They were only missing
a TV, always on and falling
apart in the corner:
antennas and stands
knobs and speakers
picture and brightness
or even the TV itself
just gone.
They never had to think
of the revealed
and empty walls
coming together
signifying nothing.

As they sat in their rented rooms
drinking cold coffee
with jaundiced-faced girls
listening to neighbors cough
eternally between walls and pages,
they were always wrought with meaning,
or meaning about non-meaning.

But never our slow non-meaning
our real unexamined life,
the just getting to work life
the just getting home life
the just trying to shit and gain composure life,
never any of that,
no one would read it.
But as I take out the garbage,
the sun trying to kill me
coming in like hot yellow wax
I need the farmer's sons
the failed priests,
the strangers, the addicts,
the murders of the great novels
walking in torn clothes
burning down the street
wracked with insanity.

Even though gone from importance
they help me to laugh
and keep my hands still.
Then I don't wish to kill
anyone,
myself included,
only to reach out in
to the madness
falling around
like a stupid rain
on a good day.

my face wet and beaten my
shadows are the bruises on your face
my violence is like an eclipse
long, drawn out, then suddenly over
the sun a gleaming knife

I watch your little girl get on the bus and walk
all the way to the back with her eyes
downcast and her head stiff and still as a nailed board
and when the others look back at her
she puts her thin knees together like a prayer.
The silence surrounding her,
scrapes a secret rust from everything.

Death is like that.

She studies her finger tips as if just now
having found them, as if her arms had just sprouted
from her shoulders.
My desire for life as restless
as her hands
which seem to have nowhere to go.
She is a freshone she is.
Fleshtoned and shiny.