Rooms

When a room needs a door, its function is to close.

An open room is for people and their need for space

Windows are eyes in the face of a room.

Plants and walls are ears.

The fireplace and cellar, closets and cabinets are internal organs.

New furniture changes a fraction of the feel of a room.

Noise and movement are pulse.

Cleaning is the stroking of a room.

Pipes are veins and circuits are nerves.

Paint is the complexion of a room.

Steps and arches are the pride of a room and most curves show balance.

Corners and shadows hold the memory of a room.

A ticking clock puts a room in tune and

A ringing telephone is cacophony.

Rooms have longer life spans than people.

A cuckoo clock expresses the humor of a room.

Most rooms like alcohol and get hangovers.

Rooms compete for attention.

When you sleep in a room, you wake with some knowledge of it.

Rooms without widows are more sensitive to sound.

Dampness is the depression of a room.

Rooms contribute to their own temperature.

Sterile rooms are mute.

In the depth of a wall, where does a new room begin?

A room is aware of its secret places.

Rugs and furniture are the makeup of a room and rooms cry after them.

The voice of a room can intensify the air and speak telepathically.

When people leave, rooms attract other inhabitants.

Rooms are afraid of the wind.

A room is a natural thing.

Fugitive Dream

Suppose you’re sitting in a church

with an old lover, watching a ceremony

from a pew that’s toward the back

and off to the side.

 

You stand, sit, kneel, chant, sing

and smile at each other. Pleased

with the ecumenical nature of things,

enjoying the light touches

that you exchange.

 

Then these people that you’ve never seen

break in and begin to do away with the priests

and other members of the congregation

in the most brutal of ways.

 

You turn to your lover for reassurance,

to make sure that it’s just a dream

And that the two of you can go on watching and playing.

But no one is there.

 

And you run out of the church

to save yourself and inform others

about the massacre.

Flying down the streets of the city where you were born,

pounding on doors and looking for help,

secretly pleased with your speed and agility.

 

And when you find someone who will let you in,

there’s your lover on TV, giving an interview

about how you seemed like a nice person

and about how no one could have expected

these atrocities from you.

 

So now you are heading for the river, looking for escape.

You live incognito for what seems like at least a year,

until you try to cross back over the river

and are apprehended by Federal Marshalls and more TV cameras.

 

Then you wake to the heat and touch

of the person that you love now, who was not the person in the dream.

Your lover’s face is soft and sleepy.

You’re quiet and penitent about what you’ve done.

Day Care

The basement chairs stand against the cool stone walls.

When they aren’t together, the music is playing.

 

On the worktables are beads, clay, and stacks of magazines.

The sweaty smell of cut wood and lacquer-

 

From inside confusion,

where each set of footsteps is your own,

there isn’t a way to look out.

 

From inside the separation between life and the matter

that holds it,

There aren’t connections.

 

Her arm stretched up like a child who has fallen down,

Beth said, “I can’t stop cutting myself.

I hear voices and without the pain

there is no me.”

 

“I listen to the music so the Russians won’t take my mind.”

In the shape of an infant about twenty-five,

bobbing his head and kicking his feet,

with a supersonic brain that only runs on full speed,

Carl burps with a giggle and then tries to fart.

Tapping in his chair, lying on the table,

they took the electric guitar that he still plays

away, back at the hospital.

He reads about how to be a success

but it’s hard for him to answer the question that you asked.

He tries to like everyone and he tries to win.

He can’t do either

because of how his head spins.

 

Anna’s afraid of her mother since her husband died.

She used to dance the tarantella and go out every night.

Now she changes her clothes right after school

and slips out more silent and grey and silently asks

“If you could reach me, what would you find there?”

 

Connie wants her child to have fun every day,

but Dr. Willy says that she isn’t pregnant and he doesn’t love her.

The medicine makes it go away,

And if you don’t take too much, you can tie a bow in your hair.

 

Nelson doesn’t smile or say anything.

He’s large and stiff and thinks he looks like Frankenstein,

but he keeps himself clean.

 

Ernie has a crew cut and a devilish grin.

They hide inside him all the time.

 

At the hotel where they bring food around like at the hospital,

Nettie’s seen more hell than most women still alive.

They took her baby and started sending strange men up to her room.

They tell her that she always lies,

but she don’t bring no men around and how’d they get there?

 

Marlene looks like an old lady in her coat and hat,

But she dances for Carl and sometimes they touch.

All yesterday she kept thinking of the horrible

things that she knows will happen to her.

 

Virginia came from a good family in the South

before she fell ill.

Sometimes she screams obscene things that no one can hear and

“Yes, they certainly have helped her here.”

 

Through a six hour stretch

where everything is nice,

we walk the parade route

of what reality is like.

Deborah

The setting is a room
with rugs on the ceiling and walls.
Her body stretches across the smooth-armed floor.
She learned to say “no” through a slow withdrawal
circled and twisting

Suppose her face to be thin and soft.
Her hair cut close.
Eyes that draw each motion like a feeling
In a mind with fingers that probe, bend
And are flung out when she dances

When she lies back with veils and sighs,
Suppose the dreams-
The way they begin to draw her to them…
She runs and spins

Her toes like soft daggers
Twirling across skin

Our Second Anniversary

 Having an affection

for the springtime birds

Is a one way affair

unless you enjoy the songs

 

You scatter stale bread in the side yard

and they mark the spot

mostly on top of my car

The residue isn’t like music

 

Your hood is up over your head

and except for the chill

you’re happy

 

Springtime birds move on

and because I don’t

it takes more

to get me to sing for you