shawn.me

Donald’s sneakers
on the subway floor
affirming his existence

Another boy
waves at a cockroach

It’s been his show all night -
the man who can talk as long as you want
on any subject you choose:

Driving. He laughs inappropriately
telling about the woman killed in her car
by a single falling rock.

He makes me think of the blind man
I know who is happily blind,
who is happily going deaf -

a former lifeguard,
finished with the cries of the drowning,
the grateful embraces of those revived

by strange wet lungfulls of his vocation,
conveyed by something more -
and also less – than a kiss.

Driving home I listen to the DJ making jokes
about the sudden death of the comedian
everyone knows he loved,

whose body stayed behind the wheel,
whose head landed on the golf green.
The jokes are obvious.

Sometimes we laugh because we’ve been pulled
from the swirling darkness
by the very fact that we simply feel

something.

And we greet the suddenness of it
like the grip of the lifeguard’s hand,
like a tired hungry swimmer greets the shore:

laughing.

Sometimes we only feel our way along
picking raspberries by moonlight
and intuition

without a need to see
or understand
why we are suddenly as unmade
as your bed and shadeless lamp.

We reach inside each other in the dark
for fruit, or something permanent.

Sometimes I imagine
your belly stretched -
womb full of twins,
or one held in each arm,
delicate as old photographs.

With similar delicacy
I remove a moth from my hair
and smell my fingers -
the odor of rust
and corruption

my struggle to
connect unconnected
thoughts in
direct contrast to
the stones in your earrings
that are millions of years old

We reach inside each other in the dark;
then in the kitchen’s dim fluorescent light
we try our best to hide our fruit-stained hands.