Prescription Poem

Like a gun, a friend, a want. Like a shy little plant, momenting around, little snows, et cetering along the paths of the world. We are together for this crunch, this last ditch in historical time. We will crack this poem to exhaustion. We hold, we sleight of hand things to each other, miracle of silence. You know that train, that distant bellowing, that echo when it rains and you are alone in your head, no matter who is in your bed. You won’t be fine, humans. You won’t be. It doesn’t bend towards anything. So you have to be the grass. You have to be the fire and the bucket, and the broom. Sitting there in quiet shades of meditation, you can’t waste time. It’s fine if you sit there, but you better be in your head, brother. I’m here too and we mean like we have something. Yeah, but it’s outside. No way to rattle this cage, no way to stand in for someone else. We are the time to say something that rubs us. We are the time to roll the murk. We are the time to shoulder the bombs. This is the project, watching bombs and watching joy. I am in it and why shouldn’t I be? That last question was for someone without my long-standing sense that I have something to say. I mean, do I? Look at the lighthouse on yon hill. It formalizes space, just as you have formalized your thoughts the way you read these words. The lines, the rickety way your thought ticks in and out between the words, like shiny shells, translucent in your cold fingers, little grains of sand sticking to the sea water there, green and black. Sun, you might as well show it when you show up: your smile despite the collapse of our grand democracy, the body. Body is a body for so many fools, and so many fools we love. So we love our bodies and the oceans rise to greet us, our wisps of hair pixelated in the overbeating sun. Your gathering dust messes with us, we are just a little dance of matter, making believe we fit. But we are just the movement, only shifts from stillness, but not the thing that moves. That’s the paradox: we call it a thing but it’s just the absence of a blankness. If that’s the case, you can only touch what is already gone. So might as well walk down to the stand of trees and go, like, really go, into your stillness, to see what falls out of it, like ashes from a summer fire, warm on the beach. You try to cap the moment with a thought of beauty: wide eyes of happy child, vines along a seawall…but et cetera, as you see.  And you cheapen it when you try to circle the stillness back around to signs. Best to leave them unattended, and just tend to the cool pool, the whatever, the tug of more quiet. It’s there for anyone, you know. And since the undoing has to be a part of the doing, you might as well be the one. Look at the lines on your hand, leading you to the breeze coming through your screen. It’s not a song for springtime, or anything, or nourishing exhibitions of night affections. Take the shelves down, leave the books, the knickknacks, and try not to harangue yourself with this prescription poem. It won’t find you if you don’t stop. So just stop. Just get down. Open whatever is in your hands, and stop. It has to be this way, with you as the you of this broken poem. And you the speaker too. Otherwise there’s no in-between for us. Otherwise the windows are the cracks. And that could be the best story anyway.