When your eyes burn with visions of Santa Ana
and Brazil is laying itself upon all you touch,
when every mystery has the same answer
and the sun won’t set without a saint’s song,
when all the words have run together
to make only one last sentence,
the flood of love will leave nothing behind,
the currents of life will deposit everything.
There the stability of your house will be questioned,
the guarantees from the title guarantor will lose meaning
and the sky will be walked upon in desolate understanding
that comes only from the stark deserts of loneliness
as it boils the air you have to breathe all day long.
These thoughts are consuming – obsessing,
the kind that come from the human taint of love,
where love’s ankles are broken in mistrust
reaching back for something once held,
an awareness, something, made the poetry readable.
Walking train tracks is consuming; so is getting to the bar.
Time spent thinking of other things, not failures,
not the moment you’ll earmark for later recall
where everything can be blamed on irrationality
despite assurances, phone calls, certified letters:
poetry and poetry and poetry and prose epistles.
everything is a failure
in the grand spectacle of
Reasoned Self Assurance.
screaming at low volumes
