One morning, you walked out to by industrialfirefly, literature
Literature
One morning, you walked out to
One morning, you walked out to the horizon.
I traced the blurry edges of your profile
but the sun blinded me
and the tears made it harder for me to focus.
I remember gathering
everything you had given me
in a package.
I thrusted it under your arm and insisted
you take it -
I imagined carrying
something like it
to make it hard, slow, for anyone to move.
Alas, a box of unrealized possibilities
did not bear as much weight.
You strode away with your usual swagger,
and bled into the sunrise
as quickly as you had come.
(31 November 2009)
This is how you conquer:
a small splash of words
unbuttons your blouse
then
you spread yourself on an easel—
before a bald paint brush.
Each fiber of your canvas
catches every stroke, em-
beds every line.
You thresh out your pain
not
with moans
but
with gasps.
Look closely:
you have painted
a gun
around the hollow
between your thighs.
This happens when
someone like you bumps
into me but this much
we know already.
Is it small talk, suddenly
I wonder, to talk about things like
how you prefer soccer over basketball
because you love the feeling you get
when you run across an open field;
and how I think
I am getting nowhere,
so you ask me to let you
teach me the sport,
since it is as simple as you say.
I tell you about how I scurried
to a DJ booth one night
demanding that he repeat
a track and I spent half that night
looking through an album
of CDs just to find out
the title of that song that,
as it would turn out
you and I both love: "Build
LESSONS IN ASTRONOMY by industrialfirefly, literature
Literature
LESSONS IN ASTRONOMY
1
As if an earnest professor
whose excited words just eddy
in the earlobes of his
one and only student (freshman),
you lecture me about looking up
to see for myself the wonders
of the zodiac:
those flickering dots with which to play
an ancient game
of connecting them
into a belt, creatures, heroes,
lovers.
A busy sidewalk café is
where we always hold class. You drink
your macchiato with long,
slow sips in between sessions that
never went passed the silly name-game
and the explanation of the syllabus.
2
Tonight,
the practical test.
I havent any idea of
the grading scheme but I try my best;
suck up anyway. H