The Roses

The roses came,
as if from heaven.
As if to rain down on us
a litany of sweet metaphor.
From the foulest weather,
the sun scowling weakly
behind a curtain of clouds.
There were no tender buds,
no easing of the bloom.
Only deluge, and then
a sudden shock of scarlet
petals on the bush.

Two Suns.

I cannot parse the sad from the lonely.
They wear each other's masks.
Each is a tiny, cold sun,
with its flameless skirt eclipsing.
I wonder if one can be set apart from the other--
if loneliness can be stripped of its
melancholy drapings,
and sadness divested of its own horror.
I wonder if I will ever wake to see
their white faces, palely nodding,
and kiss their cheeks to blushing.
Will I love them dearly, as a part of myself,
as a celebration of the human in me,
of the solitary, the frail.

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My father is not a good man.
So how should I pity him?
As memory, as a mourner
Pities the dead. As something separate,
A discrete sympathy, disjointed from
Personal experience. His parenthood
Purpled but never came to bloom.
Never was that love full and fit to bursting,
Radiating, positively glowing,
Burning like a fire in his gut.
So maybe I should remember him
As a lover remembers affections
Never fully formed; as a promise,
Unuttered, but seriously contemplated.

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The pending inchoate, the nearly complete,
purpling, lips about to part for that first gasp.
Perfect. A perfect job of keeping itself alive.
It doesn’t even have to want to.
The lungs and the heart
and the oxygen coupling and uncoupling in the bloodstream.
Effortless. He grows up and living
proves painful, the very living that was once
too simple, too easily done.
At least his cells are holding up
their end of the bargain.

The Future.

The future exists outside of our bodies,
not like a dream or an unreplicated cell.
The future is a machine, and
what we experience, a product
of all those mechanisms
in collective happening.
No single chord can be plucked out.
Nothing alone can be predicted,
anticipated, observed—
Nothing stands alone, but all things stand,
by nature, divested of themselves.
It is our interest in other things
that forms the basis of human life.
We live by the blood in our veins,
and not for it.

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I sometimes breathe and find the life in me,
a consciousness suddenly wholly present,
drawn up through my core like water through a straw.
I find that I possess every inch of myself
and nearly limitless agency. I can see the future.
The chronology remains a mystery, but its existence is sure.
And my ability, my hands, my mind,
the tendrils with which I reach, wrap, cling
grow outwards, multiplying those connections.
I plunge them faithfully in, bathing in the world,
in its otherness, in its sameness,reflecting
its incongruities.