Triptych of Things
SHIRT
A favorite blue shirt wears my loyalty.
Beside –
hangs a pima cotton. Fine stitch
for my affection.
GLOVE
When young, I wore a glove of wonder
snug to my hand.
Held with fame of little round stars
falling in day.
Crack of air – a herald for sight to arc
along a shirt-blue sky
down to celebration in my head.
TABLE
Survivor of probability – a time kiss –
a table I love.
Human rubbed into surface.
Carved names and finger smears.
Vibration of discourse passed down
through five generations in its fiber and grain.
Now, with a resting computer on its rib cage.
The fine-stitch evolutionary arc of thing.
Descendant of same atoms – it could be a tree
if not sculpted by intent. Once organic,
now a pause in being.
Still, it may be a part of me, as I will not part with it.
In Space
It is not Mars
but canvas upon which to paint interior space.
Place the small of human creation
in competition with natural force.
Going will be short distance – as far as
little round balls of imagination.
Fortunate heads.
Earth, wrapped paper thin with its art.
Delicate and breathtaking.
But I will live in an upside-down house
on Mars.
An ever-changing room of make.
Annihilation pressed against its glass
to charge what I feel –
and breath will be given.
Over by Night
An overcast day
when something so slight as the dim
pulls me from emotion.
Redacted on confused genes,
these pins of small things make numb
without reason.
Where is the strong – the iron skillet in my hand?
The excitement to exist
as in my apostle canine's eyes.
Or the narrative in my mind,
running sixteen-millimeter
film of optimism.
I bite their tongues, for redress.
Zentropa Europa – I am now on your train.
An unfamiliar in the night.
Eyes on tracks lit, appointed by the dark.
Ears magnetized by your movement.
Until I arrive at this thought. A lake,
not forty feet from my state of mind –
hangs on a whisper before ice.
I will wrench a bone in complex
– an instantaneous freeze of skeleton and consciousness.
Trick my genes, so they flee abandonment.
I emerge in command
where those tracks lead differently –
the sound of blood pumping.
The frost of my breath tells the air I am living