
Fingerpaintings
I
Wearing an old university sweater he found
in a box under the stairs, he spoons tupperware
leftovers between his teeth, staring ahead while
beads of dark slide down the window to his right,
indicating, it would seem, that
It's raining
outside,
the wet roads doubling every brake light that slows
in the traffic, where, he calculates, his soon-to-be ex
is almost certainly stuck and waiting, tapping
the steering wheel to the radio, off-time, in that way
she does. He's only here till he finds a place,
until then it seems
It's pouring
over childhood
memorabilia and yearbook regrets, the glow-in-the-
dark stars he stuck to his ceiling two decades ago
still above but now only giving off a paltry glimmer,
the bowman of his favourite constellation having
withered into the last two holes of its belt. He
imagines that his mother's in her bed reading
while
The old man
is watching television
in a volume that rattles the cabinets, the screen burning
at the blue of its wick. While the cataract dog that used to
bound alongside him on his jogs in high school, kicks
in her basket, ecstatically unaware of every hardship that exists
in married life; as well, it would seem, as the fact that she
is snoring
V
Hate can twist its way into everything,
wringing my stomach tight
with even the thought of you
whose head I once balanced
in the crook of my arm, whose back
I have dragged my mouth across
The mouth that never quite thickened
with the courage enough
to call you out as the
Liar, liar
that you are
with your palm-leaf eyes
and their shivering way of saying
everything you don't
I have sometimes shocked myself
with the want of watching you suffer
Of standing by, out of reach and pitiless
while you, with an oasis in sight
though a touch too far off,
kerosene doused with
your shirt and
Pants on fire
flailing towards the shore
without a matchstick's hope
in hell
A daydream
conjured to comfort
until the moment I see you
with a bag of groceries on the street
and it all unravels, fraying in the way
that singed eyelashes might, being replaced
with the vision of you following me
home, unwinding our scarves to
Hang them up
over our coats like we used to
But all you offer is to meet for lunch next week
saying that you'll call and winking a smile
that has me gliding dangerously over the
sidewalk home, puttering on the fuel
of forgiveness, which will very likely
snuff out as the days pass, eyeing
the receiver, again dangling
all my stupid hope
On a telephone wire