Lonely Places

The wind-whistled Siberia of mall parking lot

that stands vacant and weed-strewn 

save for shopping holidays,

and where it meets vast tides of 

gray fields racing into a distant nowhere.

A pool crusted over by a billowing tarp

in the seasons of staying indoors, 

crumpled leaves clinging to the rusted cyclone fence,

the blue fabric flapping like a dazed ghost

as the gust lazily stirs its edges. 

The sense of absence between two homes, 

glancing resigned over your shoulder at 

whatever you're treading away from,

rather than a future's beckoning. 

As Safe As Houses

This house warps and melts like a 

wedding cake in fragrant summer,

each molded corner bleeding into 

the door-frames.

All the furniture is hemmhorraging

its stuffing, regretful and dolorous.

We could peel strips of the faded hardwood

away with our fingertips,

grasping furtively some sense

of decayed mystery beneath the boards,

where the earth meets the hearth.

The fireplace is still choked with coal dust,

and there's pale squares

where paintings once hung

in lost days of antiquity. 

Even the windows,

with their burden of busy insects and

swiftly-rusting screens,

are a reference point in glass.

An X On A Photograph

In forgotten days you were suspended in the air,

a haze in the void that moved like waves of thick glass.

Between yawning pines you hovered, curse-like,

a portent unremarked on but witnessed

in side-cast glances and anxious shuffles homeward.

There was a gravitational pull to your freeward float,

unable to lift skyward, like a spectre trapped in a room.

Disembodied but present, glimpsed in reaching shadow,

you were conjured at a remove, in those held breaths

between telephone calls, in the static throb and burn

between lost frequencies on endless drives to outskirts.

You were in the streets like electrical fire,

all negative space and a careful grave,

tended like a frozen pond or barren field,

a safe distance torn apart by blank forces.