joints

without formatting such secrets we wade amid rivers

reach that point of both an entering in and the slow exit

the chuckling rocks we risk our feet on & from & for

branches refracting whats & heres & whos

consider the torn corner where the shotgun boys play

and the crack in the exhaust we’ve grown deaf to

and the calluses trying to predict tomorrow’s hurt

some sorta plaintive gesture, a numb hand’s helloshake

okay another joint, this one with formica tables, lit

in that hemingway way, with bulbs instead of money

but you weren’t there yet, remember, so all I’m doing

is reminiscing emptily, pawing away sand as sand pours in

in the way there’s feinting with knives

& in the way there’s pleasure-seeking neuropathic entrapment

& in the way there’re the clampdowns, market riots, boys with chains

in the way folks know, & hang out car windows to say so

the plying of an effortless trade, the sailing of ships to move money around

the islands and stained buoys that bob our names in the space between

the great sun’s flashing extinction as all but those who know suddenly go

and leave us as everything has to leave, cold food on cold plates in the sink before dawn

painters tweeting removal process, and former colleagues friending ghosts

the only way they know how, with an artless mechanical groping

at private desks in the privacy afforded by closed windows

and comfortablish chairs that slowly devour, and the remnants of storms

unspooling unseen above the plasterpatterned ceiling and stuffed gutters

& tissue of sewage pipes rupturing beneath the mown lawn

which is why I’ll never buy a house nor be one either because

everyone belongs to a broken link sometime, everyone twangs

when the net’s tugged, everyone loses their shoes from the impact

cartwheels over the hood, etc., and solipsisms shift us back

into the mood to fuck or fight our way out of & back in to

is just the way it is, tides and fevers, funnels of clouds redistributing

syllables into the great unspoken plains, ejaculated dust puffs

where the trochees once gently fingered our heartstrings

instead we walk on discarded chickenbones, plow furrows in plastic

grovel for debt in the unexcused boneypiles of impotent ego-mining

you’ll eventually need a conjunction to signal the shift

to resolution, placed expertly in the fold of the readers’

expectation, apologizing for troubling the assimilation process.