my father holds
his favorite drink

Mostly he ate what was put on his plate
snuck coffee grounds or dirt for a snack
Once a zipper Unzipped

Lights on the dashboard spell out
“You still can’t kiss me”

I have observed, the theorist
I am

There is so little left of the tomato plants.

I imagined a cascade of slow death for all / that mattered…

Any still figure at mid-late evening, when the long shadows make even crumbs appear arranged like furniture.

We stop doing dishes while
a mile unwinds
from the tree outside.

I am still waiting for the lion

Winter sat like a wolf
on the horizon.

Listen to me: I know
the winter gloom in
mid-summer…

Every so often, they add a tattoo
in honor of some long-forgotten love.

I buy too much, for someone of my stature.
could pawn a skinny metaphor to purchase a plump skin.
its reputed in our lineage— to daydream a life that shreds our pockets.

I want to roll in this moment until I become its vocabulary
until I smell like the bones
until I am its echo…

I myself should never have been born

Even as the sun warms the concrete
the long nights’ sensual cold lingers in my clothes.

here is the sky in stop motion, flickering,
a still shot in monochrome

I tap at the alphabet while a single deer
taps at the dirt beyond the brush
on the far side of the tree line.