The House Is On Fire

31 May, 2007

This is hard, eating.
It might be better to starve,
and I am left wanting the heroin
that so pickled Burroughs.
It could be muscles and bones,
or it could be squamous cell carcinoma
that gets the goods.
To starve around it,
to tighten up and dry out,
might scare it out like a mouse from a house on fire.

There is a fire in the belly when I drink
like the one that was there when I was twenty-one
and believed in unrequited love.
So I do it now
to forget that mouse in the dark
who makes a nest of my tissues,
gnawing out a space for itself
in which to calculate its multiplication.
It must have sneaked in when I was out.

There was a boy in seventh grade
who gave me a school photo,
which I hid inside the covering of my earmuff.
It was there against my head every day at recess,
and it burned like shame or a loathsome burden
until I took it out and flushed it down the toilet.
The annual winter confession of this act
has never relieved the embarrassment.
Not knowing better
or knowing that you don't know better
will burn down your last straw.

Remember: I Am Two Things

21 May, 2007

I know why you look like that
with your brows pressed down over your eyelids
in that cascade of soft flesh made hard.
The cancer is inside me,
but I cannot feel it soaking into my organs in the dark
like you imagine I must.
Your face does that
because you imagine the tumor erasing me,
fading me out into a hairless wisp,
me and my body as one thing taking leave of you.
But I do not feel those fabled fingers gripping my soft tissues;
my body is an ornament around the brain I inhabit.
You see one thing that could leave you;
I see one thing that was never mine
strung around myself, heavy and wet.
If this body must be food,
you would lose two things, I would lose one, and
this fleshly sack would miss nothing.

The Clay Pot That Emptied Itself

6 May, 2007

There are few thoughts
in this empty vessel,
steeped in a chemical bath
at the cost of forty dollars a month.

I once worried over timecards
and transportation and shopping and
and where my next cigarette was
inside a dry skull with a dull thud.

Now there are the small, white pills
taken in the morning
before I've given any thought
to this or that or why I'm here;

little, white, divided pills
that smell like paint thinner
stop all the worry and consideration
that once led down endlessly forking roads.

The thoughts that were are gone:
the electric charge of hypotheses,
the rise and fall of battles won
and lost and begun and imagined.

I am left to forage for animal fulfillment
among food and drink and people
to satiate every present, terminal desire.
I am left hard-pressed at day's end

to recall a distinct impression;
There are only rapid snapshots,
soundless, thoughtless scraps of one thing or another
to which I have lost all attachment.