Trance Essay for Remembering Smells

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 

Polyphemus Butchering Odysseus's Man

Today the library is loud
The books are like untuned guitars
My life is like an ugly song
On radios in distant cars

the atmosphere is not a perfume it is odorless

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

A Field Mentality

You are the voice
inside the engine
earth so

Future Cities

cleft / embattle scorched earth
shake every historical foundation

Dissect Recurrent Theme

Between twilight monstrosities find the flight of 
a tawny owl, serene stillness, fade of pine inhaled;

Complicity

they grow their long, pale, vermicular bodies and the tiny
     helmet-like shells they use to bore the tunnels

Eau de Nil

can’t hold a candle to the surface of the Gowanus
     when it reflects the two nearby drum-like light vivid green

Air After Fireworks

initial gasp at vibrant suddenness or past captivation by aromas
     arrowing in my direction in a diagram of the kitchen, all my concepts

Another Way of Looking

the page with the poem is
the page with the poem it

Little Plump

The schema of life insists 
we feel our forward motion. 

Opening (the Inside) (the Beginside)

Like a Barbie drum. The droll
Drum of things thumbs
Thinginess into my system.

Lamentation

When I imagine lamentation,
I imagine laminating

The Arrival of St. Wolf

I wanted a blue jay
in the basement, 

Sleep and Poetry

I would never consider not burning my one sunglass a week, it is meaning replaces mouth for flipped image

Headland Ambit

heath launders
once-wetland

Everything You Need to Know

The police won’t give me a chicken dinner

Whiplash

                              False
parallel offers advantage.

Introduction to Abnormal Behavior

                            I have often found it
a difficult pursuit, to be deemed human

SUN RISES ON THE AMERICAN EMPIRE YET AGAIN, TO MY GREAT DISDAIN

Give me an infinite winter.

PHOTO OF MY DAD IN GUATEMALA STANDING IN FRONT OF A GRAFFITIED WALL THAT READS “CENTRAL AMERICA ANOTHER VIETNAM FOR THE IMPERIALIST YANQUI,” 1986

The sun casts my dad’s shadow 
at the soldiers knees

MY MOM THINKS SHE SEES A UFO OVER GUATEMALA WHILE SITTING AT THE BUS STOP JUST BEFORE THE EARTHQUAKE OF 1976

a chunk of blackness breaking
off from the night and besmoging
the stars,

The Knife

toothed belt      which prevents stillness and manifests
as the feeling of mesh and emptiness

Poundbury

stern Platz
          denial when you look in 
der Spiegel
          like a pool reflecting 
you sir 

Inspirational

I look at eons, eras, mountains made from oceanic trench. 

Breakwater

a glossy flank suggests itself again,
like something you remember 

CAUSAE ET CURAE

Then jasper
Should he eat
& some littlefern
In place or as part
Of other hearts

False Spring

I heard each toe land & knee crack

& flexed my ankles in solidarity

Porous Incunabulum I Found in the Washroom

as if Silly Putty were an accomplishment

Apology for Dadaism

serrated edges to lick while the failure wafers pile up inside your wish

Cubism’s Just Deserts

mother observing rat

father observing mother observing rat

The Pontification Factory and Its Siblings

excavate a new toilet if you must verify

These Squatting Girls in Black Spandex

Easter at the megachurch. My favorite silk banner is hung.
It’s shimmery pink with a purple silhouette of a dying man.

Then This Crazy Pony Put His Nose Into My Hands

The line break is mostly vanity: wearing cologne at the airport.

Inter-Services Intelligence

Improvised explosive devices play out a song,
Inspired by the means of production, to come with me.

Marina

Orthogonal to

The zoned and the asylums

Did I Know Then The Sun On My Face

Every child wants to drive down the dirt road to the canyon alone, just to prove a point.

The Birth of Mother

Carved by water Playing w the denouement
of language

Closed Circuit

It's true what you said this morning when the fog was low that roses

Breathing Days

I stop my walk as if watching a fire
Slowly cease.

March Time

Everyone has a sweatshirt.

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 

As Long As I'm Not Left Alone

just one huge oak out every gloomy window?

Deep in the Emerald City,

The City blister-glows.

Contraflow.

The dialectic of enoughness which exceeds adequacy, the narratives of scarcity,   
how complex and how luscious that complexity;

LYSANDER, ET AL

Have you heard of Lysander he asks me
I nod sagely, not caring the slightest bit about Lysander

Initial Report from the Explorer

Inner darkness is terrible too.

That’s not a trick
but one of the conditions.

From the Jeopardy! category, "Lesser Known Lesbians"

Platinum doesn’t want to talk about the threat of reparative therapy always hanging over her head.

"The Self, i.e. in a Field."

you hold your phone up towards yourself to know
your self, and it tells on you 

The Mark

If not common lucidity for now I take it all for sheer madness,
Pure stupidity.

Aleph

What is the egg?
The chamber of the cactus

Data Gathering Module

​Exhaustion, tell me the month. Tell me
everything microchip.

Melt Into The Pantheon

whereby the neighbor urine
is a rolling steady synonym

Mankind

thirteen hours at a time, placed in nursing
stations with shatterproof glass that one

Why People Look Different from the Inside

howl ululating from the other side of the woods

On Darling Green

It is an excellent time for new habits
With a couple of gin and tonics going on
And today we did not become anything

Beautiful Flower Poem

Daffy duck and a skeleton
Smoke cigarettes in the graveyard

A Sea Conversation

The baroque priapism of the butterflies
Twisting in the dusty air

At the James Joyce House

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.

Groundage

of collect(ing) 
recollections as in 
off-season wavefoam 
seagreen souvenirs

First Principles

A whole quarry of desiccation
Yet not a drop of blood -
What sport is your philosophy?

Filling the Fragment

Apprehension is detention and
Detained nothing ascends

Manual

The only difference between us and the day-hikers is water.

haram

world collects, slurped back into the blistered quicksilver mirror, I face life

The News

Sounds true, there’s nothing you can’t use
Or kill. 

Coat of Arms

a row of apple trees stood at the back of our yard
yielding little fruit

Ghost

some emotions more motivating than others
what can we do

Whale Poem

Skip the dull parts, 
with their beatdown
iron taste, droopy edges. 

Flight of the Owl

the possessions of the dead that once 
resonated, vibrant around them.

What's more

Open to the chilly air, the possible home
Of our local raptor;

Laugh Track

the way my hand
fell onto your hand
and made a word 

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 Arrival of St. Wolf

I wanted a blue jay
in the basement,