dante woo / omegabet \ dove

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Alba: Failure

If the bare trees at the glass were kings
really, I would know they bend over in grief,
mourning their lost brilliant crowns that

they can only watch, not reach as, beneath them,
they let go of all color all flash all sawy,
it would be better, I wouldn't have to say no

they are not kings, they are trees, I know this,
and if they bend it is wind only, it is nature,
isn't it also indifference? Passing yesterday

the bodies that, wrapped and wrapped, lay
sprawled above the steam as it left the vents
of my city, I could only fumble for the words

(dead lamb, dead lamb) to some song to sing
parts of, I gave, but what I gave -- is it
right to say it helped no one, or can I say

I brought lullaby, sealed a thin life,
awhile longer, in sleep? What is failure?
Having read how there were such things as

orchard lamps for keeping the good fruit, on
colder nights, from freezing, I was curious
for that kind of heat go the lines from

a poem I never finished. The shorter version
is: once, twice, in a difficult time, I have
failed you. No poetry corrects this. But

does it mean we don't love? In the last poem
of you waking, I am any small bird, unnoticed,
above, watching; you are the traveler who

can't know (there is fog, or no stars, a steep
dark) that the all but given up for impossible
next town is soon, soon. Come. We turn here.

-Carl Phillips

<< >>

sadness; the beautiful minute of him kissing the top of my head as i sucked his dick; beautiful minutes of him. i was in a really bad relationship before this. i miss it sometimes. i have tried to convince myself that i don't want another. but in me this is what i want: a few minutes like this, with something to write on my pillow and another thing wrapped around my stomach that i try to chisel, but not while i cook something at the stove, morning, shutters open, cool air with water on it coming down into a basement apartment. this could haunt hands - hands that you could curl into an eye, a bullet balanced embracingly on its lash, and then uncurl back into its palm, with a feather sprouting from every line.