CAFFEINE

I drink this coffee, ejecting caffeine into veins.
    I am not you, but I am some equivalent,
naked as the day, palpable exactly, recall
            
In a dream
surging through the mind’s shuttlecock,
this coffee instructs, I take my cape
     & wad it into a ball, throw it as high as I am able,
        decoding the air,
    stomach growling like Raskolnikov’s (recall)—

   body
    as dirty as Wellingborough streets,
& today there are people
walking those streets, dirtying themselves,
looking for a carnival ride, looking to disarm
& soak themselves in a feel-good moment,
    regardless of dehydration, sickliness . . .

With precision, I peeled your flowers’ petals
as thin as stigmatism.
            When it comes to love,
I am as blind as night. Mindless
onrush—menopause or men-that-pause?

I am paused. I remain in this skeptical spectacle
position, sipping this slowly cooling coffee,
    mid-afternoon approaching,
needles lost in hay,
a king’s burning crown trailing the queen—

    staggered as from a physical impact,
the total momentum at the beginning
shedding the worst impressions,   
    held captive by my own
noticeable lack of a throbbing Belonging.

MY NEIGHBOR

If Rachmaninoff had of been my neighbor

       I would have been invaded upon like a ruinous

Emperor, except that the mending of my pains

       would come with a series of firsts: Music,

beginning, with a heightened awareness of sound

       (—what L. Bernstein said was like a spasm

in the middle of his mind—) would shovel down

       into me, pull out the clamouring doorbells

from my loneliness, & Sergei, next door,

       magisterially cutting incisions into particulars—

my ears like climbing roses upon melodic

       trellises, transfiguring my weaknesses—

Adagios heavy in the beat of my heartricity,

       like walking heavy in shallow sea-sand,

consuming one’s body.

If Rachmaninoff had of been my neighbor,

       unquenchable sound would tap upon the

windowpanes, becoming petroglyphs—

       a new vocabulary—as rhapsodic as his love

for Natalia Alexandrovna Satin. Satin, silk,

       exhibited: evidence of my sashaying,

mimicking sound, ventriloquisms tanked full—

       his bittersweet symphonies keeping the fireplace

lit in the Winter. In Spring, flowers blooming

       by sound alone, on-stage in their opening,

further furnishing tones, fecund. Then, to open

       the doors wide—the windows salted of melody—

standing, listening to the music tasting the flavors

       with my mouth wide open; my heart seemingly

multiplying, sweetened by the recursivity

       of the dissonances that vocally branch through

the air’s unseen monocle, refracting the unthinkable.