no one will remember us.
We’re only specks of dust
or one—one speck of dust.
Some brutes who screamed
for everything to look at us.
Well, look at us. Still terrible
and awful. Awful and pretending
we’re not terrible. Such righteous
saints! Repeating easy lines,
performing our great politics.
It’s just so very boring,
the real mystery in fact
is how we managed to make room
for love at all. Punk rock,
avant-garde cinema.
I love you, reader
but you should know
the sunset’s over now.
I’m standing right in front of
Nowhere bar, dehydrated
and quite scared
but absolutely willing
to keep going. It makes sense
you do the same. It’s far
too late for crying and quite
useless too. You can be sad
and still look so good. You can
say New York is beautiful
and it wouldn’t be a headline
and it wouldn’t be a lie.
Just take a cab and not the 6,
it’s never once in ten years
been on time. It’s orbiting
some other world
where there are sunsets
every hour and no money
and no us—that’s luck!
The way to get there
clearly wasn’t written down.
Don’t let that stop you though.
Look at the sky. Kiss everyone
you can for sure.
I
LIVING ON EARTH
Part of the celestial sky known as the sea.
Where there’s little of Earth
and nothing of us as these forms.
In the animal soup of time beside the Water Bearer
and the Great River. They’re up there for the lost
with Polaris. In the oceans. At home.
In your own body which is mostly water
and mostly not yours. Not even tonight
while you’re in it. When another body
sleeps alongside all your want.
What does the moon know of our language,
our care for its perceived loneliness
which may be its one joy.
Where would you find love if not on the earth?
As if we should be permitted elsewhere.
As if we understand our own wars,
our reasons for fleeing, forgetting—
the history we do not allow ourselves to imagine
and the lives we refuse to know,
which are often our own. I think of you here,
where you haven’t been in years.
There’s a flaw in the wood of the door
or my own madness that welcomes the wind
although it is summer, although I am winter.
You could see the sea from the desert
on a night when no one comes to harm you,
an evening when bombs go off somewhere as planned.
We could be letters. Sent here
to warn each other of a much better time.
We could be no one. And for nothing.
For what?
DARK MATTER
The living looking for eternity
don’t know eternity is brief.
A favorite thing about being alive
or other questions no one asks me,
and it would be knowing people.
Knowledge through time.
What’s the name of that hour in the day
where no matter our planned futures
everything is full of nothing
as the world is full of people
without reason other than small chance.
You are tired and most singular
in the middle of the afternoon
when seeing you on the street
(and not in a bedroom) reminds me you’re real,
allowing me to begin the rest of this poem.
Because life isn’t enough
which is unbelievable to the fog, sea,
or anything lucky to be
