I cannot turn from tragedy

There is a part of me in suffering
so far removed from my
everydays, almost mistaken
for a separate state entirely.

Does a day descend without your
presence--
When again the concrete integrations
of my together expectations
again particulates into windstreams,
swept along the dust-clogged avenues
of our designs?

I must bear these atrocities I
ask to turn away from;
I must watch longer the television
screen and try to participate in tragedy
not my own.

We are breathing together

Some queer thirst for your
name inspires your initials on a passing car;
your impression in place maps
and miscellaneous unintended elements
through town;
I tried to extricate every bit of you
but the very word itself,
a careless incantation and then a sharp
breath,
always in a car,
alone, driving
and your name calls me.

I am faced with an internal and also
transpersonal journey, wandering between a
wish to banish my foolishness from my waking
wanderings and never to have any more
from you,
and “I have,” I say,
though a third element in our conspirations
directs a walking tour of my museum-heart's
permanent collections

unwelcome, unbidden, and
ordained.

Disgorging the poem I owe

Warm and quick it jumped from
my open mouth displaying itself
across my sweater and guzzled down into
my fuzzy pajama bottoms.
I was left with a surprise at my
loss of bodily control, so unlike the
commands I normally issue.
Was I too young still to know when I'd
had too much
to eat?

The last time I had submitted to extreme
gastric exodus I was a skinnier 14, no longer
subject to the monthly migraines; coming home
from school pale and bleary eyed, stumbling to my
bed in the afternoon and waking up 12 hours later,
bringing up every drop of liquid in my stomach
on a seemingly 5 minute rotation. But 14, my first
week of high school in a new place,
muscle spasms in my neck, quick-sharp gasps of pain
and one ear always resting on my shoulder.
No answers from physicians, just spinal taps
and heating pads. I only learned to live with it,
but not heal it. And one night I fell asleep
with the heating pad on maximum and woke up
hours later in the early minutes of the morning,
stumbled to the carpet in my bathroom and stripped
down to nothing, delirious and in-not-pain; partially
beyond my body then.
I passed out naked on the bathroom floor,
thinking that they will find me this way in a few hours,
mom and dad and a naked dead child on the floor.
I woke up though after a few minutes, and
blew bits of carrot out my nose and my mouth,
then went to bed.
Found my carrot in a tissue the next day.

I had the Swine Flu for a week or so,
and not even with the intermittent fever dreams
of falling asleep in a convention hall with people
peering over me and talking about me in my bed,
interrupted by the brief naps with my head over the toilet,
not even then did I throw up. I said to my bubbling stomach,
"Either do it now or let me go back to sweating in my bed."

Illness does not do it anymore,
but evidently too much Miso Soup can pop my gasket.

We just change the subject

We in our conversation
try to get our points across
with the only thing reaching
between us
our disagreement;
while underneath our feet
we stand on tiny
islands.