phoenix (an inverted zombie life)

phoenix (an inverted zombie life)

“Because,” said the hunger artist…“because I couldn’t find a food which tasted good to me.”

“A Hunger Artist,” Franz Kafka

“I was afraid, I'd eat your brains”

“Conversation 16,” The National

i am not interested in arizona

but another state altogether

resurrection

i am hopeful that the part of me

that died can rise from the ashes

resurrection

it is lonely living while dead inside

no urge to eat—an inverted zombie life

resurrection

this state has no decayed flesh or moaning

although the living somehow remain distant

resurrection

to rise then in the arms of another entirely

and to resist feasting on her skinny throat

resurrection

chalk

chalk

it was written in chalk on the sidewalk, i suppose,

not chiseled in granite as i’d always believed

winds and rain erase i love you’s in colored dust

while gravestones weather generation after generation

The Disciplines (all those terminal degrees)

The Disciplines (all those terminal degrees)

We are from different times

and different places,

but intersections and magnetism

are beautiful narcotics.

I am now forced to be an archeologist

of my own dreams

where you come again and again

offering indifference.

This is a different kind of discipline, then,

because it is not my field,

and even in my rare dreamweaving,

I am a rank amateur.

Sleeping, I must not shout out your name

in the middle of the night;

I must not fling back warmed covers,

leaping up to run again to you.

But it is there I am disciplined, a Grand Master,

a Jedi, a ninja in all black,

having perfecting the nuanced art of lies

and deception—of not being me.

The disciplines lead us to the inevitable, I suppose,

of all those terminal degrees.