All In the Wrist

There are plastic bins filled with

chemical waters

It pinches me inside my nose, the air does,

but you seem accustomed to it
so I smile and watch you pour

I'm willing to wait for your finger-clicks to swim

in these chemical waters, in

whatever correct order they should

go, to see how your eye

caught light or lightning that day

I often remember the the marbles-ready thumb

in black and white

on your wall

And I want to write a book

just to have that on the cover,

I want to hardline some future publisher to

give you many thousands of dollars

for the right to

marble-thumb my book,

my quiet little book

that tries to stay out of the way

of its loud little cover

Confetti and a Coffin

Koll Strand sat inside a small gymnasium on a picnic table bench, sorting indiscriminately through a small pile of confetti in his left palm, breathing shallow breaths and smiling, halfway, to himself and to his hand.

Around him, on her feet, moved a woman from Colombia with a vacuum, a woman named Eva who had no idea that the man whose feet raised up to avoid her cleaning would die, one way or another, sometime within the next twelve weeks. She didn't know but he did.

The party—that's how he referred to it, regardless of the rather morbid alternatives that his friends had assigned to it or to themselves, such as "The Death Bash" or "The Coffin Cast"—would take place the following day, the afternoon and the evening and all the night until light appeared in the sky, probably around 5 a.m. Those were the rules, so to speak. There weren't many. People could bring anything they wanted, and with regard to their goodbyes, they could speak out loud in a toast or quietly to Koll himself. Koll preferred more laughter than crying, and he told his invitees the same, but that wasn't a rule, just a preference. He would be gentle.

...

You Better Recognize

Sometimes a man needs to breathe.

To breathe with lungs, sure, but that's not all—to breathe, to drink it down with everything, with eyes and tongue and feet.

Tonight I'm breathing.

I'm looking out onto a serene, gorgeous lake, and the air is so fuggin' clean and crisp that it feels like it might burst in my hands. I keep clapping them together but I can't catch any of it.

It looks like this:














Except it's dark out and there's no tree on top of my view. And shit, fine, let's split hairs: it's a completely different lake than the one in the picture. That's why I said it looks like this picture. For crying out loud.

Goddamnit.

I was just trying to show you a pretty picture and tell a pretty story and you had to get all CSI on me about the lake picture.

Over and out.