there-is-no-spoon

Even at sunrise, these disquieting mechanics of clockwork are familiar sounds of loneliness. Still, the new clock, the cheap clock is laden with purpose. Its typical, round face is bearing my 6 a.m. fruit: a heavy head, reluctant eyes. The tic-toc is effortless; it speaks of early ripening: a call for groans, hands at the ears, sobriety. The machine is not all. There is humanity here, a snooze button: an attempt at mercy, a ceaseless trick. Naively every morning, falling for it, I rediscover some four moments of silence: fool's gold. Making its last rounds, the needle reaches nirvana, setting off a 'beep-beep'. I imagine, th

The nights are dark as ever, though deep country with its quiet lung is only an imagining. Like late august, this season plays on double bass strings, damaged nerves you can do nothing with, only hide into a breast pocket. You can tell by a look down the full city drain that the world – and I with it – needs a new coat of paint. Besides hot air, nothing says spring better than old trees who, pregnant with sap, stay mute by nature as well as choice. Foolishness is in season – the masses still believe in horoscopes while temporarily defrosted birds moan in D minor and watch the earth drink itself to death with the closest

There are post scripts everywhere, trees saying no in an elaborate code, fingernails that spell maybe with bitter cursive. This is a month of twenty-eight days sometimes more when god wills it more. And I have nothing to say to you. I do not eat this month, I have a crystalline figurine between my ribs nothing goes, keeps spinning, wound-up, one glass slipper in, in. I make promises to myself: keeping a cold mouth, keeping myself in both hands and these hands only. I wake up, feeling poor, wearing minus ten around my neck, smiling at my mirror. This funny horoscope tells me nothing only that I still have a few decades I wo

I am ready to fall away from everything: the spaghetti container, the blue need, the wish. We tell this joke well, over and over until I take it into my hand, break its legs and it keeps on walking. I walk with you, huddling close to nothingness, the sum, a big face. I know you, five-fold, pastless, holding on to your car keys, pretending to have ancestors by the name of Sally. I know you, stranger. I am here, waiting for the grand finale, taking every touch, stringing it to a thread for the winter to wear like an amulet. I do not see dreams anymore; faces, needless to say, bore. Take this hand; bear everything out of me: m

I was there at the exact moment of snow, cats, vines, house, water, I was there, singing badly a song in my head while trees, whose names I do not know, coughed up asthmatic strings of code. They have branches, milligrams of hard touch, exulting stiffness, newness. I know the snow's been shopping for a nice black dirt to come home to. I know we are too difficult to follow without faces, keys, banknotes I promise a moving episode, ziplocked, fashioned, with my appearance of a compact footnote.

I drag you around in my bag of rocks. You scream, "Baby, take me down from your wall, like a flag, like a sign on a good man's funeral." Some day, I promise I will rattle my keys in your doorway, take my hand, languid, out of a dark pocket. I promise, you will be on your bed, at a quarter to five, no longer an old thing in my lap your face will be cold with the shock of a half life and I will take you in. We'll chat like negligent gods, until our words become background noise to a decade of swallowing the wrong stuff and another to pushing a forget into a mouth with the gut in reverse.

There is nothing left for me in this town but to watch snow melt on my heels. I will file a missing person's report for my face. There is nothing left, but familiar words in grocery aisles, the eyes take a backseat in our loud tundra, and I'm too prone to forgetting. I'm going to take my arms, sing them something sweet about how fantastic I was years ago, sitting in a cherry tree, miles above the ground, watching out for joy coming around the corner, looking for a blind eye to attach to. I'm going to take my fingers, arrange them like chairs in a banquet hall out of sheer desire for possession or control when design falls throu

The leaves are all gone and there is nothing left to write about. Well, other than a worn-out self, recycled in every poem, baked like a china too cordial for fire. Then again, I could write about you, but I can't let them take you, drink you in like a useless fact at every unconscious encounter. There are always the strangers on the bus, living in me like ghosts with significant glances, but ink for them is an unlikely revival more so than mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. There is nothing left to write about anymore I could write about our sonorous jealousies, but who want to hear about that? I could take the easy route: So and

I am taking off my shoes. I am hanging them on the hooks of my insides. The moon is notepaper I write my dreams on in between talks of negligence and separation. The man on the moon has socks on backwards and he is repeating to me the lines of the same old song, of my own song. I am reconciling the arm to the sleeve, placing a button in a loop, driving my nose down to the ground with a taste for pinstripes. I am taking off my gentle gloves. In the background there is a man, with feet on fire with poppies with hair that smells of ink. He is dancing to my old verses, to my long-lasting tune of shower shrieks. I need to tell yo

How strange the birds should chirp now late evening, almost in agony. The eye looks out, cries, pretending to twitch and you wish for variety or maybe companionship. Here, where the trees feign a shiver, the burnt auto shop evanesces in brown loneliness. The dusk climbs into your membrane like a sleepy 2-year-old, and you finally return to your furnished asylum. Here, you stand in a towel, waiting for the fog to pack his bags and leave your mirror, here you fear what 20 minutes of water have done to your face. On the verge of bed easing into forgetfulness, where there is always that distance between tomorrow and th