Isn't That a Cold Peace

death
has put his hand on my shoulder
to calm me
and i am.
i just wonder
if i am an aside,
and for how long
his travels have brought him

Where the Dust Settles

While he sits, he notices the cabin does not work well in all it does.  Its seal, if ever intact, is long broken.  The little house breaths with the outside.  The east window leaks, sweating cold into his refuge.  A slow creep of moisture steals between the panes.  But the place is not broken.  It's got cracked skin and a rickety heart, like lots of the old things we love.

The Good We Can Sense (Slam Revision)

Middle school hung a steel box from the bottom of my sister's chin,
so that she'd feel rejection twist and drift from her bones
every time that motherfucker swings.

The door to the box is itself littered
with the postmark of passing rejections
the graffitii of young gangs that roam these hallways
and tag what they can with the swift tongue scribble whips
of the hate they learned from their elders

Exit the Swamp

at the city center in your brain
is a hole,
a myring, swampy stillness knotting tepid life to reason for it,
next to the headwaters of a stagnant river called Easy Commiseration,
fed by a drift of ditch streams, callow mistaken for simple

that black vacuum there brings the world in to sit down
to placate and forget but mostly to stay seated, dusting over
quieter all the time.