In the Office on Memorial Day part 2 - Hope

Hope, part 2

I still own a house there where I once put my art on the walls and it still

Never looked like home despite the spit-shine colors of every hue

Trying to sell, waiting out, last one took two years

Moving on and put blood through the door frame in my New Orleans

Permission to breathe the other direction and contemplate a relationship that does not end

In decisions over melancholy strategies to survive in a place where human respiration stiffens

Living in another person’s dwelling, I avoid even the companionship of my grandmother

I am ashamed of my own shell to feel air on my turtle flesh.

Hermit crab and all I have is a room of boxes and frames to in-one-hour hang

The ropes the marks of who was here; won’t ever process because the soldier needs me

Besides who will make all these journal entries and get the financial statements out

After the last guy who had this job was a drinker gun-nut with printable targets on the hard drive.

I think occasionally about him coming in and blowing the whole department away as retribution

On the day after I get the infrastructure set to actually catch up

Now that his severance has been paid for this flood of debris

Of spider-web papers on the shelves and digital folders on the server

Like wet Bibles and wedding photos in NOLA shotguns with his NRA hand-gun application.

I am marathon-running wearing a jacket and dress shoes

Attempting to be worthy of something, just trying to find a reason for this life other than

Writing another God-dam shitty poem, reading passages from dead men:

Hitchens, Einstein, Kierkegaard, Orwell, Nietzsche and No one

Listening to another iPod song on shuffle with Springsteen, Dylan, Guthrie, Cooke, Strummer and crew, I am trying to make friends of plain air

As if the glaring loneliness is not staring at me in every driver.

I make the illusions of a fraudulent magician; the act is not even an act any more

It is who I am.

Yet, I know I am running away from and towards my own life

As this is me and was me and will be the foundation of a man capable of reaching across

A coffee table to embrace a hand softly, despite the notion that I never plan on drinking coffee

The plan seems attainable, within the distance of all these digits manipulated, puzzles rearranged

Underneath is a picture, I am making him,

I am always him and this pile is just a portion of the whole.

If I am working, I am writing, at least I am doing.

I am not still, for in the stillness the wasteland comes to feast

Like cockroaches out the box of Malt-O-Meal in the darkness shaken

The brood explodes after the quake ends; so a man must keep tinkering

That this cup is the one to drink of and this tool is the one that may bring solace

To some other wretch attempting to sail these seas