(cliche and some work that needs to be done. satisfied with it for a first draft)

walking through spider webs and the big arachnids,
not the small ones, but the ones with the egg-
sacs
and the eighteen eyes and an arbiter’s touch
for death.
but mostly ice cream trucks
and walking alone from my car at dark and the legions
of zombies and bad men with no smile and no
human sympathy, and humans,
losing
my cell phone or worse
breaking it, or breaking
anything that has more value than i do
fingers to work them back into shape
and and and
losing that single thought in the
half haze between sleep and wake,
or worse, the thought come to life and towering
over my paralyzed bed dark shades sharp shapes
(but those ive come to accept, really, and are
perhaps not so much a fear
as a perpetual state, an adrenaline
anxiety quickly forgotten)
alex dying in a car crash
alex
dying from nuclear fallout
alex dying
or me getting so high that my throat contracts
i forget to breathe biology is a fickle bitch and
it turns out i’m wrong about
everything
and there is an afterlife and it’s only defined by the
constant shifting of conscious and focus and the darkness
is really the brown pattern of pixels when your retina
misfires at random because
nobody likes to be alone,
my mother dying
my mother living
or watching her thump around like a
ghost wailing and wishing
for more than memories and electrons,
ghosts, the bang bang between my walls that
may not be the
neighbors fucking or the
pipes, the pipes bursting
and the creep of mold down the walls
and the long tendrils snaking in my mouth,
the penicillin, the past stale bread,
swelling up red and black and blue
skin pinching in little angry volcanoes,
and the fact that maybe there are ground up
hamster bones in jell-o and even though
i don’t even like hamsters
those small curving teeth and paper smell
i can’t justify the jiggle when i
imagine the
crushed marrow
everything ossified,
or the possibility that
we’re living on
an event horizon
and physics is all wrong,
and everything is all wrong and that
the reason I have vivid
dreams is not too much caffeine
but the because it is the real reality and
reality is filled with
scaffold moons and unsuspecting fountains
a green light before a shooting start
invoking paralysis women throwing
dishes while we skitter past fences and
bulldogs in the rented bodies of
spiders and my baby sister has
become a cupcake I’ve dropped and her
pink frosting stains my new carpet
and the fear never comes but is foreshadowed
unendingly alluded to and being run from
until i am suddenly dreaming
and dream-reality is my
now reality and only
occasionally the car crash and
metal magnetized meeting concrete or
the break up
or the late wake-up for an exam.

VI.

The harmonic convergence of disaster.
You wouldn’t show the new map of your system,
but I imagined the cluster of burning cells,
aberrant nebulae spanning the horizon of your lungs.

III.

It felt like the moment of takeoff, when the pressure
collapsed you against your seat and sent you spinning
into nausea. Your eyes, fixed only on the full moon
face of the toilet bowl.

II.

You, dark star, the gravity of your swelling belly
catching the chemo crew in your orbit.

I.

Hospice workers like fortune tellers reading off EKGs
as star charts: two weeks, five days, twenty-four hours.

…

Amidst the vacuum of your room, the echo of your wheezing
pull on the oxygen tank: astronaut torn from the mothership
drifting into the vast dark of space.

(For CRW 3310, Fall)

[first draft.]

We must be the only,
omniscient and looking down at the sky.
Clenching each bit of spongy blue in our jaws,
we spit it out and it is good,
each path moved at our will.

If we hear the rumblings of distant gods,
they are ignored or imagined: In the beginning,
we lifted out crumpled dead to the edge of the universe.
Nothing takes them away from us, so, turning from silence,
we leave the departed and return to our creation.

Can I take poetry from this? Is it merely a consequence?

Mostly smoke in the moment,
but somewhere, I can tell
there’s a bit of burning cherry, and past that,
the dim-lit profile of your sturdy hands.

or at least not well enough to fully fracture.
The nurse split the curtains.
Maybe the magnet of consequence hadn’t been jostled
when the pavement drew close to him,
or the paramedics clustered tightly around,
or when he’d set the bed in a ruckus,
offended the sheets until
they wouldn’t let go, and the IVs had joined,
clenching around his arm and pulling back.

Even us, watching the nurse
wash blood away from his hair,
could not resist leaning in to the chasm that opened,
gaping across the back of his skull,
black and willing to let anything tip in.