Month: April 2024

say together
an angry lover of words rots at
the sentence says everybody talks about their
time in the garden
names like Forsythia I hear
and then i hear little mouths say
for a living!
for my special puce olives in their brine

we’re born with an eye color
most of my friends have more than one eye
more than two colored eyes!
I have beautiful taste in the soul
yet this negator did not do it for me
so these days i spend a great deal of time
hazily removing myself
from public databases
so as not to be found

Vile and the viler the better

the extra mess up
your insurance has to make the calm call about
Then you call them back too and begin a relationship with your insurance
small dot on my face have not seen myself in at least as long as the floorboard
reap made of reeds
something else entirely
substitute teachers show up at the door
Locked
I will take my life, I said
And with a suddenness, dinner was paid for
No one knew
The run-off was boilable
A clear, direct thought in having how I would like to end up very very much unafraid of a person
and instead
only the figments that whisk around
causing a confidence leading to snoozing
on the part of whatever’s supernatural
which happens when a feeling conjures at all
The gorgeous chunk of a number
She’s a seven he’s a three
And in their minds a nine, a niner
we squeak for this opportunity to leave the earthly slat
More odor–

I only date nines and tens
it is time to amend myself
the end of writing does not end with me
what a dizzying misunderstanding being a young person has been
everyone clapping for more when the situation calls for it
Of course
And to transition into a new understatement
The only overstatement my unending sexual resumé
you deem me what
you deem me And i shut up

Congratulations winner
Live for that clip again
Live for the reality from then
you too down
I will openly explain each step
an instinct from long ago
but the curtains she said reminded her of eggs
I imagined the edges to nibble at
the crinoline edge
this will be a book about eggs
epically tall
too expensive
to get each word
down how it would be imagined
the licking behind the wind
Wands, vibrators
mickey mouse, the conductor
Fantasia of remembering rape
led up the one turning
Badges and the pageantry of fobs
the low-wrung half-pint
only the Prairie is
i’m thirty
And it no longer can be salvaged
That the programming drove me to my murder
Others’ fantasies about a gridless walden
The Salaciousnesses of a banister
like a cabin to hang on to
Utopia of everyone promising me shelter
or to sort preferred colors of m&m
make room for fuschia correlations; you have hated me into a coma
I am a whore for knowing you
Who stops now?
i disengaged so i’m not so sure what i see
it’s true what people say when they feel terrible
that’s always true
couldn’t we give them that?

I never said it wasn’t the case
I said i’m in pain
The hurt doesn’t have anything
besides its tone

an oboe

no one needs to engage this space
searching for a recipient
you subscribed me to something i don’t trash

pages in my house
no fireplace
you go to kindling
Force a house on me
photograph who looks like me in a way

searching all day through data to hunt for a likeness
My business corrugated and sexual

in its crunchy, resistant argument against air
I can slide down rocks in fluids in rhode island
The escape attempt down into nature
The world is always dying or working toward picking
whether to starve working people
unless they sneak some.

the automatic bloom of an unsatisfactory tea flower
a caffeine wash
for old-ass skin
the skin- a layer onto a computer to protect myself
To think of what a stem could do if
the thought broke
all of the legging flopping at the butt
small, vaginal holes
And I can’t be celebrated for that decision
one must take on other causes
the high-mindedness of the lack of contribution
To the suffering when you can remember how
being completely honest
You have no idea how to solve even small
Bits of burrito falling, tumbling
i could offer
onto the carpet at work
Never use you in writing
Use it but the iconoclast who uses it and makes it cool again
The maximum i have reached is unimportant
When others-it’s true-
remain more capable but don’t have the know how
But would if you explained it once for fifty-three seconds
World overall different let it turn another way
To save us from conventions
Their gaggy pacing
The email chain of expressivity no one liked receiving

My neighbor and his sexist emails in jokes
My neighbor and his racist jokes in emails

To leave your body with another body part in it
Return to a rapist after being raped in an innovative manner
And somehow it becomes oversimplified
The divine experience imparting a lack of entitlement
Some rapist denouncing the skeptical assessment of calling it rape
Because it is not taking place in a classical painting?
Would you scream to get away?
In your parents’ house? No-
In my mother’s house from fear i’d get in trouble?
No
And the chaos of that moment
The living of your lack
of value I set my hands on my lap now
I’m not here to argue with you
The world is over
And we can’t misunderstand another thing
The epic, i fear
On the luxury of miscommunication
I am everything you say i am
If it stops you from hurting
If it stops me from fixing anything
Frozen peas selected one at a time
For paranoid reasons
To eat individually
a particular pang

Fume Lapse
(Jan-June 2022)

In Fashion

5:52: a pigeon with a leaf hat. Air raid signal at Target. Long-haired elders in camo. No, the other shade of camo.

Telescopic Philanthropy

Language pays it forward, I steal it backward. Summer fog travels downwards, real estate upwards. Please disregard my texts from last night.

A Morning Adventure

15 minutes on one page, clicking on letters with my eyelash. Best burpless mega fatty delivery capsules. I follow the Roomba in my mind.

Quite At Home

Days commuting into each other. Historical light declines to a Rainforest Cafe mist. Blueish tint of glass in the 90s. (The actual 90s).

Covering a Multitude of Sins

You’re one to speak. On command, but whose. This parking garage pagoda: “It’s kind of a god’s god.”

Signs and Tokens

Firehose in an ornate dumpster. MoMa de Chao (Automania). “Mystic, poet, jester” (an ad).

Our Dear Brother

You’re the sophist’s sophist, I’m the whelp’s whelp. Fog drains between us as we sleep.

On the Watch

Overhanging trees holding shadows. Outside my window: “I’m drained. I’m drained. I’m drained.”

A New Lodger

Commercial sub-basement Ascot boutiques. “Yep: Lobster.”

Sharpshooters

What I mean is, the akashic has spoiled, and I’m irrationally afraid of the Dekalb stop. Footsteps at my back. Platform crocs in the heart of empire.

The Ironmaster

It’s like they’re replacing the apeiron, but with what? Look: a men’s health sprinkler system. A teacher’s miserable lanyard.

The Young Man

Revision’s dapple pulses back through the story, decaying sentiment. You know that look when you see it. A history of Loveless acts.

Nurse and Patient

I’m an operative in a diner booth. I am getting therapy on a bench in a corporate plaza, watching the soup timelapse on the smashed MTA wifi hub. Say it together: Loop. Lime. Asps.

The Appointed Time

“If you see something say something.” But how will I know what to say when it appears?

Interlopers

A Romantic period face, a troubadour period face. A gull asleep in the snow.

A Struggle

Days of the desire to discuss ingredients collapsing; frameworks dissolve in an incoherent middle. A couple of gulls ask for a picture. My phone dies when I photograph the sun.

National and Domestic

O sunflowers caged at the patriotic florist’s. Crisis actor at the outdoor dining structure, spot of Hellman’s on his cheek. O the grove this city’s indoor figs could make.

The Letter and the Answer

You said I don’t know how to celebrate the moment, but fireworks seem like the easiest gesture until you see them.

In Trust

“It’s a big nothing and everybody works at it.” Right!

Stop Him!

Vestigial futures dangle, and the vines too, they dangle. Failsons, subject to random search.

Closing In

Airborne concentrations of steel, manganese, chromium. “The world is right here.”

Dutiful Friendship

Poetry, like the internet, like poetry, is where I debase myself to preserve these things, but for who?

Enlightened

The forest that burnt down in highschool is adolescent now, my dad sends a pic. I forget to respond. Nintendo Music That Calms Your Mind When It’s Raining to Relax and Study To.

Obstinacy

Refusal to hold the handrails, stumbling every time the train stops. Of those to whom special thanks is given, special thanks shall be required.

The Track

The dawn bickers with each corner’s stash of shadow. The outsourced passion of relenting. I’m happy for all your actualizing.

Springing a Mine

Everything true is written in another document, which drains into this one as we sleep.

Flight

The sweat stains on the banker’s back are angel wings. That’s nice, but tread carefully, for dreams are an emerald: reversible.

Pursuit

The thing is, so much noise is being canceled here, one could almost quote unquote scream OKAY. As if on cue it would begin.

A Wintry Day and Night

Also, the man with foot rot’s whispered song sounds like my name. Tonight the ruby will visit me.

Perspective

At the testing site I’m sensed by the sanitizer station, my hands overflow with it, what accrues in being dispensed.

A Discovery

Guilt is time directed inwards, which is why it is described as a weight.

Another Discovery

10,000 cratefuls of lavenders pressed in the hole of my phone.

Steel and Iron

Foreground golden buildings, Big Gulp, background rainclouds, sunset, circumflex beads.

Beginning the World

“The poem on the following slide is sad.”

The Fish Market

The idea being that people, generally and at short distance
Would start moving away
Repelled by an interior motive impossible to explain
Like flies in the water

The lichen covering the face of rock
Growing away from the plausibility of skin
But nice enough

Each moment is so difficult

In each place at all times
The whole configuration of reality is deciding itself
Building a sky made up a lot like this one
Where I can see cloud after heavy cloud

So much for a brief sort of impression
Wherever you are abstractly I hope you can see the sky
It’s quite warm now
Almost time for dinner

 
 
 
 
**
 
 
 
 

Lichenologies
for Damian Liu

All over the ground-flaked
green’s initial impulse, the light
creeps under what
is now
suspicious
golden—
impossible proof,
or,
what the snow hides.

Then I
look
for first rocks. Sliding
down the hill,
now first in
the valley sludge—
impossible
green.
Two rats
show their teeth
beneath the roots, into
the melting
afternoon,
turn left,
uncertain moves,
like that.

If the creases
prepare, exasperating,
we’re present. This is
beyond it. In the
red-line cave, words
creep toward
their mossy figures,
suspicious gold.
And here the moon
forms into signs
of movement.
Here the smell
of fresh rot makes
soundings into movement, words form
to rough intention, shadowed cold
in the mediate surroundings.

What
we say
and where we say it. Dripping
on the map, snowy.
We creep down icy
through the tunnels,
swim quick
into the marrow.
Snowy and depth-charged in the evening.
Everything like that.
Speaking
in smaller pieces.
Wetter,
drier.

 
 
 
 
**
 
 
 
 

Dream Critique

He kept an image of a leaf in mind and eventually we
Moved in and weaned off an older standard and looked

Into those palm-sized mirrors and spied a handcarved case
With a tawdry wind as I heard you call it.

Waited and waited for what I wished for and whispered
Had it not yet dried.

And in a divine capacity he steals your books and tapes
With forethought all throughout and then with a drink,

Wanting all night to hear poems dripping from leaves beside the sea
And you gluing them together.

But something she said that night about materiality and it seemed wrong
It’s our turn to say it now and it seems wrong,

And even ten years post facto in the haze, she was
Improbably brilliant on the sea.

Look now at all that vanity, that lust for fame, look how they vaunt
Their cold cachet

Taking their thoughts remanded but to vomit
The sunken eyes and tints,

And a white stone on a white stone and the planes
On which their fantasies play out.

And now three glasses deep in dreams they say it
But it’s wrong they have no hearts & have no lungs,

Their bottles only bottles and their friends
All wrong, and how can they stand the distance.

Tonight rain drenching a world in which the world
And water that drips from sky onto the leaves,

Sold out of mixed-grain sourdough in a second and that way every
Day another and another.

Picture what all appears to the machine,
Springtime Chicago,

Hour after hour the implosive music…