jayivan

a wet bootprint pressed
in a speckled floor fades to
vapour

The death of a day:
I pause as the soil between
my toes heaves a sigh.

So little a thing:
the passing of a day unmarked
by blizzard or flood,

a day unscathed by
social scandal, just simply:
the death of a day.

In the field I stand
looking up, night wind soothing
the hairs on my neck,

Those small, small points telling me out of the great great Vast:
To know that I am here and the day has passed.

I loop my fingers
Through morning-lit curls alight
With your warm breath—

Your look away, drill
Holes into my chest and plow
Out the freezing slush.

I hate this. I hate
This. I hate this—this thing I hate:
when I can’t cant create.

Whittling love away
With long silences and short
Glances long askance.

I stare at angry
Walls—who knew white walls could be
So blood red beneath.

acid frequencies
like sodium embers shine:
a dense pink joy

We are soft, too soft
for today’s pornography:
we shrink when we shine.

This is not present:
routing bike trips to beaches
as the blizzard blows.

The last scratch behind
Her ear, to the place a lame
Leg can reach no more.

Furious I scratch
To give some peace where lame legs
Try, in hope, to reach,

Twitching in old age
Like in her puppy dreamtime
When her sleeping legs

Would chase the rabbits
Hungry in the desert hills
For prickly pear seeds:

But now she rolls on her side releasing a sigh
Faint, resigned, perhaps ready for goodbye.

A three line poem
needs no title any more
than the sky needs blue.

All work and no play
makes Jack a dull boy. All work
and no play makes Jack.

Computers don’t work.
Trains run late. This is not mal-
function but nature.

The Passing Moment
is all we have, not the sound
of frogs crying kwah!

Forehead pressed against
the glass of a bay window,
his drooling lips stare.

I align my pen
on the sheet’s thin rules, queued up
for the next letter.