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
Dollar signs under fluttering eyelids
The bellicose grapefruit smokes
A cigarette in the slowly light
for dizygotic oboists who foist netlabs & gastropubs
on dandified cutpurses while romancing anabaptists
looky-loo looking in windows you see the shiniest
of things, or looking at people as windows (open)
The heron knows me like no other
and he returns just when the night seems too long.
who could confess us living, garden-spire, your bright
Lightning returns to the building's tree.
Every morning is another lesson in the violence of a haphazard metaphor.
called home and brings
its phantom gusto, its blunting limbs
Stage glass has potential not
because it is made
to break but because
what if I weave
dying ash twigs into my
longleaf
Vestiges of the heat of Roman embers along the Danube.
War comes to peel away the gold braid covering
the princely cousins.
The dewiness of the grasses slaps my shoe-tops
dressed in an undersea forest, girls enjoy their floaty skirts
Storms in the Gulf & Atlantic flex their fingers
against our throats.
If I knew another more useful than you
I would definitely rather live with him.
The goal isn’t to shut down the party and take
All the fun out of the risk spectrum.
You could stand naked in front of a mirror
all day and still not see yourself
Made macaroni and cheese.
Commuted.
Amassed nothing.
hypo backward typo
fluke ineluctable
smorgasbord maw
that attracts mystics, mistakes, and doesn’t skip the skeptic. Tock.
Some flashes in the distance⎯
what are they?
as a chromaflock of hazmat-
suits
Longing in this case being impertinent to the garment, I took out my breast and said in truth I was hoping for coral to crush into sugar.
In this one the flautist takes three showers daily.
The townspeople must acquire a stenographer’s perfect circle to gyrate spirits in the century’s sock hop.
It’s a lot of small dots,
up close.
my body is not visible
pressed by Carmelite nuns
the limpets have left
The old days when the stream impressed itself
Upon him: cold, baptismal, absolute.
Fibers of his polo-shirt sliding against the black leather of his Camry.
you always say "Come out!" or
"Go inside!" as if peace is to be found
ones that drive me deeper inside
the rented house of myself, protected
by years of shiny white paint.
I tell our friends the story of how we met, once there was an orange and when they ask
for follow up I say nectarine but never anything as vivd as a cheeto, to love you
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.
Now cover your left eye and read the lowest line.
communed to a pool, the excess is divided
into separate bottled bodies which can be drunk
answer me or i cross
a nun. answer me
The twins have taken to quoting Kierkegaard.
As you can see, I've been learning French, mon amour.
winds carrying your name
coupled with mine
the way you hold light
A glossy car circles
The path watching us.
Neoclassical austerely
Wait. Outside Austerlitz
a leaf playing dead
Here is what I wanted to do: hold
each willing face in my two hands, touch
each set of lips with my thumbs.
You step out of Ken's jeep
Into the San Francisco fog, shoving
Everything baggage, sightly, swamped with generosities, glassed, everything turned
Can you be the sunrise entrance song of ocean floors.
I am all tremble and fray and torpid and molecular seams of a dusk breeze.
Maybe on the walk home I’ll carry my sandals between the middle and index of my plumage.
Likes to know which train I'm missing
Schubert who died November of 1828 chirrups.
luminous hill sides lavender quiet bath of intensity
but for once I don't think to look
in the mirror and ask if I'm the kind
of boy destined to be shot down,
if a tire pops, it'd be like gliding on air—
The attendant heaped snow on a platter and recited a poem
about spring and great faith and the plum, but
the varieties of teeth (incisor, eye, and molar)
and the way those teeth outlast us
Loved a girl who became
a laurel tree and loved
a woman who betrayed him
with another.
Layered voices, strophe and antistrophe.
What will you say
to the ones you promised
forever? You chewed down
The old days when the stream impressed itself
Upon him: cold, baptismal, absolute.
a body formed from a handful of twigs then lost
the limbless shapes a severing of stumps
The blind moon hangs over the pillars
and the burnt remains
of the cedars,
Wouldn’t tell us anything at all—
we milled outside, buzzed
with an ambient fear.
my mother
this morning
pulling back the lashes
of those eyes,
White mulberry: I spent the better part of a morning watching it grow.
Instead, you’re trapped as he smokes and tosses butts outside the airport,
no help deciphering the taxi racket, he lounges against a wall as if it’s some bar
You were kicking blankets all over the ground
I always wanted to leave California.
To exit the hunt he might be making
of downtown diners and fading public parks, well-lit places
There is no trick to the cup,
Arriving recovered to a shy deal
Though already a different photograph.
A cloth lifts
A partly landing veteran.
The storm.
––And I thought of you,
how there is no future in thought,
how all thought is remembrance disordered