Quiver like a frail blade,
take to the air like a hammer;
cool quill in black fingers scratching on the ledger you see another
body, lays down, in the floorboards of my room.

The artificial light
from my window
is as a spoon, scooping out my deities and visions.
Hollowing the swooned vegetable life dazed under
beams, harried by the endless stream of
yellow,
garish yellow
lance, striking the eyelid and beckoning. Unbeknownst to gods none of us are
sleeping, only shriveling as leafs
under angry heat.

The bathtub
becomes a coffin, fit finely for a
rest without interference from a constant rambling of
business; hard work echoes on long after the day is through and men and women
turn into magicians
in the endless glow
of a machine entity now breathing. Green is the only color worth cultivation

and the night
is deemed worthless; utilitarian to the crux the lung of the earth
collapses; it’s unnoticed.

An iron hand, sleek oiled mason with an electrician’s eye comes and

pinches the dark out.

I walk the sidewalk on a polished late evening and a young woman
sleeping upon a bench her whole life asks me,

“Where have the stars gone?”

I look up, tired, sagging, as a burlap sack burdened with too many items,
too many things forced to carry,
too many necessities that aren’t necessary but still the light
piles them in. I say to her,

“The stars, they never left. But we have gone. We have gone somewhere, I think.”

Up she sits.
The woman, now a child goes ridged and coils her collar bones into her eyes,
and a white milk sweeps her into its arms and away into a
misery, a shattered bowl that never was given
the importance
for healing hands to come and fix it with gold she looks at me goes,

“…I’m lonely, too.”

And everything becomes wet foreheads
and dry lips.

And I am marrow, to say the least.