widdershins

ed. note - this is a combination/revision of two poems found below.  please excuse the repetition - they just seemed to work really well together.


and so today was a
slow itemization of things
that turned against me:

i woke from a dream-tossed sleep

into a pellucid morning,
fear dripping into my veins

from the invisible machine
of nightmare,

had to turn the light on
and stare at the shadows

until they melted back,

outside,

the necessary cigarette
left me
as always

unsatisfied



and doing nothing

was justified by 
reducing it to

small somethings,
like reshuffling the books
because the spine of The Idiot
is smaller than that of 
The Devils,

and i don't know,

maybe i felt something

a little like sympathy,



and then
the cat hissed at me
though i had done nothing,
and i saw my fear
reflected in her eyes,

a weird shimmer

like the lake of heat

you might see
over summer asphalt,



for a damned second,

heart pulpy in my mouth,
i stood staring at
the ridges of her palate,
thought how they looked like

the marks the waves make
in the sand at the beach

i rubbed my tongue over my teeth
and prepared to hiss back,

but the rumble and mutter of a truck
shoving by importantly

on the street outside

sent her fleeing
for the nearest couch.



the sun went behind a cloud
and didn't come back -
amateur Houdini –
i am jealous
despite my scorn

then,

now,

this,



and i say to myself
this is one of those days,
an exhausting pageantry of hours
whittling myself to a sharp point
& by the time i’m drunk
i jab at anyone
who comes close enough

& my friend says
i drive people away,
says through a froth of drunk
and pot,
and later we sit
on his couch,
like a couple of knives
rasping in a drawer.

by the end of it
we have dulled each other
and the window is repainting itself
with a fragile blue

& the birds are
going apeshit in the trees -

dissever

and the blank-eyed men
are out again,
pious saints of discord with
melted-wax faces
& grasping fingers,
absently adjusting
the ties at their throats
& cracking their necks
from side to side –

they slip sideways between us,
nimble dancers with
poised, gleaming scissors,
murmuring snatches of song
culled from other lovers
they’ve dissevered –

we never see them
though they live in our house,
share our bed,
sit in the empty chairs
at suppertime,
gorging themselves on our silence -
while in the dark,
under the table,
the dog whirs & whines
with alarm

soon enough
sleep becomes a five-second shudder
between one & two in the morning
and we wake up at the same time
unable to look at one another,
afraid of what we might see

and outside, the wind is
shearing leaves from their branches
and the rain is pounding the roof
like a hundred thousand tiny fists
and the sea is going in and out
of the harbor
like murderer’s knives

we share invisible,
vibrating smiles,
hold hands
and watch as the lightning
blotches the face of the sky
like an incandescent rash,
our teeth
glued together
inside of our mouths

when the electricity finally fails
we are plunged into
bristling, barren black
extending all the way up to
the cosmos

and when you say
timidly
that you love me

all i hear is scissorblades
going
snip