Category: Poetry

December the ninth. A climate change souvenir: Rain, in Michigan — ptkh 120912

There was something about the trees: Their burning leaves, Curling up on the ground In a black-gray fog. Their burning leaves A dark sadness, full of regret In a black-gray fog. Dead fruit rotting on the earth: A dark sadness, full of regret, As our cold tongues inspired to speak like Dead fruit rotting on…

this afternoon, i found a mulberry stain on my orange shirt it looked like a bullet wound, dark purple in a sea of pure, bright color it wasn’t a splatter: that would have looked artistic, or deliberate, or at least reckless this was a single drop an ellipse stained into my chest just above my…

we are minefields walk daintily around the ruts you find each day, we lay out more and bury them just under the surface of the loam we are minefields stretched out across the barren landscape beneath a killing moon asleep, still sleeping, beneath a killing moon — ptkh 06.12.10

Would that it were that easy to retain for a moment in the mind the sensation of a whisper percolations and perambulations roll around inside the divining and we are left, a moment too late, without and without — ptkh, 06/03/10

A caveat: Being deliberate is not the same as being meaningful. I sketched the figure of your face in the sand to remind me of something I’ve since forgotten. I took a photograph although your visage is hard to see in the print, because of the angle of the sun and how fragile the negative…

my soul was rent asunder by a jigsaw of ice and fire that tore my flesh i was left jagged and alone drowning in the gore of indolence i gathered myself into a burlap sack in justification of nothing and scattered my ashes into the winds — ptkh 04.30.10

she’d seen the unspoken wall every day, and every day she’d wondered how to take it down a wall between him and her a ghostly veil that shimmered at the edge of her vision yet invisible when stared right at she told herself it was the wall that kept them apart she told herself that…

The day JD Salinger died, I was standing near St Mark’s Square watching the pigeons attack a tourist who’d been too reckless with a handful of seeds. The weather was overcast, the clouds hung low like marshmallow soufflé, water in the distance slapping against idle gondolas. A brawny Venetian on his way to the kilns…

I drew you a picture in colored sand and let the wind blow it away. I hope it landed at your feet and that you could still make out the traces of what was meant to have been. I sent you a message in puffs of smoke that mingled with the clouds that rained on…