Fans Don't Cool


Hot night I sit on sweat
breathing cigarette smoke
that wafts from the ground
floor like fog across rocks.

My mind is hot split in, too
often revisited complaints
of he who does not listen
to reason or facsimilic truth.

The whir of the fan dulls
all sound from the street.
I do not hear the smoker cough
up the years he drags out.

The air moved into the room
is wet and full of the still
atmosphere that preexists
the storm that is sure to come.

I wipe the moist pebbles
off my brow and wipe my leg.
I will surely die second hand
stuck to my fretted glow.

the box


An inheritance
arrived in a box,
thousands of letters
and photographs
too heavy to carry.
In his journal
I was in third person.

He drank
himself to death
found days after
his heart exploded.

Then,
I did not
warn him
of his indulgence
blind to influence
to make a difference.

We were young, love
came like quicksilver:
willful      fragile.
We spent time,
his other time
wasted.

She calls every night
I am the connection
to a dead son:
did the box arrive, dear?
I don’t pick up, how
she never called him.

Now,
he stands in the corner
watching my sleep
safe from his demons
I suspect.


revised from an earlier version