Three Poems
The Insomniac (Gena II)
She doesn’t sleep.
What does she think of then?
In a dreamtime outside of dreams.
The dead hours between one and four in the morning when only the cats are awake,
Daring each other in the dark with their yellow eyes.
The little white one with the blonde splotches wailing at the inequities of his feline existence.
He was a hound dog in another life.
Though once I dreamt he was a man—
A pirate with an eye patch.
Asleep in the bed against the wall that I share with her,
My brain manufactures these scenes.
And her,
On the other side, with the lamp on,
The light catching the dust and the odd moth that she fails to see,
Spinning the reels of her mind over times lost and never to be recovered in this life,
Attempting to revive memories irrevocably misplaced somewhere with papers, glasses and keys.
As the sun rises.
What Won’t Die
If I could put my hand against his chest and it would imprint itself through his bones and onto his pulsing heart and into eternity, I would know I had moved him.
Like taller than me but not too tall him
Like eyebrow raised jokingly him
Like humming a song him
Like no understands me like him him.
And I wish I was he
And he embodied me.
In fact, I wish I could wake up ensconced in the arms of all the people I love
Those gone and those breathing
And that life was infinite and not finite and crumpled like time.
Because that is one of my problems
This aging out
These set beginnings and endings.
I think often of beating hearts
How they are set in motion and never stop beating until they stop beating
And beautiful and how cruel and mundane and enormous and why this.
I also wish I didn't have to slowly lose everyone important to me
The other aging problem
Leading to me somehow laying them all out
In the same and separate pits.
Oh cruel universe, brutal and unceasing
I want to live young but I will die old
As wrinkled, and forgetful and decrepit as them all
And full of missing and a lot alone
No one is special [in the eyes of time].
But some of it would be solved if I could have just been born in 1975 or he in ‘75. Back to him again.
Like humorous but not quite funnier than me him
Like barrel chested head thrown back and laughing deeply him
Like been everywhere but came back home him
Like how no one knows me less or more than him him
And I wish I was he
And he embodied me.
Because that’s how I’ve always felt
And what can that feeling do but flow and ebb and sit like an eternalized lake
And what can time do about what won’t die?
Townie
Blood in his mouth
Tooth in his mouth
He spits it out but wants it back
Because it was his once
Part of a nerve and a gum and a grimace
Lost in a brawl over the last cigarette.
Easier to inhale and exhale now
Between the gap of sane and insane
A chink in the Berlin Wall of boredom in a nowhere town.