Human Lot

Later we could go back and cross things out,

that way we wouldn’t know where we came from,

the shapes we asked to be bent into.

Sinatra’d be okay again,

mother the same distal approximation,

the sea still trying to spit it out.

Sometimes your sleep is different than mine.

I can’t catch up.

I don’t know—there are voices tangled outside.

Wind wants to make me correct something,

the refrigerator says something needs to be pushed

further from the sun.

Out where the sunset ends, they’ve installed a graveyard

and where it rises, some automatons bash together

mellifluous metal tubing

imparting a festive contusion

to the usual calm disaster of getting out of bed.

To find out why life has this glass sparkle

at the end of a dark hall.

To find out why the paper skeleton holds its hands

demurely over its crotch. Did it fall that way?

To find out how we fell.

There is a name to wake into and music to sleep through.

To find out where the blood comes from on the towels.

Old friends, I believe your betrayals were inadvertent.

To find out if my heart is unruined.

Father, are you out there

or was your corpse accurate?

that I don’t want to happen again

but I remember the first smell of ocean

when the family got out of the car in Jersey

to buy peaches. Spark thrust, spark dust.