Resenting the Factory

Resenting the factory, I shove
fallen leaves in my mouth

Riverwater, coins
wrapped in grass

*

My love, you become a thing
of repeating:

hot metal in coils, body
becoming the chair

*

When you are away, I bleed
from my insides

I talk to the deer at
the bottom of the hill

*

When you are away, I listen
for coyotes:

dusk’s ricochet
or feral in sunlight

*

Here is your body I can hold only sleeping

There—phantom pulling you up
from the bed & into cruel morning

I have no comfort for thee, no not one Hyperion, John Keats

There is a place where your hours are owned. They tell you to wake at 4 AM. They tell you to wake at 5. Dark morning. Dark, your hair when I can’t see. Dark, the deep blue hue beyond our skulls. Coiling smoke from a soldering pen. Across the lawn, a howl. Across the city, a child’s stretch. You wake when dreams are best, blearing strong against our eyelids. You wake into a hollow, vision decayed by electronic alarm. I fall asleep with you at night yet stay behind in morning, the terrain behind my eyelids gaping, vast. I stay behind beholding cross-stitched space, afraid of that ache inside my chest. Once, you found me standing asleep in front of the bathroom sink, water streaming. In other words, you found me sleeping on my feet. Stream, I put my time to rest. Still, who dies inside their car parked lonely in the lot? What lullaby descended, then? Who dies at night in uniform, no moment to remove their name-stamped clothes? Love, your time is kept unruly, winding like a snake upon the tar or the rat inside its gut. No one speaks to you and still, you wake. Still, you’re pulled across the pre-dawn landscape to the factory floor. What threshold, this factory. What voiceless space. I dream, instead, a fallen god, a man wrapped in silk or fawn in water. O aching time! It plays again. Stream, in sleep, I follow thee—

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