Nightmare Songs: A Remainder

These are the ones I decided didn't jive with the narrative of the other six, even though I wrote them in a similar mode. I'm posting them because it's the only daylight they'll ever see, and I'm a bit sweet on them.


7.

An ornate teapot in the perfect disorder of celestial dust.
Let’s take it down, polish it with old rags
until the reflection is bluer than a static sky—a departure
from the deadlier atmospheres.
At what heights do we stop breathing?
Or have I asked the wrong question?
Do we? No,
but there are better words in the earth.
Deep veins of granite thick with words
and sometimes the molten violence
of a collision
will name us to a moment like a thick syrup.
The natural sugars are also
light into which we are spilled or poured
like the volatile liquids of industry.


8.

Into the heavy bowl, she wept oranges
and was delighted to be in harvest, and so brightly!

The fields were a bleak stretch of heavenless—
there were sprites or devils in our periphery.

Shooting them was out of the question, seriously.
We had signed contracts against murder. When murder is all that is left

then you resort to prayer. And so Samuel the murderer
kneeling at the railing—his wristwatch, canceling his heart—ticks.

Could he become lackluster machinery?
We do not condemn for sin the machines of harvest or production.

Our creations become blameless and we enter,
through them, an eternity of contrariness.

A chaos of leaves that spins into a brief eddy of color.
I’m watching this from the porch, in the safety of my own breath.


9.

Cold. Man’s a new broken song.
The corners of his neighborhood are a hungry tempo.
They are empty of pedestrian traffic like roofs,
these dim bodies in cloud—dull weather.
Or are they ships of a broken Armada?
The wind blows them in one direction
for three days straight and this is called lucky.
Never again would the youngest rejoice at so much monotony—
a future without absence, without the long horizons of loneliness.
Sun over tall pines is a game of velocity
and beneath that I sometimes also become that game—
oh, my consequences are surrounding me with blunt weapons.
Can I say ‘bludgeoned’ here without being obvious?
Forget it—this story wants to insult your expectations.
Burn this poem without its holes.


10.

In an old room the piano grew a tail.
Something grew less golden in the tallest corners.
When he looked hard it went shadowed.
There was a lineage of chins:
the chin’s newborn son and its ties to ancient Norwegian royalty,
the chin as a stone survivor of imperialism.
Oh, the uprising was bloody—nobody survived
save for a small boy, having fallen into the deep well
where he did not suffocate, though he did relieve himself.
If people were horrified, they weren’t talking
about it in the streets or under the calcium lights
where circled a myriad of black flies.
The hordes are their own reckless determinants
and we have become them without allegiance.


11.

There aren’t blues enough for cheap whiskey
except in the cold oven—gas.
But a good breeze from an open window
is enough to sweeten our tongues through scalding.
Is there an escape without damage? Oh, rarely
have we been refunded our full deposits—
charges reversed in a convention of trade.
Magistrates at the dismissal are a plenty of hands
and their bouffants wave niceties
as if they were ever more than a fashion
that we purchased for the price of a loaf of bread at market.
But about our produce we know nothing
save that it comes from the earth, about which
we know even less of origins.
This is an interrogation—tell me everything you’ve seen.


12.

A harvest of obscene squash littered the lawn.
Against a rusted dawning
we climb the oak and become breathing phantoms.
Our visible breath gallops away from us on hooves
soundlessly across a deep field of ice.
The old limbs of oak are giving us the finger.
Let’s choose not to be offended—they are only trees.
And after all, they will dance if the wind suggests.
They are a quiet and deliberate tribe
hunting for the starkest provisions in a populace of game.
I came across a shallow spring
and did not drink my fill of it.
There in the cooling shade of the willows
the clouds shifted dangerously overhead.