Notebook Flashback

I stumbled on these random lines of poetry on a search of my old site. I’d forgotten I kept a running list in college:

He sits pampering his bones in easy billows of fat
The dry, low black man said something awful on the drums
We are like a lot of wild spiders crying together
Pity the monsters
My nose crawled like a snail on the glass
Your eyes closed soft against my wonder
Would not ease the wrinkles of mind

The faces you see and the thoughts you hear, they’re yours, they’re your life
Still under the stones a little darkness lives
And we remain unchanged together
Sometimes two people together cancel each other out and are left dizzy and alone
It is unclean which is not straight to the mark
The tips of their cigarettes blaze like small roses in the night air
You are clear to me like the memory of one day
You taught me to exist without gratitude
Men with big hands make things happen
A continual climbing is the one form of arrival we ever come to
The hard ocean in your throat
Let your breath be moist against me
Ants blacken the desert
This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper
The yellow fog that rubs its back on windowpanes
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons
Your body hurts me as the world hurts God
Does not my heat astound you, and my light?
Suddenly, I realize that if I step out of my body I will break into blossom
The strings of the instrument complain like exposed nerves
The heavy surface of the sea swelling slowly as if considering spilling over
In the sparse, bright sprinkle of the grass
Some melancholy stains
Their sons grow suicidally beautiful
The cowbells follow one another into the distances of the afternoon
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow
Keeps never coming
The watch throws up its hands
The sky shudders from one horizon to another, almost ready to give up wholeness
But it isn’t enough to just go on singing
The aerial attack of do you remember?
So black they seemed to suck the light out of the air
As the moon releases, twig by twig, the night-entangled trees
Loved beyond mercy
It’s a windless day of someone’s childhood.
no one, not even the rain, has such small hands