The Desire to Form Endless Specific Combinations of Logic and Meaning 

you open the mailbox, remove a catalog of desire

parse glowing colors, limn the demarcation of

captions coupled with paired images

years later your diplomatic letter arrives

the invisible text written with lemon juice

tart, unyielding

years after that I write this in response

confirming my receipt of your inverted face

[RK, 12/14/2020]

 

Ex Libris

 

your admiration was, in turn, admirable

but one learns at the beginning how cold

is the worst punishment for the unsettled

 

who have to draw heat from the body’s core

and parcel it out while living on the wrong end

of the Scoville scale

 

in warmer days I inscribed a gift

is it still on the shelf?

[RK, 12/14/2020]

 

 

Surprised (Not Surprised)

 

it took forty minutes of a gray sky new moon morning

to burn all the manifestations I’d written the day before

 

sad and awkward to realize how much things change

in twenty-four hours, give or take a lifetime

[RK, 12/14/2020]