underground

The Second Time You Visited Me in a Dream Were We in the Algarve?

/ Arambler / Leave a comment

We sit beside a pool
inside a villa’s iron gates. A foreign country—
which one? Do you
live here? I know

I don’t. Take my driver,
you say. I don’t want to
leave. I try to get
your attention. Why

is this box
full of water? Something sloshes
inside. But when I lift the lid
all I see is

a science pamphlet
written in English. I read
the words aloud to you
hoping for a humorous phrase

or double entendre too profound
for you to ignore. Karst. Sinkhole.

Biodiversity. Endangered
what? Tourism? Amnesia? Fantasy?

You look me directly in the eye, or
you see a greater
flamingo land on the stone wall
behind me. Whoever blinks first—

Down Cellar Stairs

/ Arambler / 2 Comments

Someone has written
the inconvenience of death
in my handwriting
on the fence. Accidental
rhyme brings me closer
to a private hilarity. To laugh
at my own
impatience jumbled
in a dryer
with my hesitation—
would I be any
more ready?

Kinesics

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Stories readying to be
created from a dollhouse’s freshly painted walls. I slept
in that beautiful, long-legged woman’s house
in Georgia in another life. A man who walks
with arms behind his back scares me
with silent questions. Why? When? Where?
Really just why. I don’t want
to wake from this dream to find no dollhouse
with secret cellar door
leading to where it all happened
in another underground. Lyric or narrative
dreamer—who can remember well enough to tell.

(Day 3,009)

/ Arambler / 1 Comment

This drive to go back to excavate
a basement after the building has been standing
graveless (shallow or deep)

for a hundred years is just the kind
of thinking that gets me
out of bed on cold winter mornings.

Without tobacco, without alcohol, this is
what’s left of my underground.