Level

Everything takes on a significance

draping it like a silk dress

over one shoulder.

 

I like to lie on my back

in the basement and listen

to my wife’s sander, two dumbells over my chest

and a thin fog of dust rolling in.

 

No one is saying

words spherically and intoned

in pink-peach flesh. No one

is speaking in dust wounds.

 

My brother still hasn’t texted me back.

He is maybe at the beach, maybe

begrudging me for my diction.

 

Dream: a surgeon had his hand

in my stomach and I woke up

lying on my own fist.

 

A sander rips by the dark windows until

it is a motorcycle, until it is a day job

with the right benefits,

and then it will swing by again.

 

One astonishing thing:

we were watching that anime Your Name,

filtered our craving to ramen,

ordered on another screen,

and then received and finished the noodles

before the end of the movie.

 

Now that she is my wife in poems

her presence is diminished

and renewed.

 

 

 

Metrics

Rain has hope. It hopes

for more of itself.

Which is reasonable.

 

On my way to the kingdom

of supple-green branches, I ask

What’s the human equivalent

of tree rings? Teeth?

 

Real adulthood is having projects you know

you’ll never do. Real adulthood

is not speculating on real adulthood.

 

In other cultures, a thing is its equivalent.

Wearing a green hat sounds like cuckold

so you only wear it on days you want

your neighbor to eat your wife’s ass.

 

Most music is as boring as oil landscapes,

or if every actor was Tom Hanks.

And yet, my body is full

of carbon-neutral love songs.

It is still humming.