Telefon Tel Aviv you are the worst thing in the world (for me): (nocturne)

i close my eyes and reach out a hand,
stretch an inch farther maybe there's a wisp of hair i can't see in the dark that my fingertips will find,

eyes straining the car moans its way home, my vision's blurred so the yellow green tangerine bright red lights look like planets as i drift through empty narrow spaces between solar systems

and the other side of happiness is

__ (memory twice removed)


i have discovered hollow emotions - inchoate versions, phantasms of the real thing:
all petal and no scent,
i float through fractions of happiness and loneliness and midlightness and lead-heavy-weighted.ness (and grass is what's left of fingertips that stretched too long and found nothing,

besides me a car passes, with a mannequin that stares straight ahead, drifting shadow of a nocturnal bird too high to see, jagged conjunctions of metal and streetlight and heads tilted just off axis to accommodate dreamtime masquerades and one handed driving,

youth has delivered its true crown at last:
(today's whimpering crawl)

and the mannequin, turns its androgynous head and mouths to me: could this be life?,
and i shake my head in return, mouth back (lipped conversations that air can't touch): how would we know?

(what's that remembering the feel of sunlight with your eyes closed at noon?)
(you are the sun, when the sun has gone away)

nighttime. geological forces press against oceans and caverns and solo-manned bedrooms,
static torque and balanced weights too heavy to count: moments that muster their own gravity (stars slow their jog and look back over their shoulder, occasionally reach out a fired wrist

and then there comes no sound,
no motion,
and dreams spill like clownsuits and droplets of wet oil from rainbows,

and tired eyes find graspless places where fatigue makes no sense, and words aren't wasted to attempt to say what skydives forgot to describe:
(far-away a phase-difference is starting to practice it's artful machination

i have to dance my stone back into beating

________________________(save the last chance for me