The daylight dies out, every other body already taken.
I sit down to a book to rewind it.
Pity the ghost rising above you, exact size as you. The more
transparent twin you always wanted.
To be of that age of feeling like nobody like nobody else can.
It is the age of liking. You dislike a lake, its lack
of commentary at the edges.
What will we trademark this neon teenage weather? How will
we brand darkness in the future?
Death is not a future dark.
I touch my cold arms like pieces of evidence. Under artificial lights
it is still something like me.
Though subject to cloud seeding, I still have no idea
what is inside my glassy head.
*
The further removed from the sense the more abstractly
I describe it. The metal static in my mouth
in the morning I call the taste of error.
The image of a heart in bubble wrap is a poetic thing
I did not receive.
I wanted a more expensive sky.
The steam rising from my tea fogs over my face. I consider
the tea's advice to place my heart before my head.
I give up on everything.
In your hand, its shaky penmanship, my own paper-thin nerves.
The leaves tremoring in the wind is symptomatic
of wind in the leaves.
The waves are making a name for themselves.
*
In the age of confirming something gone wrong
some undiagnosed ripple spreads to a feeling near you.
Atremble—I'd coded.
Cardinals in the snowscape, red dotted after image, your eyes
caught in bad flash photography.
To remember middle school takes on a subaquatic sound.
To remember being locked outside your house looking in
through the kitchen window, your face superimposed
on the empty scene. Inside
a little dog yaps back in your shadow.
Any resemblance to persons living or dead is completely intentional.
*
This emptiness is a form learning to do math in late afternoon
shadow branches flexed across the other side of glass.
What is outside you call nature.
You hallucinate equations in the branches.
A draft enters the book, flipping pages just as something about
to be described gets blurred.
The word beyond italicized in ice.
If you look at the page from this angle it is possible to see the last
words of a line as a figure backing its way through a door
gun drawn into a space outlined by light.
*
If you are anywhere in this sentence you are on the shore of it.
The sun comes down to you a synth's high pitch thinning out
over the gymnasium floor.
Disco ball moon, I have no moves.
When people relate their dreams I grow distraught
at how boring my dreams are in comparison
of those I can even remember.
So few dreams I round them down to zero.
When the plane disappears I want to know which of the passengers
has managed to swim to shore as they would in a movie
looking for another plane in that dense blue
refusing its part.
David Feinstein's poems have appeared in Forklift, Ohio, The Atlas Review, Ilk Journal, smoking glue gun, and Tin House. He is the author of the chapbook Woods Porn: The Adventures of Little Walter (No Dear / Small Anchor Press). He lives in Amherst, Massachusetts where he teaches writing and is a member of the Connecticut River Valley Poets Theatre.