It's Okay to Be a Blake

The garden doesn’t feel better when I’m in it

The garden doesn’t feel at all

But it overgrows, thorns get dew-wet, sunrise, sunset

It feels whole it feels important it feels like dawn all day

Love is not wishing it'll wilt when I'm gone,
Taking it in without taking it away.

Cardboard

Clarity surfaces and sinks

When the moon is behind the clouds it is fine.

When the moon is behind the earth it is fine.

When the moon is behind me it is fine.
I can see my friends
I can't see past my eyes.
Summer days are nose pressed against the red gallery pastels
Hot palms
interlocked tomato brains
roasting sweating buildings blinking
window

The town inhales 

monthly sifts and settles

VR mimics the retina.

Sinking

Every week we look forward to the weekend
Every year we look forward to Christmas
Can't I extract myself from this rhythm?
I know Saturdays can be bad.
Christmas isn't as exciting on Christmas.
Don't make me such a stranger,
Didn't we lock eyes during rush hour?
Make our silent alliance in the hum of the race?
Trust me in my acceleration.
I'll always be looking back, or at least around
It's only water for everyone else.
I unwrap eternally,
peeling back the pattern,
aware that it's already over.
I live impatiently, to see what's inside

TV/Radio

I love the idea of life, but
Buying scratch-offs and losing them with the change made from the broken twenty that bought the scratch-off are some of the things people do every day,
Some people do, some days,
Preserve the time in tile floors
Who will flatten our world?
Who will jump into the sky and render us a moving picture?
We did it to Lucy, and Al Roker,
What can you do.
Are you a communist too?
There's a fireside chat inside my melting head,
I and I and I sit around after dinner,
Mute to the control booth,
Picking up the signals,
Scratching off tickets with our teeth in this anarchist state

I know how you like to adjust the center of your universe

All those suns are still out there

Spinning, cold, nauseous

Work

There is fruit to eat, where death is
Death is a place outside a county
Death is a person without a community
Death is clean dirt.
I worry that it is an escape
I want to exit without entering
I want to leave without coming
I want to cease
Thank god I'm afraid I wouldn't

sitting across from you bored sipping water while the gray light slants through the blinds makes the blinds look gray we fuck so good

resting on couches for five more minutes knowing we could’ve done better why is our house so big, our carpet ruins the family room knowing this was the best we could do

knowing we just made it out alive made it slithering through the hangman’s knot and the meat grinder and the office supply store clerk who knew

we were postmodern freaks imbibing theologies we wished were inherent how do we still live in this town

the silence at dinner holds us I wash the dishes and immediately set the table for tomorrow night so I don’t have to do it tomorrow night tomorrow night I have to send in the bills

the orgasms are empty, pure, chemical, fleshy, exactly what they are

our alarm clock plays the radio

i wake up to the nightmare I fantasized about

and you’re worth it

They made you old

Oiled the hinges of my bedroom door

Put the green towel by the sink

Moved the bowls

These silent mechanics

Their implied goodbyes

Net

Every time I see a spider

I worry briefly that I’m a fly

I wonder if the flies are afraid

I wonder why I’m afraid

I wonder how something with wings falls prey to something without them

I worry deeply about this

I wonder which would be worse:

One thousand of them in an

Entrapment so small they would blanket me certainly or

A pitch black enclosure so big I’d never know when one was near

Icon

I’ve been the reason for ample art

Very little though, relative to Marilyn Monroe

Maybe I’ll be famous for sleeping with famous people

For being the muse for famous songs and famous poems

Because art only emerges from brevity

Mine is too brilliant to capture,

That’s my excuse

I’d rather be no one but a little picture in your bedside dresser

I wish the poems stayed in a little book hidden away

When someone uses you as a channel, you copy

Even more when they realize their creation is neither you nor they

Since there is no we, it becomes confetti

On the table at a lawn party

Something insignificant

Something memorable