The kind you buy from Home Depot
And hid it above the bathroom mirror
The light that came down from the ceiling
Painted everything in a warm shimmer
The actor that played you in this film
Was not the one I would have chosen
He had a habit of smiling when he had nothing better to do
Which made the suicide attempt at the end of the film
Seem to come out of nowhere
Your professor friend told you to take the scene out
But I was adamant that the scene stay in
It’s the only shot I like
If you really want to make everything cohere
Just get rid of the rest of the film where he’s smiling for no reason
You could have said something
That’s what directing is.
I misread something once and assumed for many years that Etienne Balibar was Althusser’s wife
He looks like he gives really good hugs
See, knocking toward recorded states
Knowing most days ever deduced you
No season forwarding miles
She, wraith-like, lifts the sitter through the ether
Up through dirt and regret
Her spirit-name lapping over stones on the river
The white sheet, wet, tracing time in wooden faces
In Illyrium, mine forever
Out of nickel slugs, the lie and splinter gang
Stay with me stage-left in the hallway of your laundry room
The black summer outside in cicada hum
Yellow dressing room lights dimly during the day
While classes went on and we slept in sawdust
The sawdust, the centipede
The tile floor of your bathroom under the risers
Bleecher marks on your skin
Thoth hidden in the bathtub Armada among artifacts like the cold faucet
Stepping on boards across marshes
You, sweet friend, red seraphim, yours alone
Ewe’s horn and fool, come and find me
Malefic foe of D’ne, attacking the temple headfirst
Shallow gold passage of oil that flows over her feet
The lady machine bewitched
The Dodo’s song on the back of a washboard
Along Katib’s reed and whistle
Elephants sigh in empathy with the ghost
When the smiling snake of Tabitha and Abbadon
The red scalloped rib of the cinema curtain
The rabbit’s pink nose on heaven’s cloud
And violin bow the singing saw
Evil eye on sister Venus climbing the miller’s wheel
Speaking her angel’s papyrus with disappearing ink
Remember me before we knew warm river shores
The soil that hangs on branches standing upright on its banks
Pulling the threads of it dark brown roots
Tangled in telephone wires red and blue
The beige receiver unscrewed
The voice in carbon cupped in your hand
Yellow vinyl, bareback, cigarette smoke hovering into the austere void above
Soft plastic tissue released from engines in the blue sky
The deep end of the living room
Suspension of the lithe body
Roaring lion’s voice and the beasts it kills like an open door
Tawny and overgrown rusted junkyard
Heat and sweat on your cool face underneath
The tattered orange towel that covers the window
I waited hidden for hours crying alternately sniggering through the peep hole
As breath quickened and stopped
Teapot Dome changes a gourd half carved out an intricate path
Labyrinthine circuit, unseen, unknown
To that breathing thing, unfolding inside itself in cellulose
Tightly winding the mouse a sewing needle
stormborns
2087
gracieabrams
romaincrisis
