Habit Forming

Habit Forming

How eager we are to make habit,
to take the new and transform it into the rote.
Where to turn and which awning to park beneath.
What number corresponds to your home
and the homes that your friends now live in.

Disquieting, disruptive,
our encounters with the unfamiliar ruffle us.
The consciousness rears up, wants to run
into some comfortable, imagined future.

What would we miss
if we could conjure habits from acts
we are yet unaccustomed to.

Miniature victories. The erasure of darkness
from a map. Scrutiny of time, and attentiveness
to where we are going. The strangeness
of the sky here,
how uncluttered and pale it is.
Variance in temperature,
the air warming slightly after snowfall.

Once we learn it well enough we will forget it.

To Hear Yourself Talk

To Hear Yourself Talk

Do you like to hear yourself talk.
Have you tried to catch the tail ends
of words whipping back at you,
the thin string of a balloon pulling free
from your hand as it swims up and away.
Can you hear your voice as you activate it.
Wrestle your brain away from your mouth
and find the final phonemes as they dissolve
into silence. Cradle the sounds between
your ear and your neck, allow them to unfurl
and fade: an r-colored vowel, slurred,
the dull blade of the /d/ dropped.
Who doesn’t like to hear their own machinery,
these words suggesting themselves.

These Apparitions

These Apparitions

The car is dappled with stars of frost,
cloves embedded in an orange.

Over the road, a black cloud of starlings
converges and pulls apart like velcro.

Here, let me obstruct that for you,
the morning says. I take up its voice

twenty-seven miles later, nearly miss
my exit for the new smoothness

of the road, orange construction signs
and cones extinguished, potholes

stubbed out. Out of everything I have not
seen today, this week, and ever,

why these apparitions. What do I volunteer
to my attention. What is hiding.

Experiment

Experiment

Release one of your anxieties. Try.
Lift up from it slowly, as you would pry

cold fingers from a steering wheel.
Are you willing to experiment, to feel

a practiced fear floating like smoke
away from you. We get nervous, provoke

in ourselves the jitters, the shakes.
We wince at the noise a siren makes,

avoid speaking to an entire room
of people we have not met, consume

ourselves with concerns over pets,
traffic, kids, money. The body digests

muscle if it is worked and not fed.
Anxiety strengthens anxiety. Instead

of anticipating fear, could we carve
away what eats at us, allow it to starve.

Home Body

Home Body

The home is, itself, a body.
It exists outside of you, not
for your purposes only. A home
has needs, and creates them
in us. The shower head dribbles,
its mouth clogged with calcium,
and your wet hair is reluctant
to release the slick conditioner.
You patch the peeling plaster
on the ceiling, crumbling
because a cracked shingle
lets in snow that becomes water,
and comes in. The home is a body
of work. You collaborate with it.
It is happy to work alongside you
and with the land outside it.
When you go from it for good,
it recalls you, keeps your hair
in its pipes and the mint you placed
into the dirt just outside the door.
It still works itself up to be torn.