one-eyed deuce

you’re a novice in the back room playing
bones with the old school bone players

i’m in the front room dancing with a big girl
named esther in a plaid skirt and high tops

your girlfriend sits watching you as i say
to esther: it’s good to dance
with someone who really loves to dance

esther smiles, says nothing;
you come in third twice

you asked me over for dinner once
     then made me do all the cooking

     i did it because it was you asking;
     i can’t refuse your crooked grin

     over cigarettes you told me to think
     about it, moving in with you and her

     we’ll find a house, you said, where
     we can be together and really live

next to your girlfriend i watch as you
smile with the boys playing dominoes

she says you never danced with her before:
he doesn’t even move to music, she confides

what i don’t confide: the first time you asked me
out to a party, you and i danced alone together

under dark avocado leaves and limbs; earlobes
wet with wild ideas murmured in fluent mezcal

shunyavidya

then came the autumn
he stepped into twilight and
no longer occurred to himself

the lamplit streets did not occur
either, nor churning treetops
nor stars nor even words

warm glowing windows did not occur, nor
his footsteps on wet neon glazed sidewalks

numberless cars swarmed about him,
unnoticed as cells in his bloodstream

the world carried on but
did not occur, and though

the town where he lived remained
his absence erased it from the map

he was not seen walking along
streets that no longer had names

but wandered unbound, a sutra
torn from a no longer extant text

esinti

in its absence a thing longed
for is present in the longing

what’s out of reach only seems so
when reaching the wrong way

everything you want is here,
and ‘everywhere’ is here also;
only your attention is missing

a romance is a lovely story, but actual
love has no beginning middle or end

let the narrator of romances
be done with its storytelling

fired like a moth in the open flame of Reality

and be glad. count your blessings, as I do

fortune has brought you into the aura of
a flame without beginning middle or end

surrender your wings
– be more dandelion

there’s no telling where
a beneficial wind may blow