Explore Poems: Doubt & Contemplation

The bright night sky,
Doorway to everything—

In all that black
All those stars:

Salt.
Pinpricks.
…

I love what I see because one day
I will cease to see it.
And simply because it is.
In this placid interval…

Vivem em nós innumeros;
Se penso ou sinto, ignoro
Quem é que pensa ou sente.
Sou sòmente o logar
Onde…

Inside us live innumerable others;
If I think or feel, I do not know
Who is thinking or feeling.
I am only…

This question has a sting inside
Like a wasp’s:
Who is beautiful
And who is not?

The Conquerors leave their…

My lack of skill, I just hammered the keys. A piano chord,
the overcoat. On a lacquered floor I played…

Marcus got sentenced to a weekend, told us
    his positive test was off the charts. It was a baby

    hit…

I want to describe my desire to loosen
without any of the usual trappings
of loosening. I cannot take…

What cannot be said will be wept

what cannot be wept will be bled

what cannot be bled will be buried

what…

Jerry wants to argue about the existentialists again
but I am purposefully disinterested, alarmingly …

The morning air holds
the rumble of cleaners
Ravens strut through shadows
collecting spilled debris…

When I imitate myself, I am a number of certain people,
some of them certain. I, myself, am a master …

The marriage behaves, the business behaves, so what?
Fights like eggs boiling, runny
esther, barely…

There is no promise like the present
though the present’s not promise at all.
The grifter flashes a…

I am in Arkansas, trying to reimagine my voice,
Again and again, beyond all sound
Trojaned with doubt…

my west-facing window
is not trying

to be a TV.
when saturdays sink

behind the hills
in a blaze

fast enough…

birdsong isn’t trying to be
an orchestra   a murmuration isn’t
trying to be a spray

of fighter jets…

the woods are the woods are the woods
seaks the dog

play dead to
to come to life

awaken the search
instinct

do ibreath  e
do youbreath  e

give candy
lick the fingers

We lie close
on the leather sofa 
skin meets leather 
dead against life 
you pound my head 
in to the breasts
i want to stay
in the warm
is it summer or 
only fever

Your sister’s boyfriend calls us 
anus-kids, mini-sluts
We know yet nothing
We whisper it in the night
We are the pride glittering

one day 
we find

a dead 
rat under

the hay in 
the stables it

pulls
somewhere inside me

we bury it in 
in the grit

it gets
a pile where the ground

don’t want it inside it

A moving shadow, nothing, just a tree,
a late light shifting from the expected place,
all the small insignificant darknesses
that gang up on the imagination. Here they move
with their silent melodramatic shrieks
seeking a wall to touch, and yet persisting
in the darkness of the forest or the road.

A moving shadow, nothing, just a tree
in field or forest. Here’s the midnight park
behind the empty street. Under the skin,
children are playing, and the train
waits at the station, forever drawing in
to crepuscular music on a stage
with the reddest curtains you have ever seen.

A moving shadow, nothing, just a tree
with a blonde woman walking away from it
into a room or chair or a fluffy unmade bed
where someone else is sleeping. Someone speaks
in a voice inside a head. It might be hers
or the tree in a landscape of speaking trees.
Must you be so creepy, the voice is saying.

A moving shadow, nothing, just a tree.
But David, you must stop these endless games,
says the tree. Grow up, David. It’s late
and we have to go to bed. Turn off the music.
Concentrate on the shadows on the wall.
Unpeel yourself from the wallpaper. Sit up.
Lie down. Stop speaking. Shut up. Shut up.

A moving shadow, nothing, just a tree
in the branches of which hoots an owl. Symptoms
of dizziness. Another stage, more curtains,
more transformations. One finds oneself
by listening. Are you listening, David?
And music pours from the tree in copious bars
as if living were a matter of moving shadows.

I loved all the things so much I tried
to stick them one to another. I spit
my gum between the cushions…