I Need to be a Goddess

Each image, I cannot retrieve Conversations committed to transcripts and pottery Disintegrating eclipsed by significance In drift among discernment and petty sentiment Joyful insidious howls from the back of the barroom Finger picking and strums from the stage, a blushing heirloom Hipbones, jaunting and folded, like paper napkins coast Precipitating barfly's glass sheds liquid Sizzling neon humming, like an awkward uniform A cure, incantations under storm Invasive occupancy of your pain To bar you from harm Is to deny your agency's reign My longing to protect Is an attempt to preserve some non-existent image But I love you like brothers This space we built is leaving malleable and waining Under a camera or an apartment containing Tears that fall when we catch the other straining Pervasive intricacies of an airplane bathroom Alike the incomprehensible unfurling structures Bonds woven in afternoons Of solemn laughter and chatter Each physical length growing insufferable Desiring machines and dreary homicides Arsenic for deafening housewives Chemistry, orchestras, prison notebooks and pliers Bombshells, bureaucrats, dumbbells, cataracts Retiring and weary like porch step thermostats Hegemony, checkerboards, neighborhoods and crunching fliers I long to see my grandparents Hug them tightly, attempt their accents Humor and quarreling, discussion of taxes In witching hours when manure is pungent As purple horizons consume the sunset Stucco walls and recliners keep us secret Chris and Dorothy Peter and Jackie Richard and Mary Les and Sally Mutual care exceeds the body Herman looks alive in those photos Made his departure by the phone In that smile shaped driveway In front of our former home Where a new family lives But probably won't for long I need to be A Goddess emergent from sleep An entity of tenacity Resentment is belief In the quality of being Spend my evenings copying Pages of my parents handwriting