Body Double

I was the empty aquarium recycling its own water. 

From o’ to be young black & gifted

No lie, I  had to speak to the DA

Holding a book of physics essays

Thinking yo, I can’t catch another case

Blood Mittens

this is a friendly reminder 

Drone Poem

We saw precise white lettering in the sky. 

Lunch is Served on the Patio

There is no experience of unmediated desire available to us. The host city maintains that you are exposed. 

from IRL

                         In this
way the world of ambiguity
has its hospitable cont-
inents But the days Owl
onward.  

Getting Rich

I shoot holes in sports cars with a golden AK

Me Poem

(wow, look at me!)

I Haven't Said Anything Funny in a Poem in a Long Time

there are things about me

that are not to be taken lightly

Why Isn't Every Day Like the Day We Went to the Mountain

my animus recedes

today i’m ms. anima

The Oh Yeah

all free energy holds

back internal hustling 

In Charge of Approximate Titles

Dale Young

C. Dale Young

Neil Young

Die old. 

Empty Space

Describe it
as the end of the line before the end of the line.

Glossary (of the Room, Occupied)

Appendix A: Irregular Objects

What It Means to be Avant-Garde

if you kill time time kills you right back 

Delete to Receive

rolling through the space that remains of a not-so-distant cloud on the verge of maxing out, filled with variations of ordinary sunsets and faces too intimate for deletion,

Visitation

I couldn’t name by taxonomy

Elegy to the Year of the Wood Sheep

like an eye fading on a severed head

Poem with a Chainsaw

“Like someone hitting the side of a glass
With a metal spoon
[To the ear]”

Advice to the Love Worn

You too have learned to bake

Unfortunate omissions

Into an admirable lie

Different Drum

There are many ways


To repeat yourself


This is not one of them

To Scribble Down the Bright Magenta, Begin Again in the Begot Begun

In truth we reflect / each other all the time.

Februaries.

                                   What you never knew about me: in a flood,
I’m the silt underneath the abrupt and unplanned rivers.

Pouring One Out for the Petty-Bourgeoisie

It is placed into my hands, I hold onto his ears, the mouth still jerking with a waifish creak

from Blepharospasms

Your face is the new face of venous reflux.

Donkey

She shrieks a story I want blotted from my thoughts.

Premonition in Octopus Ink

Someone is peering at her from inside her, staring back at her from ahead of her, someone who lives in redness. 

Third Field Guide

a kind of fuck this moment 

Measure

To love shadows
when you call, although
dark me this
I'm still, well,

The Lost Wine

Perhaps for the sake of my heart
I dream of blood as I pour the wine. 

The Flesh and the Spirit

I took his hand, light as a bird,

and held it in my palm,
kissing the skin that made me, 

Witches

In my head I’m wicked, wise, invisible,
but only one of these things is true.

The Diving Bell

of the aching, rust-worn bell,
it might cave in;

Briar Notes

When my time comes, I hope
to slink 

In the Beginning

Renaissance and this moment
meld,

Dream-Fish

A clouded-over eye

Slime Kanji

                        a pause
in a morning of pauses. 

The Dead Zoo

What religion could remain deaf
to such meticulous cataloguing?

Other People's Lives

She makes a cup of tea, tries to read the paper. 

All We Can Talk Of

rain in the act of falling

Ossuary

the sky falls out of the sky 

Love Song

and when our boat luffed, / we corrected 

Buttons

hands put them there
chose them 

A Lion in the Sea Is not a Sea Lion

wilfully in season in every sense.

White Buffalo

the closed eyelids of her hooves 

This Ritual

from your “my brother” 

Saint Petersburg in July

a memory of tundra

          and forest, a shadow

Expat

The sick wear the same masks
as the well. 

A Young Girl Discovers Her Reflection

I want your hair, I’d say. 

Sad

Your alphabet turns chemical like the ant’s

Any Number Multiplied by Zero Equals Zero

the elastic proliferation
 / of desire

The Men I Once Knew

Lemons. Life-jacket. My thigh.


The Lyrical Sadness of a Life Half Lived

and one final, baffled complaint

against all sweet sounds and harmonies.

from From a Winter Notebook

comrades in grief and in imagination

Atrium

yes, i’m fine but i could trip on a shoelace
and smash everything at any second.


Acquaintance

no mention of celestial proportion
on your business card

Cottonwood

so what else is there to do but climb? and besides i have a favorite tree

Georgia in New Mexico

a shriveled black prune and that’s why she gave you away.

Birthdays

It’s insufficient

but without it


would be insufficient too

When You Believe You Have Not Enough Time

Resist the aperture
of message

Performative

Continue until the image is erased.

In Her Room

particles in outer space reach temperatures of millions of Kelvin

Chronos

The voice, vocoded or intentionally monstrous

Proximity Friend

swish Oral-B as you convince yourself that

Physical Education

this is how boys like me play

Asking for a Friend

as though this was any
path to knowledge. 

Hombre

The mirror won’t / wash off.

Preventable Feeling

as a day takes forgotten ways
to inform you, deleted thing

(I'm Blue) the Gong Song, or, America the Beautiful

Doesn’t matter what you call me, I made you sing.

Temporary Empathy

No matter what, an alarm

goes off 

Poem for Revolution

the Bibles and the bullets are black.

Annunciation

[Of course, light
loves a hollow.]

X, Rehabilitated

Oh, X, death is not a place
to visit.  We are already here.

The Aerial View

as the dangerous rocks 

Figures of Big Data

the sun can predict nothing but black

Granted the Pomegranate

g o n e   f o r   g o o d   f a t h e r .

On Not Screaming

and I was fine
with being quiet.

Texaco, Texaco

My parents thought I was asleep as I slipped

my tongue slowly in and out of my mouth.

Perspective

Imagine need like a battering ram

Perfect Intimations of Intelligible Forms

In the only version of your going
I can bear to concede

Office Sun

multi-million green

Lessons in Korean

I am syllabic, I am divided

by sight, by sound

from Body Language

We call aimless
that which refuses to kiss us back

The Universe

passenger in blank air

On Time

so each year wears out that sheer delay

Addiction

simulated utopias too simple to access

The Lovers

(“We can’t go there anymore”) where truth is possible yet not actual

River Letters

some of us do live in travel guides

YouTube

his pupils detonate the drowned
light of the triage ward

Binary System

        with a finite number

of blinks and a singular need
         to be seen 

To Teach a New Animal

our gods admit to spirit
around, beside, beyond, within

Democracy

in one (1) movie the woman -
           tied to a cell toilet -
     is fucked by six (6) pretend policemen.

Dallas

 private necessity
beats eating around the bush.

Raynette Turner Aged 42 Mother of 8 Mount Vernon New York

static shot:
a juror stands at        a mahogany
lectern and feels the follow
ing vowels

Les Feux D'Artifice Sont Mort

Last week I blew onto a foil pinwheel
the wind turned it round into beauty

From What Abyss of Memory

your beauty does seem to belong to a civilization
greater than my own, more effective
in accomplishing its goals.

Again, Winter

the long, white hill by a cable. She gave these photographs
to my mother, who found the actions of this teacher

Girl Says, That Happens to Women Too

I attempt to draw a line down myself
where my being black and woman
begin, end, spiral

UN-

yet and still the churches burn

A Partial List of Effects

                                This lineage I try
to reject leaves me with a partial face

Dead Inside

                      How does anyone sleep
alone in a bare room with only a Bible
& an empty cup?

Crybaby

I shoot the missiles down using my feelings or a handgun

The Visiting Scholar

You think I’m bored. Actually,
I see amputated limbs in discarded trees.

The Evidence

You’re building a vigorous case against me

I Revisit Age Four

I am a child
I still live closer to birth than death.

Something Strange

This is panic – this is accidently touching moss
Seeing a yo-yo, breathing past the graveyard

Totems

A rocketry museum with a moon rock

The Long Now 8 (Lyre)

A wound is not a world in itself

Reseda

Stranger, please.

Hallows

O pre-teen promise.

What Blooms

All monsters aren’t monsters.

Airplane, Inside the Safe

As compared to riding in an automobile
Wilbur Wright called flying “real

Poetry.”

from Blood Chit Man

If you lose an eye ★ you lose only one‐fifth of your vision but all of your sense of death ★ I mean depth ★ Fuck it

Ghost Factory

in the 150 language macaronic
enigma-twilight of the Iraq occupation

From the Kola Peninsula to Lake Baikal

beach of a littoral zone

Still Dirty (Subclip)

just doing my thing invisible style

Cloud Studies 1

a tape measure on a flat map

Taboos at Twelve

if I could break that rule
then I could break any rule

Advice from the Lights

as simple or simple-minded as the hope
to prove that you can be of use

Geography and Customs

I can’t seem to find anything

that’s an example of what I mean

Common in Trance

a phantom floorboard wish to sprawl

Guardhouse

and you are the meep on the loading dock

Postcards from Paradise

I’m your weekend warrior with a knee brace
cheering on the last to finish.

Kindred Spirits

Resignation isn’t always a form of defeat.

The Dark Net

These are the final days, and I don’t care.

from Lovechild

Music is neither essential to humanity nor corruptible, it is essential to animality.

from Waterfall Plot

Issaqueena Falls is an image

from Small Paintings

attempting a feeling of loss

Forgetting Is the Ghost that Keeps You Alive

These days it’s always something

Karl's Boys

Power is then falling asleep in a chair
And everyone sleeping in chairs
While the bed stays freshly made.

Luz

This is not kaddish
This is not rain on shabbat
This is elsewhere

Off

Flirty cartoons deliver safety instructions.

The Cecropia Moth

The fluff / of antennae

Clerk, Directed by a Computer

Keyed entries were transmitted directly into the computer.

A Scab Briefly Unconscious on 14th & Broadway

 i yelled (probably)

1073 Natoma

chaining ourselves to each
other lost at the sea

We Make Things Possible

Night stalks nothing

Job Knows Precarity in a Place Others Call Gowanus

Freud didn’t like phones says Barthes

Ah Ah Ah Adoption!

 [All people in this video is dead now. Isn’t is so terrifying]

& After the Adoption

everyone says bitches all the time

In Abeyance

I dipped my napkin in his sacred blood

Sugar Mountain

“I’ve been sick my whole life,” says Joni. How do we know which illnesses are imaginary?

Seasonal Affective Disorder

In america, you can’t trust
The flowers

Map

Nothing normal has ever happened to me

Eventually

             the poems
always outlive
             the desires

then

I imagine
now

Loss

how long ago
did her skin
start to slip

Cicatrices

we pretend marks are clear
skin stories

Translations from the Occitan

The others were severe forms of travel

Then Again No

an otherwise sequined night

I Know a DJ

Convince me
of yourself
and I’ll believe anything.

(S)preg-

An active variant moistened
could be “sparge” but now more

Spero-

Like we even had to
wrap our bodies round
slender projections

Kleng-

a cut in victory from the hip

Woody Guthrie

tall gladiolas shout their red 
flaw into the mist

June 12

true the setting is provincial but
the families don’t feel small

June 15

word is deed and only so few chances