It Happens Like Weather

The enormous gathering up
of all my time into what mirror
it starts as your keen sprained eyes
behind black plastic paranoia
or breathwork in the stadium elevator
then never to find a car ride home
The ash trees held the light for us
and stories handcuffed to telephones
and sliding alphabets into gray blue
photos of radios clouds your hair

Nothing happening but to drift as
holograph the way spirals evenings
the cafeteria they filled with music
as all I wanted was to write you
without name without a face or past
a landscape colliding now lost Ohio
the torus shifts mechanical & violet
When you begin in me by trespass by
missed occasion sketches thumbtacked
a word demolished in air conditioning

Welcome style of Late Montage Hotel
if love as a coincidence impossible now
in warehoused images become rustic
as disappearing to begin this over in you
my subscription annulled in fascia so
by morning I know nothing by evening
nothing changed thoroughly addressing
all of this all over itself a myriad inviting
actuals you can really see happening!
(of the average style, a pacing spy)

Comes word one hundred ninety-five
and say creation of gentleness in chaos
will ask only for other fission no portrait
or personal memento kitsch of eras to
behold no John Ashbery T shirt logo
I’d feel a perfect dizziness noise library
of Buddhist monks spilling the cosmos’
chalkdust into the river & Bleach too
as a docent sings last century’s stereo
saying That last piece is a keeper.

RM Haines lives in the Dayton OH area and runs Dead Mall Press. His chapbooks include POEM AT THE GOING RATE and INTERROGATION DAYS, and recent poems have appeared in The Tiny and Works & Days. He also shares essays and poems on his blog, Out of Its Wooden Brain.