BAD MOOD
Bad mood and bad dog and bad luck like
my broken neck or heart or head
sussing out so much bad weather
unraveling like kinked yarn by a bad,
a black cat, which summons
luck again, that diffident lover half
naked in the dark. To her
I walked below one thousand ladders
over miles of bad road
ribboned with bad directions
which wasn’t as bad
as I thought it would be
my ear pressed to the powdery wall
behind which strangers
performed badly their bad sex,
their bored adumbrations
conjuring nothing, not even the paleness
of tulips, the heat of
the severed instant
in which your voice snapped
like a band of sound
between your phone and my phone,
impossibly distant, impossibly atonal and pale
across that bad connection
the bad things compelling
us to speak out, to end up, to say
even now my skin flecks away
like paint applied
badly, quickly to cover
some previous horror,
some bad end solved
badly, the evidence lost,
thrown out, awarded to the jury of dust.
I said it was not so
bad and it was not—
there were days when knives
of
the day open like sweet fruit
and there were hours
and words amounting to consolation
and entire towns
ripe with welcome
handing me their thousand mirrors,
their seven long years.
1 comment:
This is just lovely. I keep reading it. Thank you.
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