Refuge

Every story gets old beginning
with the moment it begins being told.
I’m “more here” with each such moment.
My agent is disbelief.
My story might be real.
I’m not bleeding, but full of blood, I have potential.
My story has no pages,
just its own, ancient chemistry.
What are you waiting for?
We will never be summoned.
Close your eyes and let’s practice
what comes next.
We have to escape while we can.
I’m trying to remember you—quick,
now you try to remember me.

The World As Seen Through a Glass of Ice Water

There are a billion reasons to look down
into a casket, but just one way to lie in it dead,
which proves there isn’t anything
you can think of that isn’t here for the living,
who are each alive for a short time
in a very different way.
After she moves out, one tears up grass blades
to watch which way the wind blows.
Just over there, another buried his favorite dog
and now look at that tree!
Would you like to model for me?
says the lousy painter
to every woman who walks within earshot.
Feeling a little dead?
Maybe you spend a weekend
faking a French accent,
maybe you buy an even more expensive stereo
and build a separate and self-sufficient world
inside the garage.
Something happens something happens something happens.
Repetition repetition repetition.
The saddest painting I ever saw
was on the carpet in my friend’s hallway
where he tripped one night
carrying a gallon of red.
This was just before the divorce.
Just after he told me he was trapped
inside some idea of himself,
one he swore bore no relation
to what the rest of us had been seeing.
“Nice shirt” has always meant too many things.

Fortune #97

It’s not exactly as you would have had it: the rain
falls as freezing rain, the freezing rain falls as dying stars,
every neighbor stands in for some version of yourself
you’re glad you never became.
The gas station sells an ability to leave,
which you buy in installments and never completely use,
having developed a set of responsibilities binding you to everything you can touch.
In the way the cold or a sudden kiss from a stranger
might remind you that you still have a face
good for being more that the window you’re forever looking through.

From Skirmish. © 2009 by Dobby Gibson. All rights reserved.