Jared Orlando

An Otherwise Lackluster Frame

Settling; in the night stand of an empty hotel room
Clumsily folded in between off-white pages
In a dusty Vonnegut novella-

Lining; discounted cardboard shoe boxes
Deep under the the tattered green print
Seats of a railway car bound for Union Station-

Hidden; boldly taped to the foundations
Of three seemingly identical rental houses nested
Along the achingly quiet streets of Evangeline Parish-

Shreds; spilling out of rusty, dripping exhaust pipes
From hardtop ‘75 Caprices to ‘65 Fastbacks
Turning the air into speckles of white and blue

[A man spending his whole life—
Concealing love songs in the most broken of places]

Somewhere, her breath will, if only for a moment,
Fog an otherwise lackluster frame
And the only melodies consuming her mind
Are those of the one—

Foolishly, but unabashedly, released from the lungs
Of the man with two feet on the ground
But his head in the clouds

Last night—I watched the sky slowly crack

Last night—
I watched the sky slowly crack
Tiny white veins began to appear—
Growing across the the vast expanse
Of blackness above
Branching out into tiny slivers,
Like little streams of dim light
Yet the pieces of sky did not give
And out of desperation—
I cut down every tree in sight
Upon the ground, miles of
Long vertical wooden pillars
With intersecting smaller horizontal ones
Strapped across them
Fastening together the largest
Ladder ever known
The streets were empty
While above my head, the world
Was obviously going to shatter
So leaning the ladder against the northern mountains
Reaching the top hours later—
I spread my arms wide
Awaiting what I was destined for—
To be a stich for the open wound of the earth
To catch it all when it falls.

Then morning came—
And things remained as they were.

Restless Anatomy

We live our lives
As a run-on sentence
Hoping, and waiting
For some kind of
Break, a little recess
From our monotonous
Ands, and buts, and commas
Just wishing a period 
Would end it all
Right in the middle of our
Next breath, but it never
Does, and only a 
Prepositional phrase enters in
Under the stairs
And behind the lips
Spending every speck
Of wasted energy
On an endless fight
Against what keeps us from
Living in blocks of time
In segregated rooms
Spotted across a landscape
Of singular clauses
Breaking away from a mold
Of our repetitive continuity