I don’t know how to melt
so float away from those I love

Tell the sky it chains us to
the flight’s duration

Each curse in the bus’s wheel
A parking lot line

The spell of terminal space
A heavily bagged eye

How a month can be a mouth
Beginning to slow

Any decade an eraser

But this one wipes clean
the written cut between days

*
I’m sick of smelling
my own breath

The mask sends
it back in pulses

Any worry moves
inside like a drum

First in the chest
then everywhere else

A felt thump

I swear the smallest
incoherent stain

could signal a type
of rounded end

The warp and weft
in a timeline

The time between two
waves goodbye

*
I can’t see the bedfellows bellow

A nod to the turbine and what cracks each bird
A little pepper for the formula

Crows in the corn white
I track the edge of

This quiet wide
as a river we ride into winter

If you save the enthusiastic pains
The body can be a blownabout

thing a boomerang
I ask what separates us

from the felt reception of love
any frequency so many waves

mind being passed or herded
back to the thrum of shore

so frequently
when we try

to end our waking
talk among one

of the many rows
dug in each snowfield

Our specks trace the ledgelike
shadows just so

*
I can’t comment further in this end time
but commit myself to middlesome effort

*
And the guitar strings break
And we are merry in the slop of our songs

And they repeat with the middle parts missing
And it may be hard to be alive only this once

And the spilled beans amount to less than their hills
And we carry our animal bodies into the fire

And they were meant to burn
And burn against the anythinged backdrop