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The Predicament
This predicate retrieves the equidistant object of the desired-too-much and the desired-not-enough.
This predicate prefers to be proportionately self-absorbed, like the pirouette of disrobing on the flattened top of a boulder, alongside a higher, more rounded rock. In an hour, the overshadowing cavorts.
This predicate would prefer another name, something more casual, but not too intimate.
This predicate deflects the smeared continuity of arousal and its drowsy tenderness.
Why should it not be yours? All yours until you need some other predicate’s gush of delicate floating.
This predicate is working on a memoir, “How to Seduce a Naïve Gerund.”
This predicate promises to remove any obstacle between you and the lineaments of its delayed gratification.
This predicate (dis)closes the source of pleasure’s stem.
This reticent predicate hides behind the mirror of adversity, a crevice in pink stone that cannot be quarried, but must be inserted intact.
Such are the lives of this predicate, more unpredictable than the oscillation of happiness.
I knew that might make you smile, but I said it anyway.
This predicate emulsifies the yellow oval dot behind the dotted “i.”
This predicate says the subject takes itself too seriously, and hauls bottles and cardboard to a recycling center operated by delusional cartoon characters.
This predicate calls in sick and spends the day reading its best friend’s blog.
That’s harder to do than the ambidexterity of ignition’s zig-zag is willing to concede.
This predicate draws a circle around its favorite vowel and colors in the thrill.
“I prefer the names of things and places to people,” this predicate whispers to itself.
This predicate hums the melody to “The Way You Make Me Feel” about the syntax of the predicate before, the predicate to come.
The first of the many tasks remaining to be done: create dip.
Music: Trad. Piece.
Each predicate comes with its own insurance policy, underwritten by a certified expert in the mortality tables of the ephemeral.
This predicate enjoys its liabilities: integrity fascinates only in the aggregate.
Anything less is symbolic logic working on a cold case of origins.
Eight hundred trillion years ago, keeping universes far apart seemed to be no problem. Ten billion universes at a minimum, each out of the other’s visibility.
This predicate fell asleep at the control panels.
Six billion years ago, the contact between two universes – startled at the ecstasy of each other’s rims -- ejected the predicament in which this universe is only curious about the lugubrious odds of its own solitude.
The total predicate cannot be calculated, only savored:
The past perfect’s tinge of orange within violet;
The future pluperfect’s lunge of green shimmering out of an ultramarine labyrinth.
The present blackness swallowed whole.
July 28 – July 29, 2019
Turn Lane
As I drive to work, I see a woman in the left-hand turn lane begin to sob with her head in the palms of her hands. She leans against the steering wheel. The child in the back seat appears to be asleep. The traffic light is red for both of us, so I can let her grieve whatever it is that has stunned her. Her arrow turns green, though, and just as I’m about to tap my horn the briefest increment so that she is spared the impatience of drivers behind her, she glances up and raises her fist with a knife of tears.
Breaking Camp
“Watch out,” I yell, but the garage door’s paneled slats
glide up and break my sister’s hand. So much for her
being able to clean out what our mother doesn’t want
any of her six children to touch. Hand healed, she returns
to her dying husband, and doesn’t get to see the tent
my brother and I pull down from the rafters,
a half-century of dust smudging the olive canvas.
All eight of us were once small enough to coil
in it, snug in the helix of a labyrinth, each enameled
with a peculiar warp that leaves us unrecognizable
around the sullen embers of twilight’s genealogy.
Morning Wood
Her forefinger and thumb
rub and pinch his nipples
as if they were parade ground
bargaining chips. Please,
he begs, let me give suck.
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