this messy house and restless sleep
and hours of staring at tiny bright pixels
flickering and wavering after a while,
this tired sore knee and aching foot
and a combination lock at the gym
growing a thin, stale layer of dust,
this foggy head and tired eyes
and longing looks at a soft black case
that's opened far too rarely,
this dying car and long dead iPod
and all of this entropy collecting
on everything I own and am,

every day a little bit more like a drop in a bowl,
this blood thins and this skin dries
and I ponder with my hands on the keyboard
the next words I will write
and how they could possibly make
all of this
go away

I wrote you this poem with magnetic words on my refrigerator this morning:

friend –
she soars Over mist
the garden rain shines
rose pedals sing her music
in her very be(d) i dream
beauty is you a-live

the rains poured down outside
but I've been dry too long;
a million notes were sounding
but not a single song

She understands but cannot quell
the intense need I have
to stay awake for no other reason
than to delay
the morning.

I returned from Pittsburgh with a book.
When I was 17 and tried to write poems
they came out reeking of immaturity,
but not for lack of trying.
The red book from my freshman year,
from the class I hated, was hiding
in the bottom of a tub of similarly discarded textbooks.
But this one
surfaced.
It's not a textbook, I tell myself,
but a text. I sat nights reading it, not understanding
what sex had to do with petty things,
what a crow had to do with memories. I read it
over and over and tried to copy the style -
the empty flattery of mockery.
It was easy, I concluded, to write poems like he did:
just make a few clever statements,
wrapped in a clever innocuous story. Oh
and don't forget the larger, magnanimous words
that seem to tower above all of the others,
drawing the reader to them like flames.
I never figured out when to start a sentence
in the middle of a line. It seemed random,
like the cut of a fabric or the length of thread.
I hated the class because poetry seemed so trite;
so banal and ridiculous. Something anyone could do
and look back, laughing, at the fools trying to analyze it.
Yet burning hot embarrassment tore through me
as I read about my teenage pain, thinking how my teacher
said there's nothing wrong with therapy but don't ever
compare therapy to poetry. And I traced the lines cut in
awkward places; the flow of words that never made any sense
beyond the present context. I felt those threads I wove
float into my future, land softly as elephants.
You see, I never learned to write poetry like Dunn or, what's worse,
like I always believed I could.
I wanted to keep that secret for myself,
not share that minor intimacy with anyone.
But, see, the teenage boy in me refuses to budge,
still believes he knows the Truth.