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Is the newness of unused pillows wrapped in plastic
symbol for a good future, are they
hopeful instruments stacked like unwanted days, weeks, years
pass, increasingly
there’s no room for us to stay
because the fantasy of what’s to come
is more important than us being together in the present
I want to kill the messiah you’ve been using like a dildo
The ultimate suck of symbol.
◊
New pillows wrapped in plastic, what makes it new
is that they were bought and brought home and never used
Making it perpetually new it’s in the faith
for eternity that we can not
sleep comfortably, it lies in the reckless aggregate
as a result of choices
we thought were our own gates to walk through.
◊
How many canvas bags from get-rich-quick conferences at Holiday Inns
now used to store bingo ink dabbers
A childhood dotted
with blurry pink red blue green
smudges on your hands and forearms
and the rosary beads I don’t have
the strength to compartmentalize
the difference or to frame it
◊
The air makes it difficult to see the difference between light and not light
And to break the spell I repeat mother’s name
quietly from inside extending backwards, generational somersaults
from birth chart to desert climate to tropical soil
Lillian Lillian Lillian, demons surround eating you
from between decades of hoarded things
in this house in this moth-eaten space
that was once a suburban crisis heterotopia
for the abandoned and unloved
