How can you tell a cloud-man from a dirt-man? one might ask.
I am getting closer to where you are.
Listening is a big theme in our house.
There is the blank listen, the hearing kind only, the I’m screaming
so you better listen this time, the falling asleep kind. Often we switch roles
because we hate to be typecast.
Everybody’s asleep. Why is that?
And you’re a cirro-stratus face.
There is power in a name.
So tell me something I don’t know.
I don’t know anything else.
You were saying something about listening.
Cloud journal for the twenty-first century:
Wyoming: falling in love for real clouds / realism on a blue felt-board
Oklahoma City: bruises / you decided you didn’t need your medication after all clouds / we’re probably going to hell clouds
New Mexico: absence of cloud
Nebraska: dollar cheeseburgers and four gin and tonic clouds / I want to go to sleep and wake up in a different life clouds
Los Angeles: think you’re falling in love but not being sure clouds / weigh on you like a lead apron / charcoal-orange insomniac clouds
Dallas: the nightmare catalogue of a three year-old clouds / woman with a spending habit clouds / marriage of the non-listeners
Utah: together behind the bushes on the side of the road clouds / goat carcass on barbed wire clouds
Oregon: segregated clouds / cherry tree clouds / please don’t leave me for what I’m about to say clouds
Did I miss anything?
Probably, my nimbo-stratus boy, my pie in the sky, my cumulous of pain,
my cirrus, flying too close to the sun.
And now I’m falling—
like I do.