’t been sold for bullets or sugar. Your face filtered narrow before sunset and I can no longer lift you into the grocery cart, you’re all edges without contours; I feel around above and beneath you for the
soft place.