Caleb Nelson

when i move away from here you’ll see how much i wanted
to move away from here but really you probably won’t
notice at all

so much for the untethered mouth a ridiculous
mound of purple cloth you’re what’s wrong with my
life today i would like to see you drip from my fingers
like foam

what else for the people conveniently absorbed in water
ten years you studied me hoped i would slowly become
abstract like a noun how many times do i have to tell you
i’m not succubus sucking at the dark

your casual reasoning isn’t this songbird of night
the progenitor of duplicitous dreams hollow bones
any path of false being that makes you want to scream
i say join the crackling in the clavicle

here some empty lines of living how miraculous
i had the weirdest dream where you stopped talking
so much listen very quietly you can hear someone
playing rachmaninoff i still just want to be myself

i want to be the person who got out of the car
that morning didn’t say a word got on the plane
went to Georgia did what needed to be done
but i fucked that up too didn’t i

the ongoing particles of light in my sock drawer

my mother reaches out through the darkness of ivy

over the eaves my father moves from party
to party in the lavender dusk

perhaps
it is no good to use a spatula
for mending

the point is not whether or not
you live for ten thousand years

if i go upstairs it will mean two things:
the sun is strapped to my feet

or the locket she wore was tiny
black like an iris

i can lie about the wind fairness food
i know how to be useless among the populations

as it turns out
i am not brokenness i can survive in the shame

that clarity brings

over Chicago the maples the exhibitionists they
all float like glass eventually it will be summer

again and you will still hate parties and pirates
but this is no place to assemble your eyelids

in secret
in this kettle-happy-world

even now for my parents
time whirls beneath me

like an animal i cannot
control a bloody
claw cutting me down

Notes on a Movement of Clouds

We walked the venues, watched the stars, a lovely virtual
ritual. You can’t blame prisms of rain for what does
not belong to you. Then, the silky air synched me up
in the agony of speech. You left without noticing
the sky, the clouds, some mixture of afterlife and alibi.
If you say so. Thought dissolves my teeth, these
insidious articulations. I once saw a guy joyfucking down
the processions of labor. Early integers fell into this green
gravity, delirious and clean. A communal breath beguiled
by musical chairs. Next, I was a feeling made of laughter.
You can’t be choked by good. A bloodless disruption,
morning is one upside, I guess. Today, words produce
undramatic sounds retaining their fictions. You observe
me like the discrete bubble I am. For a long time, you had
a name for every bird inside me. As if I’m the netherside
of raking gutters. I dig my fingers into the curse of chemical
nomenclature. Catastrophe is in the message you gave me.
In a different world, you won’t forsake what I’ve loved.
I always consult you before asking for nothing in return.