But sure I couldn’t smell anyway, it wasn’t so disappointing to learn that smell does not trigger the memory of smell itself, but of something else related to it
Today the library is loud
The books are like untuned guitars
My life is like an ugly song
On radios in distant cars
the crisis in or out, and little false lakes growing up the rolling hillsides of the
South Platte drainage that stretches lazily all the way to the Missouri, passing
You are the voice
inside the engine
earth so
cleft / embattle scorched earth
shake every historical foundation
Between twilight monstrosities find the flight of
a tawny owl, serene stillness, fade of pine inhaled;
they grow their long, pale, vermicular bodies and the tiny
helmet-like shells they use to bore the tunnels
can’t hold a candle to the surface of the Gowanus
when it reflects the two nearby drum-like light vivid green
initial gasp at vibrant suddenness or past captivation by aromas
arrowing in my direction in a diagram of the kitchen, all my concepts
the page with the poem is
the page with the poem it
The schema of life insists
we feel our forward motion.
Like a Barbie drum. The droll
Drum of things thumbs
Thinginess into my system.
When I imagine lamentation,
I imagine laminating
I wanted a blue jay
in the basement,
I would never consider not burning my one sunglass a week, it is meaning replaces mouth for flipped image
heath launders
once-wetland
The police won’t give me a chicken dinner
False
parallel offers advantage.
I have often found it
a difficult pursuit, to be deemed human
Give me an infinite winter.
The sun casts my dad’s shadow
at the soldiers knees
a chunk of blackness breaking
off from the night and besmoging
the stars,
toothed belt which prevents stillness and manifests
as the feeling of mesh and emptiness
stern Platz
denial when you look in
der Spiegel
like a pool reflecting
you sir
I look at eons, eras, mountains made from oceanic trench.
a glossy flank suggests itself again,
like something you remember
Then jasper
Should he eat
& some littlefern
In place or as part
Of other hearts
I heard each toe land & knee crack
& flexed my ankles in solidarity
as if Silly Putty were an accomplishment
serrated edges to lick while the failure wafers pile up inside your wish
mother observing rat
father observing mother observing rat
excavate a new toilet if you must verify
Easter at the megachurch. My favorite silk banner is hung.
It’s shimmery pink with a purple silhouette of a dying man.
The line break is mostly vanity: wearing cologne at the airport.
Improvised explosive devices play out a song,
Inspired by the means of production, to come with me.
Orthogonal to
The zoned and the asylums
Every child wants to drive down the dirt road to the canyon alone, just to prove a point.
Carved by water Playing w the denouement
of language
It's true what you said this morning when the fog was low that roses
I stop my walk as if watching a fire
Slowly cease.
Everyone has a sweatshirt.
One hooked barb
caught on the nape
Sprouted lentils I could not keep from wilting
Poppies dropping petals from the desk
Sight will withstand seen, scene fit for
Myth, no, its allegory, story in
Search of catalyzing enzyme;
I kept them what-if-ing perhaps-ing
one indefensible angle after another
I attend the panels of elderly Marxist professors
to shout denunciations at emptying rooms
the past, hard to believe, once existed
Merrily the crowds will graze their way.
We’ve arrived at something like the end of a principle.
We change, studying what we remember
feeling the punishment of dreams.
At bedtime, I wrap the strands of my thoughts around a hug and release them into the night
My brother dove into the water
to save me, and I wish
I had waded into traffic for you.
anyway, like I told Kate on the phone,
there isn’t any real way to get anger
to count these days.
what drinks from a straw comes back to me as gold.
This is the ocean suite of lust
Easy now, the ash in your eye
skin like barracks
Night equates to sleeping for many.
Nothing can be wrong with sleeping.
Meanwhile the lapping waves bank
the clarity of coins on her clean sweeps.
All your answers are the perfect ones,
but I’m not cured.
they all began unremarkably,
with previous things presumed finished
just one huge oak out every gloomy window?
The City blister-glows.
The dialectic of enoughness which exceeds adequacy, the narratives of scarcity,
how complex and how luscious that complexity;
Have you heard of Lysander he asks me
I nod sagely, not caring the slightest bit about Lysander
Inner darkness is terrible too.
That’s not a trick
but one of the conditions.
Platinum doesn’t want to talk about the threat of reparative therapy always hanging over her head.
you hold your phone up towards yourself to know
your self, and it tells on you
If not common lucidity for now I take it all for sheer madness,
Pure stupidity.
What is the egg?
The chamber of the cactus
Exhaustion, tell me the month. Tell me
everything microchip.
whereby the neighbor urine
is a rolling steady synonym
thirteen hours at a time, placed in nursing
stations with shatterproof glass that one
howl ululating from the other side of the woods
It is an excellent time for new habits
With a couple of gin and tonics going on
And today we did not become anything
Daffy duck and a skeleton
Smoke cigarettes in the graveyard
The baroque priapism of the butterflies
Twisting in the dusty air
Neon lights above the front door displayed the new name
in genuine Joyce handwriting,
and all the condos had been rearranged
the way James Joyce would have done it.
of collect(ing)
recollections as in
off-season wavefoam
seagreen souvenirs
A whole quarry of desiccation
Yet not a drop of blood -
What sport is your philosophy?
Apprehension is detention and
Detained nothing ascends
The only difference between us and the day-hikers is water.
world collects, slurped back into the blistered quicksilver mirror, I face life
Sounds true, there’s nothing you can’t use
Or kill.
a row of apple trees stood at the back of our yard
yielding little fruit
some emotions more motivating than others
what can we do
Skip the dull parts,
with their beatdown
iron taste, droopy edges.
the possessions of the dead that once
resonated, vibrant around them.
Open to the chilly air, the possible home
Of our local raptor;
the way my hand
fell onto your hand
and made a word
And alone it was the abbess alone chosen by lot,
a sphinx wandering far from her hive.
The graver gaps in our knowledge of quill
underlit those habits
The fickle pattern of lovers dissolves in
shuddering white. Filigree structure
centurion,
Gladiolus, the trapp rock over there.
a brine of salt into separate sheath
& broken break of shed salt sinks to feed a cloistered scientist
and I’d never stayed anywhere
where I hadn’t just been told what to do
Emily Bronte, died, at thirty, of hers.
Consulted the cards
About demons to choose
Remaindered in the sun
A soft afterglow
Lighting up
the best is when all icons are uniformed
breathe from your feet
and loose, fur
unspoiled gray.
is it just another word for opening?
(more in the mornings and evenings
and on holiday weekends),
As if one could pour the sun
through a sieve, and thereby separate the fine
particles of light from the coarse.
There is a bright hole in the sky
and where once hung a bright star hangs now only bright absence.
You wouldn’t betray your Gemini or couldn’t.
And who you might be any minute was the hook.
No bench prevents two humans, stable
from distance, from bursting
But like I said, God is still human and has his idiosyncrasies.
Even more is a refined silence
and extravagant indifference.
The cop standing beside us nods, the final mutation
in a system so enormous that to think of it hurls us
Seeing for second
produces knowing
I am a language you could learn.
I am the money you should earn.
I wanted a blue jay
in the basement,