Eschatological horizons are razor blades used to clean a tile floor close to the most concrete, removing all that is not that final purity in which I can finally rest. Do not come yet Lord my house is not clean but it is empty and full of rotting anticipation for sleep. 

The Way He Held My Hand

Reminded me of how

two hands

might secure

the muzzle of a dog

Alexander

Slouching with integrity,

bettering myself.

Stop closing in on it

and forgetting to fill the void around.

Beaming at lie-flat socks

that don’t huddle, cramped in ones or twos.

They lie there full of pride, 

beaming themselves,

doing the least work possible.

Pinky Stare

Tracing the finger bones

in my shortest finger

the thumb and index of my opposite hand

try to learn the shape below the skin

of what will remain when the meat is gone

15 years ago a van emptied onto a Brooklyn street 

filling the sidewalk with a cluster of women

one approached me 

offered a warm greeting

and got right to it

Where do you think you’ll go after you die?

Back into the ocean I said

after a pause so short it astonished me

if I were enveloped

Thinking of myself from age three-ish to ten
I think of a sort of nothing -
roundish, blank, placid 

memories seem to be spaced quite apart

towards the beginning I plunged
into a frigid hole of water
which, covered with leaves, 
had looked like solid ground
I walked home naked 
hiding behind my mom's legs 
each time a car drove past

in the video from my 5th birthday 
(which I do not remember)
I receive a camel sewn with decorative gems 
and mirrors
when asked by my grandma, plump and fretting,
what is it?
I guess, A cow?
it seems maybe willfully ignorant
a refusal to be here
a power play now second hand
or maybe I was woefully ignorant
a bit dull, and grasping for any answer 
that might suffice 

it’s always a battle for the story I might tell myself:
willfully or woefully

towards the end of my blank time
I sat on a tree stump in my yard
for hours after school
too scared to go inside the empty house
the memory is fuzzy:
either I pooped in the tree stump,
which was hollow on the inside,
(deeply fearing a car might drive by)
or else I thought about doing that
and I felt swallowed up by a shame 
so heavy it compressed me

if I were enveloped in a blanket from a magical land
if the shape of myself was unrecognizable to myself
if the next word from my mouth was soft lambswool
if time was a sloppy looping doodle
-and sometimes it seems it can be-
then I might turn my gaze
full full full
to be that witness I was searching for

Sounds great

Two questions:

What the fuck is a poem 

and

why have to do one every day