Summertime is a castle of long white grass.
Anything can make me think of you.
Squares of sunlight burning on my chest.
Hoarders marathons close-captioned at the gym.
At night, when I’m counting the books that I can bear to part with,
something I do
under the auspices of cleaning house,
nothing ever actually leaves the shelves.
Words are made to accumulate, like plaque in one’s ventricles.
Even the idiot who runs my heart knows this.
Solitary man, he won’t say it but he lives for your company.
The hope is that he dies of it.
*
Cut me some slack. I don’t have a death wish,
however much I may circle back to it
as a subject. As a subject, it’s tied with love, painters,
Replacements songs, and the garbage I see when biking.
Life is full of candy wrappers bleached white under the sun.
I still mistake half of them for butterflies drunk in gutters.
English is the only means I have to show this.
Caravaggio, in hell, must not be too jealous. He had oils and Italy.
Light, therefore, let him render the unspeakable.
Almost every morning I stare directly at the sun.
Reeling, I go, blind beneath its radiance.
Kicking each pale letter of the world in place.
from The Newest Employee of the Museum of RuinFind more by Charlie Clark at the library
Copyright © 2020 Charlie Clark
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Four Way Books.