65

today my feelings ride me,
a big tired elephant in the circus of
the heavy things
doing the languid ballet in my brain, around you

one time you made me cry
because your kindness surpassed
whatever threshold I had established,
and another time you said
"one day, one day" and
"I think about your pale skin and dark hair"

if I ever made you cry
maybe it was because
when we used the word “love”
we were summoning different chemical arrangements;

mine are down by the dried river, cupping their hands
in the ghost of the stream
as it twists snakelike
towards the rumor of an ocean
whose waves gossip your arrangement,

gossip Light while my pain sleeps in me
like a second skeleton
beneath my textbook one.

I feel feverish draped over it,
like I’d rather drape
over any other thing, but

ancient memory of my own mortality
blooms before it realizes itself, it
feels like half my tombstone
is in my stomach,

growing like one of those rubber toys in water.

sometimes it pauses,
reflects on its growth
and apologizes to me
and it fucks off
and I imagine whatever it is that you imagine for me
and I bask there:

"one day, one day."

I think there’s a meteor shower peaking tonight
above and between us
and I bask there, in the whole sky,
I bask across the things between us,
I leave my second skeleton behind

and in leaving it behind I discipline it, I make it
subordinate to the minutes that precede its waiting secret,
as I wade in the preceding minutes that lend me my history.

it looks on in silence so as to not offend the wading,
so as to not alert me to the inevitable death that is my chaperone,

and I can mistake the silence as sacredness or respect
if it obscures the skeleton lovingly.

and if it is lovingly then how can I be mistaken
and if I know love, it is in the retreat of that prescient chaperone

it is in the way we fall down the same set of stairs,
stopping intermittently to achieve something mutually distracting
[love]

it is in the way we revel in that which is mutual,
as if it betrays to the skeleton the loveliest thing of all:

we all die
riding the same horse

63

62

i was doing what i do best: waiting for a customer to walk up. the music was unoffensive and frank sinatra. a man walked up and put a few items on the belt.

he was old and appeared sort of glum. when i asked him how was doing he cleared his throat and said "okay" very faintly, like his throat was sick. i rang up his stuff and told him his total. he paused and looked at me, smiling unexpectedly. he said something to me that i couldn't understand because his voice was so quiet. it sounded like "how are you," but with the first syllable missing, so i said, "how am i?"

"are you," he said
"how am i?"
"are you"
"umm, i'm good thanks"
"no no, just are you, are you," and at that he lifted his palms outward to indicate that we seemed to be alive and in a grocery store

i thought "this is probably happening because i'm going to die soon," followed by more palpable concern for my thought reflexes and some unease at how confrontational the question seemed, at least in my immediate interpretation of it, which was admittedly laden with fear

i said "well, does it seem like i am?"

he smiled again and said "yes, it does. i wouldn't have asked you if i didn't think you were."

we exchanged money and i watched him walk slowly across the parking lot through the window, feeling some vague but warm thing that lingered into the evening

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57

i walked into my favorite coffee shop to get my regular breakfast: a blueberry bagel toasted dark-ish, with a small coconut iced coffee. i loved it in there. best coffee in town, even though i knew nothing about coffee. best coffee in town, i tell you. i walked up to the counter in a jovial mood, feeling like i had established a rapport with the counter lady in the last couple weeks. i briefly thought i would say "i'll have the regular" but this seemed risky and i didn't want to come off like some asshole who had deemed themselves memorable. "i'll have a blueberry bagel toasted dark with a small iced coffee," i said. "we don't have any blueberry bagels," she said. "oh no, you ran out?" i said, trying to think of other bagels that might do. "no," she said. "we don't carry blueberry bagels." "ohh. i've been getting a blueberry bagel here almost every day for the past two weeks," i said. "pretty sure we've never had blueberry bagels," she reiterated. i felt vaguely uneasy, like maybe i was in a stephen king novel and i would go back to my apartment and it would be all boarded up or turned into a movie theater or an unfriendly senile woman would live there. i ordered a wheat bagel and ate it in my car in the hot parking lot. a loud truck pulled into the parking lot and a dozen birds flew from the dumpster, charging the sky in a synchronized fury of wings. i knew that they would never have blueberry bagels again