will i question every answer?

I cannot write a manifesto
Nor type a holy book.
All my thoughts are doubt. I don’t even trust the sky
Or the soft engine of my heart, or these words,
Or that written somewhere in the Milky Way is even one
Objective truth. Sometimes certainty slips through my pores
For a moment, and fills my skin with its tangerine presence,
But that bright whisper never comes when my fickle heart
Feels full of rain and I ask with my eyes and the line that runs
Between my nose and the corner of my mouth how I should live,
What good a person like me could ever do. What good?
No, my absolutes are less useful by far:

Silver is always beautiful.
The tide is important.
The sea can swallow me like a little yellow pill.
It is sad when birds fly into windows.
I like eggs, unless they’re philosophical
Or fertilized. It’s that simple.
My constituent atoms will go on to better things
One day. All things, in fact. Someday
We’re all going to die. I think. Perhaps.
Maybe. You see? I’m no authority. But I do know
That limes prevent scurvy, that they are sour
And green, small and solid in the hand.
I love the smell of fresh, unscented soap.
It is better to sing than not to sing.
Hair can be cut off painlessly,
Unlike most other attachments.
The wind against my scalp, I know,
Is soft and cold, like a drowned girl’s kiss.
True things are slippery in my arms, reluctant
To be cradled.

And my fingers refuse to cling.
They slide from my grasp more easily than split seconds.
I don’t know where they go, and I suppose it doesn’t matter
How they spend their days away,
Whether they ever slink back in to return the keys,
Put their feet up between my memory and my suspicions,
Watch confused dreams whirr behind my eyes and teeth.
I can’t stand up on an overturned wooden crate and shout
To all creation that humans are very small compared to the cosmos,
That to look at the wings of fruit bats or to imagine the wild orchards
In Kazakhstan, with apples in every shape and size you can imagine
Makes me feel as though my very marrow
Is blossoming. Bone petals. Bone flowers. I can’t write
On a sandwich board that complimentary socks are as good as
Or better than a perfect match. I cannot write a manifesto
When I have no passion but everything I see, unless, of course,
I deny that, too.

things that go bump in the night

Sometimes I used to,
sleepwalking,
tripping out of bed,
opening windows, pushing screens
from their moorings, letting white moths
come in, and mosquitoes. I'd wake curled
in the closet, the pattern of the rug stung
into the skin of my face, my spine cramped,
my fingers bitten.

Vampires, of course, but only
on purpose, when they want to scare you.
They're too graceful to trip,
and can fly, besides. You have to let them in,
but they can look like bats, or friends, or white moths
so you won't know what they are until it's too late.
And they have hypnotic voices, besides, and mesmerizing
eyes. It's not a rule that can keep you safe.

But vampires
are so trendy these days. They're not scary
like they used to be. They play in punk rock bands.
They worry about their love lives.
They go to fifth period geometry
and doodle human circulatory systems and pierced hearts
in the margins of their black notebooks.
They live in apartments.
They wear silk.
They pour your coffee at diners.
Their fingernails are clean.
Vampires don't mean unbridled,
unrestrained, unapologetic, all-encompassing
hunger
anymore. We have zombies for that, now.
We make new monsters.
I suck the blood from my own fingertips
and I sleep on my back till the windows leak light.



(for Sunday Scribblings.)