in the case of music gone wrong

in the case of music gone wrong
there must be a penalty for this harmony
the paint peeling in cascades down

the side of your forgotten dry wall.
in the case of your phone gone dead
i would beg you to remember how fall

was for us that year the once moist trees painting
themselves across our chests. and i did beg
you to stop. and did you. the memory still brings

the tightness that it brings the smell of grass
slowly dying drying itself for winter the quiet
chill of the ground hardening for the frost

and the slow stillness that the air assumes.
in the case of silence gone wrong
how can there be anything more

anything else to curl its lips around yours
to pin the moment down to this moment the smile
of our smiles rising to meet themselves in the air

then dying past our own memory of ourselves.
sing now. sing.

APRIL

Now we could make things happen more simply,
letting the snow gather on the sidewalk, the letters
stack themselves on the pile by your bed,
all those people you never knew. The man whispering
in your ear is no one you need to listen to, just
someone in the mood to give fatherly advice. "Don't
talk to strangers," he says. I try to prepare myself for the coming season
of waiting, how every glance becomes a collage of facts
to gather and retrieve. How little I really know.
Oppenheimer reading the Inferno in the original, perplexing his colleagues,
who equated poetry with a weakening of the logical mind.
Time-stopped I am floating between two states, both undesirable,
both demonstrated by desire. If only you were the sibling
I never had, we could talk this out, resolve our differences
before our parents came home. Outside the trees
are becoming leafy, the weather is hot and cold,
always catching us with the wrong jacket on. A friend
comes to me and tries to read the words written on my forehead.
"Lost," he says. "Beware," he says.
There is no memory of anyone having been in the room.
There is no memory of the room.

THE CLAYS

We would run down the bank,
Of the long and thin creek,
Slipping along the dank
Clay bar, our toes chilled
From the water in our shoes.
Where glass bottles, old tires
Littered the mud shore,
And refrigerators
Lay sunk in the gravel,
Their full white hulls grounded

If the heavy spring rains came,
The creek would swell and come to life,
Dragging trees with it.
We would wade
Into the waist high rush
And feel our legs
Give way to the sensation of water
Then watch soda cans and basketballs sweep
By us fast and huge and feel
Somehow cleaner when we later emerged wet,
Caked with red and yellow clay.

Some of my poetry appears in the anthology Premonitions published by Kaya Press, and edited by Walter Lew.