Two Poems (June 20, 2009. Issue 6.)

Armchair unbuckled straightjacket

When I gather in a mass of my peers,
I am a choke chain tethered magpie in a salt razed corn field,
I take small strides and try to avoid stairwells.

When I sit alone,
I am a carbonized thought process,
I story tell, dictate, and catalog.

In the blend-between is a blissful clumsy robot,
A man mostly better for the wear,
Browed with a boasting pride of the pressure.

She Came To Me

She came to me with a still born pause perched between
her hard palate and tongue,
Words that internalized a scream for help but in translation came
as noticeable silence among prattle.
I found myself looking into the routed canyon wells of her eyes,
I did not want to be her friend.
With her friendship would come the stories of losses and gains
that evened out to amount to "the reason".
I did not know; did not care to know
Trying to avoid the tells of the emotional mask of her profile,
My mind took her down to the lowest common denominator,
Her legs,
The meat of her hips,
Trying to asses her bra size,
"36C, no probably a D"

Internal dialogue interrupted by reality,
Short shallow breaths like a child crying in a closet,
This was her trained natural aspiration,
Framing the breasts that I was too closely using for distraction.

It was time to look away, completely away,
Turn around,
Go anywhere I had not intended
Anywhere but inside of her head,
Get on the wrong bus, walk in front of a bus,
Escape.

She was coming toward me, and more importantly now, TO me
Anticipatory pressure of mutual fear
and the need we have for our connection,

Here she stands,
Prostrate to me,
Man.
Nickname of the establishment,
Famed in the bible,
Brother in kind of the one who made her,
as well as the one she let remake her,
Her mouth opens, and I ready myself for her story,
"What’s today's date?" she mumbles.

"I do not know" I answer in the universal tone to clue her
that there is more to my answer,

She judges me by my response as just another who can't do anything
to lift her off the ground.

A heavy hand had chipped away the possibility
of rousing her with nuance or subtlety

She recoils when I half step toward her,
I am not the touchy kind of person,
And still I took her hand.

"I don't know what day it is. I don't care what day it is,
neither should you"

I would not look deep enough to see if I had gotten through,
The reality of this metropolitan medusa moment too heavy as it was.

Laying awake hours afterward,
Did I say all I could in the one
or two sentences I knew I would have with her?
The drawback of wanting to fix what you don't want to know is broken.