WEEKEND GLIMPSES

Business venture: Heironymus Bosch's Burlesque. Who's with me?

me: you know what's the best ars poetica?
him: what?
me: people.
him: people. i guess they make a pretty good ars poetica but i don't know that they're the best.
(silence. i try to make out his expression in the dark.)
him: i'm sorry. that sounded mean. people---i like it. i do. it's so simple.
me: you kiss like a poem

Friday night: I-and-three-others jumped a fence, scaled a wall and wandered into the as-yet-unfinished skeleton of the new dormitory on campus. The paint was cloudy, the fine wood-dust unswept and blanketting the halls like ash like snow like the stuff of salt flats. Only some rooms were lit--it was a veritable labyrinth of a place. The strangest part was that the power boxes were all exposed with the words BRIGHT FUTURE spraypainted in yellow on the front. So as we walked the halls, it was just a receding horizon-line of totems promising BRIGHT FUTURE BRIGHT FUTURE bright future. Made me feel remote. I pretended the winding halls were nervous pathways, that we ourselves were nerves traveling electric. Lately I'm all impulse. Then again, everything is.

Different night, different boy: Joe tried to teach me how to waltz in the alleyway while the party raged on inside. Beauty of squares and synchronized steps. He told me that God works in three-quarters time. His gaze was so intentional I had to look away.

My band's next act of meaningful vandalism: we are going to make murals in the parking decks with sidewalk chalk. I am going to draw an L in front of all the ONLY turn symbols on the ground. So that drivers will see the truth as they descend down the ramps: LONLY, LONLY, LONLY.

Forget standard seasons. You know it is summer in the South when the mosquitos take over. Little vampires.

Also if you have never pied your best friend on her birthday, well, you should.

As for Saturday night/Sunday morning:

I rearranged him into a poem with ease.

Scar shaped like a sickle. Mannerist hands&feet.

A boy in the act of disappearing.

What to do. What to do. What to do.

What kissing What roughness What.

Imagine a boy turning to you in bed and saying, "I am not to be trusted."
What game of Cowboys and Indians and Poets is this?

BONES née STONES

I suppose I could write a poem
all about this boy i feel some kind of affinity toward.
But
I'd rather write a myth.

The one where Deucalion makes men out of stones.

The one where constellations are ladders between the upper and lower worlds.

The one where _ _ _ _ and I are standing in the Museum of Natural History, peering into an antique cupboard with blacklit geodes and unfamiliar, glowing rocks.

The one where I say Look, pointing to the back of the cupboard where we are reflected thanks to accidents of glass and light, and then there's us.

To which he winces and backs away, saying,
Never look at your reflection when someone tells you to.
That's the fifth rule of going into hiding.

(This boy who won't even allow his picture to be taken,
because he thinks it will make it impossible for him to disappear.)

I would write a poem
but
none of it really matters,
not with the weight
of shared silence
and fossils neatly shelved.
Stone creeping back into bone
despite Pyrrha's best efforts:
the impossible return---
the question of ever being a child again.

We're just two people sharing the arcane. Now what?