Estas brutal, someone says about the heat or the boricua 
walking down the street with a dulce de leche. My sister shivers. 
I paraphrase a fever when I mount the stairs to the roof to swelter

Up till three reading zombie
comic books, I wake to video- 
game first-person shooters

Paul Guest, I am looking forward to your birthday
and the long chain of fitful celebrations
that will follow and be broken

What if I made you hear this as music
But not how you mean that. The slow beam

Coma of cold storage
Against the sweetening
Orchard—white petals

Winter trees cough like old men
about death’s white nightmares
while the rain talks in Latin.

The blonde carrying the tote bag full of bones
Is dressed in a chiffon blouse printed with

Persimmon-colored butterflies

Sundown smoke like a pink snood
                                        over the gathered hair of the mountains,
The sun a garish hatpin

Four ducks on the pond tonight, the fifth one MIA.
A fly, a smaller than normal fly,
Is mapping his way through sun-strikes across my window.

The more you say, the more mistakes you’ll make,
                                                                                                          so keep it simple.
No one arrives without leaving soon.