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David Lee

You linger in the dimming aftermath, grayer and fainter than a breath.

My soul is simple; it doesn’t think. Something strange paces there now.

Is that coffee you have, or the hell of fusion in your cupped hands?

For the president’s arrival they shot two dogs making love on the tarmac.

Arrows shot by the halt at the lame,
 Opinions come and go just the same.


Let’s walk down to the river, bless the paper boats and turn it all into wine.

But too much rain can translate anything to unspeakable.

With a hammer well aimed, try to destroy the whole with a single blow.

My lust works like the tides pulling in reverse, controlled by a simple ballast.

Think how you move, how a room changes with your smallest breath.

A sociopathic streak on my father’s side I try to put to good use.

The pen is mightier than the sword in the fretwork of a poet’s language.

My mother is queen of buttons. She shows off the prized ones.

The first skeleton drawn from the earth, they called beautiful.

Charlie wasn’t Lena’s first love, but he counted on being her last.

I tell my sister what I didn’t tell my father, I love you. Please, don’t die.

“Oh, Jesus.” It’s the greatest shame since 1929’s stock market.

We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.

I know which home takes the turning, which mind washes in hot water.

My father challenged us to a free-throw shooting contest.

My own hunger was for a reduction in the vast space between people.

My own hunger was for a reduction in the vast space between people.

They cut you off, let fall your hammered silver bracelets to the sand.

Your friends are sniffing glue from a paper bag in the back of an Impala.

I love scientists. They’re trying their hardest. And they just want love.

Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden was edited by Tom Jenks.

She had felt to him like some floating spirit of who she used to be.