Songs for the Sleepy Hollow

. . . 010306 . . There in the corner of my eye was the quivering silhouette of my mother. She had been staring out the window combing her hair to an incorrigible groom. She'd pluck her eyebrows like feathers to a dove till all that's left was a half-naked stare. . . I often wondered where she'd gone she used to sing me to sleep and tap my legs like burning light falling off the tip of a cigarette. She never smoked and never knew how so I learned it for her. . . It used to be just the two of us but now there's everything in between: she and her work me and my sisters her affection and old age. I couldn't decide which carried more weight, but I knew I chose to carry hers. . . I can't reconcile the silhouette from the shadow, the duties from the affection, me from my sisters. It was as if we were all strands of unruly hair all caught up in an impossible tangle. . . By now she had been looking elsewhere, outside the window with her naked stare. I see her from afar, in the corner of my eye: her tired arms, her wrinkled expression, her weighted womb. . . I had to crawl back under the sheets to tap my own legs and hope to fall back to sleep. On other nights unsucceeding, I'd steal a smoke and think of my past, the memories burning like the tip of my stick reconciling the smoke with the scent of her dyed hair. . . . . 011606 . . If I close my eyes I dare not see the slit of your eyes like a bleeding wrist. And how if I pry them open they would gush out like tears. . . I dare not feel for you and I remind myself to stay awake while I hear you call my name thin like a blade passing over my skin. . . This must be sacrilege, my ignorant singing, the consequence of an impalpable desperation tuning itself like an instrument of pain. It comes back to haunt me, your blood, flooding through the floors of my house. . . The pain ignites the dormant fires in it, it burns aned wants to be seen. Everybody wants to be a witness. Everybody wants an unobstructed view. . . If I close my eyes now I dare not see, not ever, the warmth taking shape in a grail, the saint burning on an altar of my distractions. . . .