Al Salwen

The point of art

i said to my lover is to make people feel like ants the blood oozed underneath the too large bandage on my chin where i had gashed it open falling off my bike while swerving off the path to avoid the small child whose mother leapt forward and firmly calmly & kindly patched me up with her first aid kit that she carried everywhere even in the middle of a sculpture park where transmogrified steel beams towered over us and when i said that you laughed and i laughed and my skin split open again and again.

Cradle

here in my hand
part of a closure: a moth
shifts her antennae
the soft est
sound                                        
carried
only by lonely satellites
blinking in space

saying
i was good; i held still

There is a house

that is more a series of rooms and holes

than a home.

A narrow set of stairs

with no light, littered with cockroach bodies,

leads to a door

with a broken lock. It makes a satisfying

click every night

when I seal us in.

There is a hole in the ceiling of the

bedroom

where the light fixture used to be. We

covered up the brass body

with black

acrylic paint and tried to screw

it back into the ceiling

with no success,

punching hole after hole into the drywall

as fiberglass rained down on our eyes

like snow.