My daughter backs into the neighbor's car–
confesses over a coffee table of water stains and smoke
thick like a 90s beer pub. She gets off easy. She doesn’t know
what she doesn’t know.
An asylum in a mad city, Bedlam begins
in a town ditch with eleven chain,
six locks, four manacles, and two stocks,
to guard (or guard against) the menti capti,
whose minds lay tangled in a landscaped
brain. Mary’s blue robe the only sky
for inmates;
How it just happens that we all have someone to make a blue tarpaulin memory with.
Even if you find them many years later and many miles away, There is a spot on this Bombay Chowpatty Where the sea is so close to you.
But I like my own bed best,
she says, and the quiet in mornings,
when I scatter seed for the birds,
the quiet in evenings, not at all.
That's when you should call.
Do they make the cut, or are they too inconvenient? What about rain? and never will, dismembering or in many different lights, Something huge and without music has just happened.
Jars of stunted-self languish there still,
in the half light. Stacked fat slices
of summer pear. Peeled, cleft and
without mouths, they kiss up
against the glass.
And my father angry at
traffic, always. Still they are driving
on the screen past midnight. Sometimes
we would arrive in the dark, my grandmother
in the kitchen waiting.
I mean this to say: my sons will not put their hands on people
who have not asked for their hands—like in a community pool
when a girl is fourteen and had not seen this boy since 6th grade;
Bred in the wild wild tropicanas
outcropper from fecund alleys of hortigunculturists
Hit the road jackfruit and don’t call me
pumpkin he says spitting nectar on the Konkan
This was in the late morning, Sun.
You threw down the heat there too.
We took the cloud of blackbirds as a sign and got moving,
but Colleen didn’t like the quiet.
I slipped a dream or two between pages 102 and 103 of the handsome volume of poems on my bedside table. Like you would a leaf. The one collected from the pile under the Oak’s shadow.
The cold rain at 2 a.m. beats against America,
and by then you had already left.
A ghost, two clowns
will dance on the ceiling until
the sky turns grey-white.
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