stacks

The silence is broken by the press of objects, placed on shelves and in corners. Layered with dust or smudged with the awkward attentions of too many fingers. Stacks of books read once, stacks waiting to be ever read. New technologies and time worn tools. Shoes and lamps and remote controls. Layer upon layer of accumulation. A crowd of gifts and burdens.

There is a catalogue of wishes that wade through my head. They range from the realm of the readily available to those that would require time itself to change its ways. Lucre and odd comforts, distance from nearer neighbors, closeness to a few of the further stars. It is these lists that linger, hear among the longer languid hours before dawn waddles in with its routines and its lights. I would draw a map back to the road I was almost on. I would write a poem that would settle a bet. Instead I shift the words around like blame in middle management. Instead I sift through the threads left in the hole I wore through my dreams.


Yesterday I caught the dawn lit behind the weight of birches, beneath a crescent moon and the bead of Venus. I call the trees birches because they lined the lot of an apartment complex called the Birchwoods. I am guessing it was Venus because of the brightness and the hour. The moon-- I would know that guy anywhere. The phrase that caught me then was that heart of Islam moon. I had used it before, years ago, but it had returned to me for that moment, some loitering moon and thoughtless dawn decades later. Words I had scattered somewhere before, leavened into ones I waste again. I never find the meaning, I never find the feel. But the empty in me keeps me looking. Rearranging all the words I find. Writing them down in stacks and stacks.