high_high_poem stork daddy the lattice surrendered skyline right where the dry and gnarling tree began. all distinctions were a matter of degree not kind. and so it was with my shivering laughter and strenuous cynicism and the two beautiful girls one sleeping in towels we draped over her, and the other staying up with me like a parent at christmas only giving wonder, to find it in the new role, the new set of mysteries. and every idea we share seems like such a good one. the walls of other houses seem like paper on some hollywood quiet on the set. and she lends me her lighter. my lighter is plain powder blue, because if i got a lighter i identified i'd admit myself a smoker. which would've seemed a sin to me at some time in my life. but now to think something a sin seems a delusion of grandeur. anytime we try to tell another what we mean. we usually leave out the most important parts. we try to write a poem, and it's just a sleepy morning light puzzle we say your hair is wet, and we mean, i wish you needed me like i feel though i'm told i don't, i need you. i ask if she's okay to drive home and so i tell her to follow my finger doing the mock police test - yup...just as i thought your eyes are brown. putting out cigarettes in rain water almost would seem romantic if wet tobacco wasn't the smell of the grave. earlier we rode bicycles down train tracks. and we'll be a highlight in someone else's workbreak e-mail and then if that fails news check but officer, driving erratically IS my anti-drug. i learned more tonight than in a year at law school. yet who we are is always who we were the day before. and so all of us talking are both driven by impulse and checked by fear. or desire, a matter of degree and not kind. the ordered lattice gives way to the non-glacial life of a tree. when you were a kid, you knew about as much as now, but you were expected to know less - and so, wonder, wasn't an admission of incompetence. and in turns, in polite jokes we try to appear as neutral and one size fits all as possible. what if you named your dog rape? we laugh at for a while. and maybe we both say in different ways, if i could, i'd be on your side. and if i was on your side i'd forgive me. laying in bed, later, i look at the ceiling and it seems the air is lattice building to it. and i see those girls and the slow push into gravity of the bicycle's starting pedal and then that feeling when they move all together, prettier and less prettier than you sleeping and more awake laughing and trying to understand and you're leaving lattice into trees and trees into sky. finer and finer distinctions until you fall divided asleep. at at the finest distinction there's no room for any but acceptance, but her and remembering and forgetting. and tomorrow, everything will seem as if it never revealed to you the essential sameness in all of its difference. and she'll call you, as you call her simultaneously trying to find someone who might know what you forgot. 050216 ... blather amazement society "and we'll be a highlight in someone else's workbreak." "wonder wasn't an admission of incompetence." "the slow push into gravity of the bicycle's starting pedal." and the ending... outstanding piece of writing. 050216 ... stork daddy thank you. i'm not even certain i wrote it. i was in another dimension at the time so i'm not sure how it's possible it was actually me. 050216 what's it to you? who go blather from