revision: moments

ok, so i'm working on this piece... yet again. i finished a draft and was thinking.. yeah... all right.

then i realized that was the cold talking, telling me to go to bed and forget about this writing thing.

i don't like the cold telling me what to do, and i'm not too crazy about settling for something less than what i'm capable of creating. however, the orange juice has run out and so has the nyquil.

so, here's another draft. more work will be done. suggestions, as always are welcome.




We leave these moments unfinished,

like sketches: deep tongue kisses
of graphite stranded like a dead ocean,
sand and heat on bare white paper.

Notice the use of space,

how the contour of a line might suggest
the pink curve of lips caught mid-smile,
breath being drawn into lungs the moment
before a kiss, or a shy bend of linen sheets
half-exposing a tangle of limbs;

how the page begs for color,
the way a grey September morning welcomes
the slow invasion of light, adding color
by degrees, layers of gold and brown and autumn
gathered like leaves ready to burn;

how the small gouges taken from the skin of the page
might remind you of Jackson Pollock, cigarette trembling
in his mouth, paint mixed with shards of glass
tumbling from the open vein of the bucket in his hands,
in the moments before the scrape and the scratch,
the terrible gentleness of the trowel and the knife,
the desperate precision of a derailed train
jumping back on its track—

were you so inclined to think that way,

on a sunday afternoon, in a city named for a state
where the page of the book you were reading
just turned in the breeze, your thumb slipping
into the margin a second too late.