Fuck, I miss you.
The haunts are vacuous.
Your words are ghostly gray.
Some hackers deleted the emails I vowed
I’d always save. One evening, cold and gray,
the heater hardly churning, I searched for them
under the glow of a college desk lamp.
No results.

Glimpsing Nietsche through Rilke
was like glimpsing naked bodies writhing
between the zigzag gray of late night TV.
My eyes have always pondered
a moment longer than is casual.

Tonight Taylor and I are walking, buzzed,
under a bridge in Tucson, Arizona.
He nudges a guy in corduroy, and buys two cigarettes
a dollar apiece. He knows I don’t smoke.
We pass it between us. The bars are so close together.
We can walk everywhere and anywhere.
We walk to his car.

The night is wide, but shallow,
a stroke of French Ultramarine on primed canvas.
The radio leaks, smoke spills from my nostrils.
-Keep it out of the car.

I stick my head out of the car and rotate my vision
from asphalt to star-stricken sky,
faster, faster.

In between the blue and the black are Budweiser lights
and parking signs, smoke dust, radio waves,
and Taylor, chuckling.

We’re in the Milky Way, streaks between streaks,
lines between lines. We’re parked between the lines.
No one can say we’re doing wrong.
But my eyes always ponder longer than is casual.
The night zags onward.The car stands still.

They lived in other bodies
tainted by flows: simple casings.
We found them ebbing along the shore,
chiseling the rocks. They said nothing
when we touched them.
And they chiseled in their soft way.
Foam popped slowly around them, too slowly,
though it was beautiful and dark.
The shore lithographed as the sun began to set:
the paint hardened over, crackless in its thick.
One by one the animals stilled
their work and accepted the night.
We ground our toes into the sand and lit a common cigarette,
and admired our work.

They hang like breasts, two oranges,
thick-skinned, trench-skinned, bulbous
at the tips. A rigid cable joins them:
hold it up to the light, copper wires
beneath the green stretched tight.
How they blossom into leaves!
The cable stamps a star onto the orange
and aspirates color into the flesh:
at the opposite pole, the nub,
hard, sure, and full, but disconnected,
protruding; nipples that want attention,
want warmth. And where is the tree?
Where are the feeling hands?
A bowl waits patiently, thinking its cold atoms
into alive and receptive, smoothing out its smooth
with the cream of afternoon light.
Pinch the oranges at the green
tips with a burst of fresh.
The bowl breathes in. It awaits.

On the edge of the sticky mohogany
my legs cross underneath, canvas-tipped toes
against the lower rungs of the bar stool.
My pencil skirt is tighter than I wish it,
drawing my attention to the plump filling out
the round of the padded cushion.
Can I get a Tecate?
Tap a silver debit card like dividing up a drug,
Not thinking. The bartender returns,
drink already condensating.
I turn to grab a pen from my purse.
I always have pens:
black pens, red pens, medium, fine-tipped.
My hand stumbles around while my eyes find a vision:
beard in a cardigan, mole on a cheek,
the same square-framed glasses I’d seen years before
reflecting coffee cups and cigarettes
held by shaking hands;
the caffeination and the hours of reading
and correcting, the corrector’s ink
and the suggestor’s script.
Aware of my obtuse stare of being
I grasp a pen and scribble phrases on the tip line,
phrases that animate, phrases that beat
the old “how’ve you been.”
Customer copy crumpled in my pocket,
Tecate holding my place, I shuffle past bodies,
pen poised. I say hi, and dip my BIC
into the inkwell of my youth.

On the edge of the sticky mohogany
my legs cross underneath, canvas-tipped toes
against the lower rungs of the bar stool.
My pencil skirt is tighter than I wish it,
drawing my attention to the plump filling out
the round of the padded cushion.
Can I get a Tecate?
Tapping a silver debit card like dividing up a drug,
Not thinking. The bartender returns,
drink already condensating
I turn to grab a pen from my purse,
I always have pens,
black pens, red pens, medium, fine tipped
My hand stumbles around while my eyes find a vision:
beard in a cardigan, mole on a cheek,
the same square-framed glasses I’d seen years before
reflecting coffee cups and cigarettes
held by shaking hands,
the caffeination and the hours of reading
and correcting, the corrector’s ink
and the suggestor’s script
Aware of my obtuse sense of being
I grasp a pen and scribble phrases on the tip line.

There are days
when a cold wind
blows through the ribs,
on the wind is the past
regrets, failures, missed connections.

The world becomes cold
like a stone at night,
the soul’s feather turns
weakly in the breeze.

For a generation with a short attention span and multiple tabs open on its browser, don’t you think, as far as literature goes, that poetry is the way to go?