1
The mouth of hell is twisting
inside me. Your mouth is soft
and unbearable. Someone is caught
saying the wrong things. Someone’s
breath is caught. One hand fits
completely in the palm of another,
a theory I didn’t test.
2
Everything is precisely in its place.
You tell me what you’re afraid of
and I tell you I am those things.
I am the police. I don’t feel any
particular drive toward continued
existence. I am overestimated and then
underestimated in a twisting beam,
a sort of pulsar. Something distant.
3
We don’t know anything. We sit
quietly with our hands
in our laps, eyes forward, mouths
open, draining the space around us.
Sound loses meaning. You are a pixel,
a green one.
4
You look at your hands so I know
what I like. I like when you say
something is wrong. There is an animal
in our breathing space and we program
each other to reach past it. I smell nothing
on the way up the stairs. I know the stairs
and where they go. If a person shows
emotion at the tip of the world
nothing special happens.
5
Everything is halfway. Your lips are
halfway closed. I am halfway out
of the car. I yaw in the seat. I never
want winter to come. I never know
how much heat I need. You all look warm
is something I might say to someone
sleeping.
6
People say a circle has no beginning
and no end. Show me the beginning
of a rectangle. Show me your neighbor’s
best tree. We’ll cut it down. There is
a constellation behind the tree, but we
find out too late there is also
a cloud. You might never see the constellation.
At some point we have to stop
counting tragedies. The cloud is gone.
Jupiter is headed for its house
and so are you.