sometimes when there was no one

Homewrecked Friends

I do not like how we will wait
Unpunished, waiting to be punished,
Our awful trailing homes
Freewheeling wreckage in flight
Behind our run.

We will go down, lumber
as drowned soggies.
Like them, those cookie bits that leaped.
We will mush and cluster.
Little light-bearers bearing,
rushing and falling.


Sometimes falling there, when there was
No one, when
Any kind of us could have done
or sparkled out ropes
of camaraderie-
we couldn't.

We bumbled with something uncivilized at the end of the day.
We tucked it under the table.
We congealed, husked words
and sipped.
It was something left for people,
like one damp thing,
Unarmed and shaggy in our layers.

But she, that lady bourgeois,
she gave a left-hand push out the door,
Then where we were,
Our gold polish rubbed,
Dispersed with a rotten time.

Worn, we went out,
Feeding on some
memorial hand that might
make patterns of our soft molds
into uncharged white dust,
Even unloosened by criteria-
The same that eats at you
and all your half-work for the day.
So that you'll feel, guess,
Be unkempt and lousy.

from my chapbook, Payments by Months