MAY EVERY FOLD BE HOLY

by David Rawson

He can fold you into sugar,
into a howling thing,
into the ant that carries
so much more than itself, but even
fifty times your weight
is a limitation. Each fold is your weight
compressed, until your matter
does not matter, until your mass is
something holy, twitching.

You were the first
cancer. This petition you are holding
declares it. Your wife's hair
has fallen out. She made this clear.
She is the officer who fired God.
He is not so oblivious.
The one who advises you
dictates your gifts. You are a lump
of sugar she borrowed
she cannot return.
When the days bleed,
you are a sometimes dog
eating more than you
can carry.

Of a clown whose body crumples
as complying
 to an unseen hand, who is always
 about to ask, why did you lose
your virginity to "brothers on a hotel bed"?

When he shakes
your hand and says, “I'm the kid
but call me Michael” and then screams
“I'm a young man.”
When you stopped watching Twin Peaks
when the dwarf wouldn't stop
shaking.
When you read the note, "I have taken all
your spoons," you roll
a chocolate covered coffee bean under
your tongue,
Press down, keep
pressing.

When she said, "I was sick
long before," point to the kid,
That lump in the corner.
He can fold a paper
ever so neatly,
As many folds
as there are stars,
Until you can no longer
stand
The density.
You
feel
the lump
of something,
a Schrodinger
laugh. Maybe.

She has measured herself
out of the day, and you
in the mound, the only
worker left.

WE ARE LOVERS WHO FORGOT DINOSAURS

by David Rawson

were fat, shedding feathers, sweating oil,
flicking tongues, bodies the color of cotton,

singing out love to trees that knew bruising.
Ours was a love of footprints, the pruning of love

for millennia, until the ice age almost pruned it out
completely. Ours is a love that was meant to shiver.

We are lovers who forgot there was meat in there,
that cartilage even is a kind of love.

We scattered at the sight of eye-line ankles, the trees
that bite before they kiss.

We will always know a love taller than us.
We will always duck when it begins to snow.