Death of a Bicycle

The midnight fight of pale headlights,
Like a raging cancer patient falling out of bed,
The backward burn of that secret red
That shows the frightened dust
Falling from these vague leaves
As the vacuous cat purrs with me inside—
I’m leaning out of its side window.
The small house where we picked him up,
Him and his bicycle, where we came to get it—
The house opens its eyelid and
Sees his mother waking up within.
The detained light is a danger to our whispers.
And me the seated beast’s last voluntary victim,
Her stomach plays horrible music
As I watch these floundering friends
Take him apart, the bicycle.
A sudden blow to his bisected head and
He is on the ground, his veins twitching still.
They are upon him all at once,
Dealing out the suffering blows
In the crawling crimson vapors
Of our secret sadism.
I turn away, I turn away as I hear
His gurgled cry for help.
A firefly perforates the night air
And I pretend to connect the segments;
A lone lamp stranded in the country field
Melts a pool of orange butter below—
But I still see them tearing him up.
They deal him their gasping frustrations,
Unnecessary now, and take him apart
Piece by piece.
He must fit in the back, you know,
And I am chosen to squeeze in there,
This mechanical corpse all unbolted
And disfigured.
So I stare straight ahead, and giggle quietly
As I imagine that vacant tire’s
Dead gaze, haunting my periphery.
These friends laugh loudly, and we drive.

Spiritually Speaking

If you're looking, you're going to find it. And if you're not--well, maybe you'll get lucky.

C

The ugly thing about beauty
Is that you’re not here with me.
You pretty girl,
You unknown force,
You swirl of subtle movements that
Compose some profound silence.
You devastation.
The vibrant vibration
That has made it’s home in
A room behind my stomach,
The dizzy winds that spin
Scintillating around my head
Serve only to awaken me
To a very small hole that
Runs right through the middle—
The circumference of the finger that I
Once felt so faintly in my palm.

(You opaque presence in this room
Of half-human transparency.)

Yet everything is divine.
I awake into infinity
And act ecstatically.
The day is everything, but
Nothing more than a composition
Of a million open moments.

(But in weak minutes and quarter-hours
The days are merely parenthetical asides
In a story of me awaiting the entrance
Of the compelling absent protagonist.)

Just like that,
The movement suddenly turns tragic—
A sudden disorientation with no explanation,
A subterranean shift,
A rare scent on the wind,
Amnesia in the courtroom,
That feeling of waking up lost
Or forgetting why you walked in
Or anticipatory anxiety
Or maybe just
Fear.

Fear
Of unveiling something empty
That’s wrapped up like a present
Or opening your mouth and finding
Nothing.
Fear of
That woman with the scissors and the
Ghostly eyes
Or maybe some mother who
Drinks in the back room.
Fear me, because I fear you
Showing up out of nowhere and
Finding me like this.

(Open me up and inside you will find
A muttering old man neurotically combing his hair.)

I’m afraid that
Somewhere between the clouded frames
Of my magnified self-conceptions
The handsome proprietors of
My unsanitary solitude are
Slowly murdering you in my mind,
Quietly and behind my back
The thieves of my timetable are
Defiling the collage I had formed
From the things you said when
You thought I wasn’t listening.

Perhaps the next time we pass on the street
Or greet in my dreams
You won’t fit the description.

Or
Perhaps,
Like a bright bell twinkling
Through this voluptuously
Volatile night,
Like the small touch of a child
Descending your dreams of destruction,
Perhaps this is not so bad, after all.

I’m struggling in your arms
Like a child in a nightmare.
Hold on
Tighter
Love,
Look at me
And smile.