100. If I Had Eyes the Color of Sky

The sky turns bluer before it turns dark,
and I am more tired than the night the sky’s become.

The great tent that covers us
so that we think it is a blanket and we must sleep.

Somewhere the sky stays light late into the night
as if there were no night and sleeping were but for dreaming.

You know the place.
I believe you know the place.

In the believing of it, it becomes somehow real,
as if my right wrist might write it down.

The sound of typing resembles the sound of words
insofar as it is the sound of words being made.

I can only think them
onto the screen.

I do not create the natural sound of words.
The circling of vultures is an uncomfortable silence.

Summer doesn’t seem suitable for sauna,
yet we breathe in the steam, we make our sweat.

Everything’s dying, everything’s death.
The sound of settling into place.

Errosion.
Erhotic.

What wears away.
What takes its place as a rolling sound.

The caryatid, the caryatid, the caryatid,
she sings to the katydid, she sings to the cicada.

She does
not move.

You might begin a story from this premise:
that every word means something else as well.

Once a pun, a time for planting thyme, and a run of words
lived peaceably in a distaff kingdom singing to herselfs.

“I don’t remember having a vagina,” she said,
and she sang a hymen to all the gentlemen about her.

There are stories we don’t tell because
we do not want to know how they end.

My skin luminous in the light of the streetlight,
I wait for rain.

Water for waiting,
water for want.

I wrote it on a corrugated red tile for you
in red ink for I had run out of blood.

The language I used I could not speak or read.
It had no sound but I could write it with my right wrist.

When the sky is bluest at night, just before it turns black,
the color is so beautiful it hurts me.

I cannot eat after midnight,
but I can drink the water.

Sitting in darkness, I write into the white screen.
Your form is the shape of memory.

Down my throat, the water flows.
Out my penis, the water comes.

Tubes directing fluids
as veins direct the trapped blood of the body.

Down the tube of my throat a tube will go
looking for my voice.

Remember the shape of our talking?
Do you remember the shape our talking took?

Do you wait for rain?
And what do you do with it if you do?

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