two poems

Lewis Freedman

BATH SALTS

no half of
me is enough
to save me

from your charity,
and because the
text was destroyed

while the page
was saved, no
whole of me

can be treated
as my mind.
so when i’m

lying here sleepless
and suffering, in
communion with the

anti-future as
rising memory where
a ghost borrows

flickers from feeling
once lived to
transmute disappearance into

doubt, to line
and stun the
breeze-endings which

carry to us
ourselves as moods,
i rub my

eyes and think
how while my
eyes get so

old and nasty
my ignorance remains
pristine, proof that

my ignorance is
specially saved, is
making me write

this again. this
night i repeat
is a siege

against every shining
resource of the
day, turns me

inoperative, keeps me
poor, inventing elsewhere
as no-page

under the protection
of disaster. i
listen out for

the tiny cries
until listening dries
them out and

we’re bathing here
in our dried-
out night canyon

under the theory
sky of no
possible change.

i ran away
from my face
because what’s larger

the way i
sharpen and extend
this sadness or

all the tasks
i’m failing to
do? mirror voice

abandoned and loose,
whispering shards, repping
in cuts its

warped scale, you
virtuoso doctor against
thought, you trendy

false planet, your
breath dissolves the
flower as you

pick it, and
your numb conversation
with an anagram

of end-times
protects only our
junk-strewn witness

cramps, and farms
our impulses in
no profile hunger

mines to baby
your bad meanings.
thanks. what? i

said thanks. i
sift the flour
which piles up

in a pile
in the bowl.
i was lying

down and sleeping
off the hex.
i was lying

in bed and
playing phlegm, dislodging
and reabsorbing my

material as a
system of signs.
these days i

play to make
living unreal and
for that i’m

misaligned and turned
around and genuinely
sorry. i left

the keys in
the front door
all night and

for that i’m
also sorry. please
let me not

run from the
width we don’t
see which whispers

en masse and
drinks our faces.
let my avatar

be removed from
our graph of
live wind data

which shows my
senses as broken,
my strange practices

useless, a meal
of magic gone
straight through us,

uncatalyzed as prayer.
to get saved
drag a fallen

steel playground net
across an abandoned
harp trap.