Your dreams hold your days together.
_           _ You spend your time transforming stars into

kitchen implements that you could bake potatoes in.
_           _ Or coming up with one good reason for crying

over dirty socks or falling asleep each night with all
_           _ the lights on in the house. Waking, you can’t help

remembering the first, but not the only, time
_           _ you took off all your clothes and stood there

like a pile of unopened letters. And then
_           _ the kissing would begin; tongues rummaging like hands

through someone else’s desk drawer,
_           _ decoding his system for living. Remembering

those few extra minutes you stayed in the shower––
_           _ because you wanted to. Because it meant something to you.

A woman is wading through the dark rooms
_           _ of her house, each one stagnant and swarming

with loneliness. She wants to say I, but can only say You.
_           _ And a man hates his son’s crooked teeth so much

it hurts: they ring like a fire alarm. Pieces of a shattered
_           _ mirror keep falling in her eyes, she can’t help it.

Come now, the dishes never put themselves away.
_           _ Reapply your eyeliner, pick a fight with a saleslady.

Living is forgetting, blue wings beating against the window,
_           _ portraits through the centuries with every feature

exaggerated. I cry out to the trucks heading South, the shifting clouds,
_           _ anything that moves: I know what it’s like, take me with you.