You know this, of course.
                                    If only you could stuff your own bugle, you might hide the betrayal.

            To be fair nobody said the business would suit you. Even your mother
            (despite the new tires) had her doubts. The lead apron you are forced
            to wear does weigh a soul down. And the dust in the newspaper (there’s
            always dust in the newspaper) only bores and empties
            your face, stops you
            from putting thought
                                                to paper.

                        Last night before bed you read Blake and for a minute you were (like him)
            convinced that your mind was the form of God. You knew
something could beautifully erupt inside you and interrupt this doubt.

                        As the moon shone in your window, you believed it all deeply. You would do
                                    anything to live in such reward.

            Now, all of a sudden, a gust of dust whips up to blind you.
            In such cloud you think, “Remember, you have earned this chair.”
            You wait for the delivery to round the corner and just like that you
            acquire a clean-shaven authority. With a stately posture
            you overcome the look of your flimsy attire, but nothing undresses
            the look in your eyes, the gaze of someone undone, a living half-shut.

Does My Lip Limp?

            The birds light
my return with foam
                                    but a thousand
            still remain rapid. How was it
            that a bridge
bent forward towards
my walking?  

            My memory’s a fragile hollow
behind the raven’s nest and the eyelashes
                            I forget
                                and break someone returns
                                                    to me
                                   for living.

The ruins
          ladder forth and compose
a seething unity. I’m hungry
                                  a swelter of skull    that feels its lack.
                                  Is talking shallow torture
for you? I find it flat
     when in mind I no longer entertain
            toward a new world.

            Will it start? Does any thought float?

We Found Ourselves in Reading, then Closed the Book

That was all it took. One pesky
minute adrift in the mind
at bedtime. Awake there, I didn’t sleep, naked and
unconsoled. Why did God always insist
on using brains to store unwanted
soundtracks? I stretched my legs, walked the dog, and still
“truth” wouldn’t fall out of my ear. It gave me
a stiff neck and a strange gait. As unhappy
as a bird in snow, I sat down to plan
at the kitchen table with the formica at my elbows.
My companion felt suddenly the seriousness of
the problem. It was, then, easy to explain. Getting  
to go where you aren’t, where you never will be, that’s
what airplanes are all about, I began. Nescafe,
diesel fumes, Nietzsche’s typewriter behind
a pane of glass, how wonderful it will be
to stay where we can never live. She clearly understood. And only
a short walk from the S-Bahn Station, I noted, the lovers
are buried, through the woods, interred where they fell, by the lake.
With this last detail she packed her trunks.

We admired the shapes of foreign spoons, the slightly
different cut of shirt worn by men over 50. Had we
the chance, we would have even found an Italian
railroad yard worthy of our attention. And when
an elderly Danish woman at the next table inquired finally
how it was that our countrymen were so stupid, I could only
note that historically our army’s firing lines have been circular.