And of course I had left it on, which meant so much wasted energy

posted by Adam at 11:00 PM [edit]

The entrance exams

Wake up, kid. Wake up, Lucas. I had a ball watching you.
You thought no one was looking, or perhaps you thought I
was, and so you did the little hip-and-wristy dance you usually
save for weddings. I've never seen you so awake. Wake up,

kid. They've finally invented a color for sarcasm, so that you
can use it in writing and not be mistaken for a brute. The brutes
are protesting: they did so like to blame it on sarcasm. Please
wake up, Lukas, I hate watching movies alone.

Think of the damage it would do if we set fireworks off in your
room. Just to wake you up. Think of the streetlights screaming
AAAAH into the overlit nights, just to wake you up. Or don't think
at all, and pretend we're not coming to get you. Even as the detectives

pierce the walls with their lion claws and climb, like marsupials, up
to your window. Even as the mercenary locksmiths sharpen all
their keys, scritch, scritch. Wake up before they get to you.
Wake up. Lukas, because you are not listening I will tell you

how to survive. Play the songs so sweet they can't come
from stereos, because the people on stereos never strain
for their notes. And yet it is the straining of a voice you love
that sounds sweetest. Wear whatever it is that you wear

best in autumn, sweaters or brown socks or the kitchen
in your ear. These autumn clothes are our best protection
in times of death. Finally, walk near water, place some berries
on a string, fish out that song that I had almost forgotten,

the golden apples and the silver apples. All shined up to die.
All fever-fed from fear. Ready, at the frayed end of these too many
words, to make the screaming softer. I am too old to cry. I am
too true to speak. And I, unlike my Lukas, am too late awake.
posted by Adam at 12:38 AM [edit]

Face in water

At the entrance to the club, they stamped my wrist:
I KNOW MIKE SANCHEZ it read, though I do not.
I was fascinated by the lie upon my skin. I wanted
it tattooed in; I've never had a lie to take care of before.

When you put your face down in water, you realize this:
I am not now starving. It is always, always light at night.
No fear no stars. All the kids at the club were bobbing
their shoulders and thinking that too: hey, hey, I'm not
starving hey.

Great books also begin with their faces in the water.
We either grow accustomed and begin to see detail
anew, to fish for the dropped bracelet, or else we simply
drown.

I know Mike Sanchez. He drives a Jeep and gets up at five
when the light over Taco Cabana still looks pretty. When
the city still looks like a place where you might just meet
the right stranger over pancakes. There's nothing stranger.

When Mike gets into a booth, he puts his phone on the table
and, under cover of darkness and fallen napkins, slips his feet
out from his shoes. Mike has been missing good coffee ever since
his coffeemaker broke and on the same day the world blew up.

There is my lie, tied up nicely at the end with no possible evidence.
Sell it to the club kids, I swear they'll buy anything if it's packaged
right. Not that I blame them. I too am overfed. I too can drive
for hours, or wake up hungry, and never see any darkness.
posted by Adam at 12:17 AM [edit]

All twenty-four

In five minutes, in fact before
I am done writing this and long
before I have finished erasing commas
only to put them back again(,)

I will be all twenty-four, all of them
sitting shiny in jars on the shelf:
the first ones in their swingset grass,
the bagel and Grandpa, and the next few(,)

near pools and cameras, getting fatter
while drawing. Then comes guitar rock,
the sun rising on all the homework, and the
more recent mixture of paperwork, travel(,)

and you. You should have one all to yourself,
a whole year, and how would it look in its
jar? It would look like a thousand leaves
all crushed into a fine powder. But liquid(,)

and unsure where to put its commas. How to
punctuate itself. When to end. It would look
not like fire, as all the other poets of New England
have said, but like the post-fire mess on the forest floor(,)

The smoke still perspiring out from the damp
skin of the leaves. It is my twenty-four, and
soon the phone will ring, waking me from
the pleasure of bad poetry. This one(,)

particularly bad, is my present to myself:
a look back over the attempted sainthoods,
the jokes in tents, the hidden puzzles
in photos I'll never get the chance to look at(,)

Not now, ten minutes after my twenty-four, nor
in the future, when you could just be a comma,
you might be a stark period, or you may still be,
as you are now, a treasured question mark(?)


posted by Adam at 12:15 AM [edit]