fragments

____I.

From fairest creatures we desire increase,
That thereby beauty's rose might never die,
But as the riper should by time decease,
His tender heir might bear his memory:
But thou contracted to thine own bright eyes,
Feed'st thy light's flame with self-substantial fuel,
Making a famine where abundance lies,
Thy self thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel:
Thou that art now the world's fresh ornament,
And only herald to the gaudy spring,
Within thine own bud buriest thy content,
And tender churl mak'st waste in niggarding:
Pity the world, or else this glutton be,
To eat the world's due, by the grave and thee.

____Shakespeare, Sonnets





untitled, Brett Walker


i counted, sixteen roses are as sweet as your toes,

and forgetting my age, in class today, i jumped up and down like a bunny rabbit!! like a bunny rabbit!! with three little-people the size of possibility, which is to say: infinitude

while outside and all around and for all time it rains and grows shades of dark and darker(still)
which proves the queer axiom that winter beds do grow larger and lonelier than summer ones,


___(1)
pouring tea after dinner
i suddenly missed Martha's tea.
and the sound of the wind as,
wrapped in blankets,
we sat in silence and
made no-sense of all those things
that are clearest in streetlights' view
(time,
history,
loss,
love,
circumstance)

and finishing my apple,
she doesn't look at me,
but i hear her say:

ok

(and i feel better,
knowing it's ok,
we made it through
another day
longer than the last
longer than the rest)

time to go in.


*___*___*

i close my eyes and mumble to myself the moments i fear i may start to forget soon... on Father's Day, i had Subway with a homeless man named Rolphie, because he approached me (outside) and said: man, can spare some change?, i'm soo hungry
___- i'll tell you what, how about we get you some food, yeah?
___- man, you serious?
___- sure i'm serious, wanna sandwhich?
___- Yes man, you are nice, thankyou!
___- no worries, you'd do it for me.
___- Yes man, yes man, i wasn't always this way, no sir, was not was not always this way
___- i hear you brother, nor was i. ___what's your name?
___- huh?
___- i'm hungry too, mind if i join you?
___- man you serious?
___- if you don't mind, no point us sitting alone at different tables
___- Rolphie. was a veteran, i have the card, let me show you
___- it's ok, i believe you,
___- no no no, i want you to see it it's important you see it, then you know i'm tellin the truth

my hands hurt soo bad. three of my fingers won't really move. my thumb's swollen, cuts across all my fingertips, my palms sore and red and warm. people seem to think it's from removing tiles and scraping cement. i know better. this is what happens when you stop touching people.


___(2) (nocturne)

dear future wife,

dear unbalanced silence,

dear collapsing universe,

dear unfathered children,

dear damaged palm-lines,

dear unfathomable infinity,

dear miscalculated past,

dear myself, called the nicknames only you will think up,

dear untaken breaths,

dear damaged lungs,

dear undisturbed time,

dear alleverything,

sleep softly my dears.
sleep, and let me sleep for once, too.


*___*___*

TITLES &/or FIRST-LINES (for Anjie)

- hello?
- this bastard air of this bastard life,
- (no help from )
- this future's not what i paid for,
- Gossamer
- (and at night, the toxic amber of streetlights hold my hands, leads me out of bed,
- these are not dreams that lead me away, these are not dreams when i drive home
- too late to
- screw up your courage
- (once again)
- and he knew as well as anyone love was all there was worth
- and if you haven't stopped breathing, mumbling fuckfuckfuckfuck quietly to yourself as you reach across for a prayer book, hands trembling and resembling tree-branches, not knowing what else to say.do.be, then you haven't been dead enough to know what life is.
- please?
- the shifting gravity of entangled lips,
- anti-alacrity
- when we lost the keys on our second date, and we walked in the cold and your stilletos probably so uncomfortable and we found them again and accidentally proved a false-axiom: out of tragedy there is great victory, we were led astray, and all our crying afterwards i blame on those bastard keys for showing up.
- catastrophist
- professional people watching, quiet loving, omellette eating, silent seeking q.
- untitled.
- untitled 2.
- fish, curled to suggest: home.
- the misunderwritings of qdudsu hcialme hankotra
- your head, leaning on the taut seatbelt, you slept almost the whole way to seattle, and we drove through the prettiest parts at night, i remember only the moon and the white specks on the black water, the rest of the forrest absorbs everything we throw at it, moonbeams and prayers and middle-of-nowhere-one-in-a-million-please-gods, while you slept i drove almost 22 hours. finally, while you mumbled more nonesense to me, i said: q, it's getting ridiculous now, let's just stop somewhere and sleep for the night, to which you replied: mmm,yeeahh, sure sure, agree... i agree, yyeeahhh___ wwha?
- and nothing is sadder than distance.


i have no idea what i'm writing about.
i'm sorry for wasting all your time(s).