THOUGHTS OF YOU

When I should be making art
I only concoct thoughts of you-
Ever expanding gunpowder spark
neon tubing bulletproof strobe flash
spiral moon-jelly spectrum globe lights.

It’s something like shooting roman candles
into the blackness.
setting votives in a damp ruin,
or a limestone cave,
mossy and infinite.

If time and space are just hummingbird wing beats,
and life and death are just echoes of lamb bleats,
it’s always most obvious
when you’re gone.

The bedraggled, transplanted plant
that resides on my nightstand
is no more real, it seems, than the color of your cheeks,
than the color of your breath
after sex.

But somehow those rosy emanations
are more big-bang like
than leaves, or dirt, or wood, or glass,
they brand my every movement more than steel, or fire, or light,
Your laugh is only a combination of notes I’ve memorized
but it lives in me like all consuming palm frond fire.

Whatever emptiness exists after death,
you could plant it with these seeds of yourself-
red Chinese lanterns in my chest
that remain hanging in black passageways
and light my wanderings when you’ve left.