Hammers next door have erased

morning’s automatic goodness.

They’re triumphant selling

off my wounded sleep’s bits.

I take the sclerosis personally.

I’m in a borrowed house

driving at home head down

aiming not to be a guest for good.

I think of the morning passing

into afternoon as deeply as art.

Wednesday, it’s May, finches

easily loved spring off the edge

all hurls making it loss

and a cool vapor helps around the ribs

hardening meaningfully at the coming

moment of indigestion leaving is,

a dark hall I can see only me in.

It’s horrible how well we were met.

A ruthlessly written town so adorned

we never knew arrival. Jonathan Edwards

says we mattered less than the grass

that stands us. Still, we wrote on it.

It’s our agreement with hell.

Fra separated first to part her hurt state.

Then Michele to Maine’s rusted

blue barrens. She’s by a clean cold ocean

room now with Derek & the dog.

Elvers are in her notebook.

Fearlessness relates to protection

one way or another. You’re mere

again but maybe now

a prism of mereness

itching the outside to rise.

It was good to walk with you

through those ransoms

to get into the ground

firmly decided in the brain

of the world. Tonight again

I’ll dip a torso toward the bar

singing the joke to the hole it’s not.

A hole you can animal in plenty

but here people peopling

are equidistant utters, ideated

with nowhere to go but throats.

Emotions control so much space.

I admit there is whole day,

I just don’t affirm it’s any longer

to be young.

Composure you can’t trust

replays warm air. Distance is

somewhere in the empty light

on the moon - you look to it

as the floor leading you at the speed

the mind goes off. Those periods

have dropped in temperature,

out to the area somewhere to bay.

 Just as well, we say, the heart

losing its quality of heat will spool

watching the living foliage silver

We are recency, built to debut

and debut. Changed to preserve charge.

We might as well go dressed.

For what sovereign sight stands alone

without a theme? The moon

we cannot go back to bursts expected,

a blue equal to memory’s vulgar syllable.

Observe: the image at its source I see

is a fist. Our job is made for us

to be thankful for

torments with a heroic attitude

bronzed & frothing, bound to

the side of the bled out hill.

But enough about regret.

Pronouns grown up fit the ground

there and there, handling ceased ideals.

It’s a ritual in everyone

you see you came from.

They continue kicking in

the airs for continuance.

We may no longer see a share

in the level of sacrifice

but the green spikes pursue

engaged in taking up

sacred physicality obscured by

the same old dirt. Betrayals won’t gather,

recollected  as rain finds a grate.

We find pictures now are futures.

So I guess then that’s sun standing me

up where friends have never been

more beautiful in a cohesion that moves us

closer to ago that’s coming in quick.

Like this moonlight’s now is a responsibility

to be clean. Out here beyond the walls

compilations, we are constant faces thrown,

opened to compost to trick and put a heel to

the meaning of velocity

we now lean over, going away

with more than one body

swept of clouds.

An evening is after all a practice we have.

But this was our coincidence:

what comes for you I come from,

but it remains unclear

that there’s any martyr whose passing

the world would notice much. In absence

of such a moment, the greatest need

is not to walk from buildings that die

spectacularly but live never to be cornered.

I’ll continue to sit where I’m needed

at twilight & to put a bowl by the back door

to see what may come, while

some people are born born.

Brian Foley is the author of The Constitution (Black Ocean, 2014) & Puritan Landfill (Black Cake, 2015).  Poems have appeared in Boston Review, Verse Daily,The Volta, Denver Quarterly, The Fanzine, Everyday Genius and elsewhere. He lives in Denver and attends the University of Denver Creative Writing PhD Program.