Germ

One hooked barb

caught on the nape

Animal Fancy

Sprouted lentils I could not keep from wilting

Poppies dropping petals from the desk

Torque

Sight will withstand seen, scene fit for
Myth, no, its allegory, story in
Search of catalyzing enzyme;

The Bullet Guys and Me

I kept them what-if-ing   perhaps-ing 
                 one indefensible angle after another

It Rains in a Dying World

I attend the panels of elderly Marxist professors
to shout denunciations at emptying rooms 
the past, hard to believe, once existed 

The End of Politics

Merrily the crowds will graze their way.
We’ve arrived at something like the end of a principle.

Kintsugi Feeling

We change, studying what we remember
​feeling the punishment of dreams.

excerpt from THE PELVIC BONE

At bedtime, I wrap the strands of my thoughts around a hug and release them into the night

Watching you die

My brother dove into the water
to save me, and I wish
I had waded into traffic for you.

chapter 25

anyway, like I told Kate on the phone,
there isn’t any real way to get anger
to count these days.

chapter 44

what drinks from a straw comes back to me as gold.

from "Geary Street Poems"

This is the ocean suite of lust
Easy now, the ash in your eye

we turn serpent because

skin like barracks

Oblivion.

Night equates to sleeping for many.
Nothing can be wrong with sleeping.

The Sweeping in Her Arms

Meanwhile the lapping waves bank
the clarity of coins on her clean sweeps.

Man In Bad Suit Leaving Pulpit

All your answers are the perfect ones,
but I’m not cured.

Goodbye 3

they all began unremarkably, 
with previous things presumed finished 

Pale Green Poem

Dollar signs under fluttering eyelids

Pink Poem

The bellicose grapefruit smokes
A cigarette in the slowly light

Metempsychosis

for dizygotic oboists who foist netlabs & gastropubs 
on dandified cutpurses while romancing anabaptists 

Just like This with Cash Money

looky-loo looking in windows you see the shiniest 
of things, or looking at people as windows (open)

The Great Blue Heron

The heron knows me like no other
and he returns just when the night seems too long.

April, April

who could confess us living, garden-spire, your bright

Vigils: After Rimbaud

Lightning returns to the building's tree.

Velvet Touch

Every morning is another lesson in the violence of a haphazard metaphor.

Employ

called home and brings
its phantom gusto, its blunting limbs 

Continuity

Stage glass has potential not 
because it is made
to break but because

Begin today

what if I weave
dying ash twigs into my 
longleaf

Clockwork

Vestiges of the heat of Roman embers along the Danube.

Ancestry.com

War comes to peel away the gold braid covering 
the princely cousins.

The vomit emoji

The dewiness of the grasses slaps my shoe-tops 
dressed in an undersea forest, girls enjoy their floaty skirts 

North Carolina's Famous Wild Horses Emerge from Hurricane Florence Unscathed

Storms in the Gulf & Atlantic flex their fingers 
​against our throats. 

There's Another Lament I Won't Get Into

If I knew another more useful than you
I would definitely rather live with him.

I Can Remember Becoming Deeply Concerned

The goal isn’t to shut down the party and take
All the fun out of the risk spectrum.

Biopsy

You could stand naked in front of a mirror 
all day and still not see yourself 

Bildungsroman

Made macaroni and cheese.
Commuted.
Amassed nothing.

al dente

hypo     backward     typo

appliqué

fluke ineluctable

from LINGUABRASIONS

smorgasbord maw

Like Clockwork (after Andy Warhol)

that attracts mystics, mistakes, and doesn’t skip the skeptic. Tock.

The New Year

Some flashes in the distance⎯
what are they?

from FREAKOPHONE WORLD

as a chromaflock of hazmat-
suits

[In this one the derision is milk staggered with soil and I am in question as intelligentsia bewildered in dust and frayed velour]

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 lasik eye surgery is considered as well as lingerie but ultimately the decision is futile and I am corrupted by a number of needles]

In this one the flautist takes three showers daily. 

[In this one the young men say the translucent mask is an instrument of ecstasy but my pleasure source is arbitrary]

The townspeople must acquire a stenographer’s perfect circle to gyrate spirits in the century’s sock hop.

Untitled (The Largest Room in the Salon)

It’s a lot of small dots,
up close.

WHAT'S A NORMAL WAY TO DIE ON A MOUNTAIN

my body           is  not  visible

from Day

pressed by Carmelite nuns

from Day

the limpets have left

Hudson at the Museum

The old days when the stream impressed itself
Upon him: cold, baptismal, absolute.

My Fake Mom

Fibers of his polo-shirt sliding against the black leather of his Camry.

To the Heart on a Sunday

you always say "Come out!" or
"Go inside!" as if peace is to be found

Panic King

ones that drive me deeper inside
the rented house of myself, protected
by years of shiny white paint.

When you became a wing of me

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  

It Is Growing Damp

And alone it was the abbess alone chosen by lot, 
a sphinx wandering far from her hive. 

Concord & Merrimack

The graver gaps in our knowledge of quill 
underlit those habits 

The Near Continuum

The fickle pattern of lovers dissolves in
shuddering white. Filigree structure 
centurion, 

Two Kinds of Care

Gladiolus, the trapp rock over there. 

thermohaline

a brine of salt into separate sheath
& broken break of shed salt sinks to feed a cloistered scientist

I am a bad house guest, even though I try to be a good guest by minimising the amount of space I take up

and I’d never stayed anywhere
where I hadn’t just been told what to do

After a long illness,

Emily Bronte, died, at thirty, of hers.

Obituary

Consulted the cards

About demons to choose

Echoes

Remaindered in the sun

A soft afterglow

Lighting up

where's her beating on this dress?

the best is when all icons are uniformed
breathe from your feet

Landscape

and loose, fur
unspoiled gray.

DEREK

is it just another word for opening?

Visiting the Waterfall

(more in the mornings and evenings

and on holiday weekends),

Elegy: New Landscapes

As if one could pour the sun
through a sieve, and thereby separate the fine
particles of light from the coarse.

Elegy: New Light

There is a bright hole in the sky
​and where once hung a bright star hangs now only bright absence.

Slippery Gods, Not Things

You wouldn’t betray your Gemini or couldn’t.
And who you might be any minute was the hook.

To Dissect Lions, You Need Lightning

No bench prevents two humans, stable
from distance, from bursting

God Walks Out of the Room When You're Thinking About Money

But like I said, God is still human and has his idiosyncrasies.

Soldiers, Poets, Civilians

Even more is a refined silence
and extravagant indifference.

idylls for mall cop

The cop standing beside us nods, the final mutation
in a system so enormous that to think of it hurls us

Remember, Perceiving

Seeing for second
produces knowing

I Could Be Your Magazine

I am a language you could learn.
I am the money you should earn.

The Optometrist

Now cover your left eye and read the lowest line.

Trade, But Shame

communed to a pool, the excess is divided
into separate bottled bodies which can be drunk 

TO: iz (no subject)

answer me or i cross
a nun. answer me

Two Nicks

The twins have taken to quoting Kierkegaard.

Tall Grass Blues

As you can see, I've been learning French, mon amour.

Wildfires

winds carrying your name
coupled with mine
the way you hold light

Adelaide

A glossy car circles
The path watching us.

Marie on Ed Sanders

Neoclassical austerely
Wait. Outside Austerlitz

Attrition and Difference

a leaf playing dead

When I Got Drunk in Hyperspace,

Here is what I wanted to do: hold 
each willing face in my two hands, touch 
each set of lips with my thumbs. 

The Question of Selfishness

You step out of Ken's jeep
Into the San Francisco fog, shoving

Prowl of Hovering

Everything baggage, sightly, swamped with generosities, glassed, everything turned

Can You Be As Urchin

Can you be the sunrise entrance song of ocean floors.

On a Thorn Bed of Neon

I am all tremble and fray and torpid and molecular seams of a dusk breeze.

The Peacock of My Eyelids

Maybe on the walk home I’ll carry my sandals between the middle and index of my plumage.

The Machine for Destroying Nothing

Likes to know which train I'm missing

Schubert's Piano Sonata in B-flat

Schubert who died November of 1828 chirrups.

little pieces, ash over me

luminous hill sides lavender quiet bath of intensity

Waves

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,

“I Like My Women Like I Like My Cars,”

if a tire pops, it'd be like gliding on air—

This Is My Day for Crime

The attendant heaped snow on a platter and recited a poem
about spring and great faith and the plum, but

Pinconning

the varieties of teeth (incisor, eye, and molar)
and the way those teeth outlast us

Gift for Apollo

Loved a girl who became 
a laurel tree and loved 
a woman who betrayed him    
with another.

Or

Layered voices, strophe and antistrophe.

Against the Future

What will you say
to the ones you promised 
forever? You chewed down

Hudson at the Museum

The old days when the stream impressed itself
Upon him: cold, baptismal, absolute.

Between the Trees

a body formed from a handful of twigs then lost
the limbless shapes a severing of stumps

Meutestraumen

The blind moon hangs over the pillars
and the burnt remains
of the cedars,

The Animals

Wouldn’t tell us anything at all—
we milled outside, buzzed
with an ambient fear.

Vision 3

my mother
this morning
pulling back the lashes
of those eyes,

from Leafmold

White mulberry: I spent the better part of a morning watching it grow.

When You’re in Romania and Wish You Were Alone

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

When I see a Train, I Want to Take It in My Arms

You were kicking blankets all over the ground 

South Pasadena: Rage Noir

I always wanted to leave California. 
To exit the hunt he might be making 
of downtown diners and fading public parks, well-lit places

What Critics

There is no trick to the cup,
Arriving recovered to a shy deal 
Though already a different photograph. 

The Kind of Hope

A cloth lifts
A partly landing veteran.
The storm.

I know where but where where?

––And I thought of you,
how there is no future in thought,
how all thought is remembrance disordered