Tagged: the Earth

More On the Sun

I think it can see
how fragile we are
There’s a newly paved road
on the old road
Over and over. The sun
a twitching
of blind spots
The sun itself
is a blind spot
What lights there?
We change lanes
mostly guessing
No wonder our Earth
has its face
to the sun
like it does, at all times
pacing around it
Maybe the sun
was born
with some disease
that requires watching
An impulse control
issue. Look at us, driving
places. Honking
like geese
in such
well-meaning light
What must we look like
to them, up there?
The irritable
The spitting
Our lives an array
of outbursts
The chaos
of joy
falling softly
on some other planet. Pink
and blue murmurs
Gold standards. Our boxes
for looking directly
at the sun?

Crosswalk Balloon

a balloon bounces
across a red light
on the rocks
not popping

the cars go, they too
on their balloons
on the rocks
not popping

each day, I feel
another day
coming

not like these balloons
which could go
any minute

I wonder if somewhere
out in space

there’s a street
our planets bobble across
not popping

and if
the light
will ever change?

The Truth According to Bigfoot

Are there
two
black women
or a
white vase

A potter
or
masseur
of clay

A carousel
or
drill
on turn
by horses

All of us
more
than just one
thing. All of us
until
we are dead

All of us
liars. Liars
in love
with
beautiful stories
about
truth

And truth?
It is
something
we might
have seen

Something
walking upright
in the
forest
like a man

We Were Here

An injured hawk circles the circumference
of its tether, resting occasionally on a glove
attached to the fence. Clouds gallop over
mountains, shedding their snow like loose summer hair
I’ve seen no people between Moab and New Mexico
Just the signs of people. There’s a town called
Many Farms where TB medication was tested in the 50s
Several hand-written signs for Xbox repair
A stray dog at the Conoco eating what remains
of a sandwich. The school sits half-excavated
from the rock. You or I take pictures from the car
I wonder where the people are, and if a land
so unforgiving is ever asked

Devil’s Garden Utah

we climbed on rocks
before stopping to watch them

and wandered into a dozen people’s
pictures of a hole, forever skipped
as places to sit that are taken

until the night, when we got lost
we barely made it back
by following the hardness
of where other people had stepped

you stood in the center
of a frozen pond, a girl in a dress of ice
frilled with directionless fish

that saw me grow calm,
fluid in the face of your danger

No Such Thing as People

I have seen the chest of sky
at her deepest breath

A black sky draped like cloth
over a table I am under

The stars are glistening – they
are juices inside of melons

peaches, bad people. There is
no such thing as bad people

Just good people eating
the same things over and over

ignoring the plates of strange
misshapen people

that become our soil. See the
children in the soil

Watch them touch the sky
on a mountain of dirt

Topless Swimming Pool

For god so loved the world he traced it, and traced it
until the outside lines became dark

He wrote the hearts of young boys
into the margins of a topless swimming pool
then asked them not to look

Bubbling up from god’s wrist – a cupped hand
full of spring water, lifting weightless breasts
to the lips of these women

These women who do seem happier with their bodies
as if floating on a moon with no men. No need
for support. I’ve spoken with friends

who are women and no one is mad at us directly
More at privilege. I keep my neck still
as one of the boys in my care

has just seen his first pair of breasts go diving off the board
I tell him that women can have their tops off
anywhere men can in this city

He says that seems more fair. I envy his long life, full of
worsening. I try to shield my eyes, but they are widening
starting to get pointy in the middle

I turn my head to the line at Tube Rentals, where topless women
are being gawked at by boys like me, boys like me are offering
to hold their inflatables, saying how awful it must be

having boys like me gawk at them constantly. All the boys
are like me, with places inside they can’t reach
I watch the young ones strap on their goggles – some

have never even cut their hair. They dive to the bottom
of the springs, then come up screaming that they’ve touched it

Imagine Everything Is Fine

the funny monkey wearing glasses
tsking on a high wall, combing himself
the other monkeys cleaning. every few
seconds a monkey will stop, take a hair
from its mouth, look at it. their touch
is suspicious language. the funny monkey
mumbles a lie, puts on pants

decides to finish himself
in another part of the forest. the others
are talking about him, drawing his face
into one another’s backs. some of them can’t
recall his name, which is like having to ask
for love, which is worse. the funny monkey
stepping back, running away, is being pulled
tighter in a sling that will shoot him
forward through evolution’s
slight investment, until he is
scratching himself, printing off reason
in sheets of bills

we pay off our interest this way
we fund our entitlement
and in this way we lose our planet
but pretend not to notice

The Pleasure of Walking

How slender is the wind. I wonder if a particularly nice gust of wind
feels nice for the wind, or if my body feels coarse against it, like
passing through beads strung tackily in a doorway I remember. Does
the wind ever find me naked behind that doorway, and continue
to shield its eyes and part the way before it? Even this tailspun air
I lust to impress – her forcefulness, how she leans along the stillness
of a picturesque existence, dropping her sounds then picking them up
slowly. This time it’s the sound of a girl being fucked, or a woman – I’m
a man now I have to remember – or the wind herself, maybe
I lunge inside her with every step