A dream of tight ropes
Wound about a city
Wide as a chess game
Revolving ‘round my inside
In stammers and pigeon coos
Of course I mind
That you left off
The sincerity making light
Of how heavy it is
Down in the molehill
Where sounds crackle
As a nonsense or joke
Or coyote call rolling over
Themselves like a rodeo
I need even melting
A break a sudden
Shock of red dye
To the teeth
So I can renounce
The bandage as a weak
Condition akin
To losing a little sleep
Remind me why I
Suffered more here than
At the gallows or in
The August sun
It can’t be because
Of the renouncements
The bandages torn off
For the sake of inviting
A metamorphosis

-C.S. Henderson

I Can Tell You A Joke

buried in the manual of sleep, lacking fear
tightroped into the shock of soul dangling
in difference. Leap if you’ve a fistful of sparrows:
reflect the gallows in a stammer
unpacked in that image, engaged justly just
as a tickle creeps up leg-wise when toeing the bridge.

I couldn’t stomach the wail any more than I could
pick the lock keeping the outside compressed like a coin.
I didn’t expect significance to be so embarrassing —

every word sounds like a cold,
every step flooded by a broken foot,
trembles toss themselves over the edge
solemn and wooden and floating
with all the sincerity of a yacht.

Punchlines melt into spools of philosophical tyranny,
all less interesting and proselytizing
their pursuit of a laugh.

-C.S. Henderson

In Which the Poet Arrives, Dwarfed in a City

I do not expect sleep to pursue me in revolt
of sincerity and the wooden palettes
I was forced to put up after the whole house
started imbuing outside with a sense of grief.
My doctor said the only unironic image he’s seen
in his days of practice is a man weeping outside

a supermarket for all he could never get
himself, or officially, “the heart’s broken feet.”
To prove they were only a matter of opinion
I threw the script off a bridge and laughed
at how immediate my heart’s embarrassment was
and how I couldn’t compress how cold I felt

into something even the size of an elephant,
which I could have at least ridden into town
and past the security (I didn’t expect the flecks
of mud to show through my shirt or that
the dripping sparrow would pick the locks

of dreams and roll them out with the tremble
of a plague or that the bedroom would glow
beautifully with the right lampshade flipping
light’s coin to the other side) — if I thought

any of this would happen, I would have scratched
down the walls and engaged everything
as a painting, solem, on my hands and knees,
praying it could exist.

-C.S. Henderson

You could just tell me how home
is just a bird fluttering against
your lap, or laugh off the stammers
of trying to be elevated above
the sentimental maintenance
of integrity, or put a sudden shock
of orange into your hair before dinner —
either way, we correspond oddly
and with an odd thing
of wonder, like the future is a crag
jutting out of a sudden fog,
and then we leap!

-C.S. Henderson