WHAT DID WRITING ERASE?

What remains of the tea is colder than my body. Trashcans overfill with objects: a suitcase, the lower half of a statue, rubble, light escaping horizon. I see litter & five stoplights when I wake on an orange pillow. And when I dream, I dream of unborn bookstores, cubbies for school girls. Walk on leaves & ice & the blue of my nails contracts like the human fact of a poem.

*

Wind protrudes with lust, an interlocutor: a predatory element for fauna & a propagating one for flora. We're wind-whipped by names, multiply. In all days your name sidles the field. Into my hand falls a chunk of light.

*

Chin to knee, you have to blurb whatever I repel. Cabbage-leaf as bowl. Face as love lies dying in a vase. Failure, the answer to a question you’ll remember. And your thesis heats the impact of a grim picnic. You have to turn the light out to catch a comet. Migrating bed, so bright it hides me? I helixed into the force of a known face.

*

Rappel down to the dank leaves. Drifting in comments. I live in the mirror of a dialectical flower, purpled accoutrement to the fat ships of text. Slinking stems of avarice. With elastic blows, you dismantle the extension of space. Like a barrette or whisper. 

*

I’m overflowing with tea & dream I hear creaking above my pillow. A litter of mice excels in pinkness. Like a nipple. Are your vases empty wine bottles? Are you attracted to the white surrounding words? I name my comet Slide.

*

Lines of trees, of enemies, of sponges pushed to the edge of your table. A borrowed accent. Brick-like numbers trick the hotspring into an indoor pool. Our manuscript a bikini we try to prepare for. Where we burn paper, scenes of firesides resemble picnics. Your sandals or stones settle the quilt.

*

With classic jaws, we assemble objects, look for an organic context. To drag into the sunroom. Sulfur, I warned you against calculation. We trample what we frisk. Numerical mimesis a spoiled picnic with pitchy clouds.

*

The poem feathered with guano, with carrots or maggots & love, with economy, with a sleeping dog & the cupped breast of a woman masturbating, with pillowed righteousness in the slow-moving theater, with the chewed leaves of war, with a thirty second clip of heaving, which refracts the fall, with fingernails tearing at weak satisfaction, a father's droopy eyelid, the restless leg of love, the shame-blanket bleaching out the Laundromat, the deep-cave taste of pumpkin seeds, school-girl jealousy milking a spider for venom, your blurb written in blue eyeliner, with the wind of names or the advent of change, intrinsic occasion, fear of birth & love of the baby, the texture the texture oh.

*

Not a war against migraines or deceit. Sentences or their well-strewn fragments. Or lists. So I resemble objects? This is your private desk, an emesis blurbing what you couldn't stop with guilt. So I unbeach a room that caught the sun & couldn't let go.

__

STEP INTO THE ALPHABET SHADOW

I slip into black holes, my body stretches out,
decompressing, another way to die before you
know it. I bike past squirrels falling out of trees. When I
was a kid lying on my belly on my bed I would scissor-kick
two legs back & forth: pretend a teenager. I would
loop the page with imitation cursive. So sure to find
what I saw in movies. Tight sweaters, kempt
hair, an empty house ripe for party. I know my limits,
I can float in space with a plastic umbilical cord & backflip.
10 in a row. My limber body spells out all the cheers the girls 
on the sidelines sang. Then I hear oxygen hissing like
a faucet like I’m a shadow & the trees aren’t real

__

In the last year, I've been writing prose poems for the first time in my life. I think they work to synthesize a sense of tangible immediacy with my thoughts on poetics and the space of the poem. "What Did Writing Erase?" is one of these pieces.