May 2024
after seeing Arthur’s City Park, September 30, 2023, at the NYC AIDS Memorial
directed by Nick Hallett

 
~
 

Scratch loop
Hocket
Left pocket
Headrush

Peter pipes a perfect pickle
Peter passes David a note

Pterodactyl
Tesseract
Koala
Interval

(P-Idea: Opening the inner valve of the poem)

“Wheee!” down the cello slide
“Wheee!” down the retina’s ear

 
~
 

CLAM = CALM
OYSTER = STORYE

Restore the story to its previous elegance
Upholster the metaphors, bevel each caesura
Button down the assonance, make it mean

Eminently, huffily, synergistically
Especially for you & only you fuck it

Break all the lines hah yes yes!!
I’ve done it already—

look! There’s Alex picking up
the psaltery bow of metaphor

How about you put on that record
Aren’t you wearing that hat?
Why yes
Who says “why yes” anymore
Here have these samosas
Samosas & pickles my favorite

 
~
 

CITY PARK
PITY RACK
ICKY TARP
PICKY RAT
PARTY ICK
TACKY RIP
CAKY TRIP
PRICY KAT

 
~
 

Among all the things I could pity
It’s myself that I pity the most
Perched on that bench so pretty
Ain’t I witty ain’t I lost

 
~
 

Once I found the river’s reverb it began to echo in my ear
An art to it, an artlessness: river reviver rehear

 
~
 

Lea & Shawn spin records into oblivion
Parsa sends syllables through the canopy

ENVIRONMENT at the AIDS Memorial

St. Vincent’s hospital O Vincent saint of poverty
O ancient husk of sound of body
O syllabic prayer O unbecoming park O park of some becoming
of revelation evolution eventuality invitation

 
~
 

It’s been so long that I forget the music
It’s been so long that the music stays gone
It’s been a psaltery I’ve been reading Robert Glück
Who Charles Theonia calls Bob in the poem
I can’t call him Bob I’ve never met him
Let alone Jesus
Hello J how was your day today
Good thanks wanna fuck

 
~
 

Nat unfurls an electric note
Crouched above the rain of his guitar

Nick unfolds triangular time
Ensemble memory-flecked
Ground damp, future isosceles
Or scalene or equilateral or

 
~
 

Guide me, Margery, through this island of shit
Manhattan’s mad and Reuben’s madder
On the sidewalk our dog empties her bladder
In Margery Kempe I hear the chatter of angels

 
~
 

[Jim Hodges, “Craig’s closet,” granite and bronze, 90 x 57 x 28 1/2 inches]

Arthur practiced cello in a closet in 1970, the sound too secular for the Buddhist commune where he
lived. Jim builds a closet in the park in 2023 to hold the memories of the living and the dead. A rack of
clothes heavier than clothes should ever be. A jumble of boxes immortalized in stone. If a park can hold a
closet, can a closet hold this sound? If a closet holds this sound, can a man hold this memory?

MEMORY at the AIDS memorial
M-E-M-O-R-Y . . .

 
~
 

Everything’s lost and everything’s fine
Everything’s saved and nothing is fine
Everything’s saved and everything’s fine
Everything’s lost and nothing is fine

EVERYTHING NOTHING
SOUND
[ ]

A fine fall breeze
A fine tree
Fine leaf
Fine I’ll have sex
Fine I’ll make dinner

 
~
 

Artist of discontinuity under September’s silver disc
Artist of kissed opportunity under the century’s viral risk
Artist of missed perspicacity under this cloud’s oval hiss

 
~
 

(P-idea: Lie ear-down on the floor of an elevator then ride to the bottom and back up again.)

 
~
 

Musical chairs
Best by: MM-DD-YYYY

Whistle wallop
Glister glimpse

Chkn w/ fries at 45 rpm
A erhu busker on the F line at W 4th

 
~
 

(P-idea: Have sex wearing noise-cancelling headphones.)

 
~
 

Hay fever! It’s that time of year
Aren’t you a good egg
Don’t you snore at night
Isn’t your skin the softest
Isn’t your heart impure
Isn’t your love the realest
Isn’t desire unsure
Isn’t this the park where we met
Isn’t it spring
Aren’t we going to the spa
How about some ice cream
Isn’t the shop closer
Isn’t it here

 
~
 

Cornea
Counterpoint
Arthur’s retinue

Placing a note on the lip of the fountain
Placing a hmmm on the cusp of the tongue

Sing like an iceberg, says the Instagram reel,
dark blue in its crumbling
Whoop like a hedgerow, namely

Reel meaning real me-ning meaning reel

[Da capo al fine]

 
 
 
 
 
 
**
 
 
 
 
 
 

WEDNESDAY NIGHT MUSIC AT TANGIBLE BOOKS

If there are many flowers, the lilacs c’mon strong,
but there weren’t any, ever,
just a bunch of letters
in some or another bundle, many
not even indexed to anything you could see.
That is in fact most. Maybe, in fact, all.
With listlessness so ever present
and so unearned overhead these iliac plains
we are so thoroughly caught up in,
what is there to do with this
life so awful chthonic,
but get out of our own groins and navels
and on to bluer skies, less
haggard landscapes higher
up?
—But who has strength for
a will so hefty as to
ward off all that kneejerk abstract
come straight from our fundament
to our minds, direct, in these dark times
which spurn, of what has worth,
it all on our behalf?
asks a voice
from afore a nice evening spent
a part of some sparse audience
amid the dust, across from music.

Now is different. Now I see:
ember (undying) beneath the steam,
concrete, that
in the gap between people,
and a solitary ballasting fact
(heedless of and having everything
to do with us)
of the unbroken daisy chain
of personal transmissions
of what exceeds all
sputtered graspings at
(which are forever stalling,
failing, for want of better tongue or
piece of paper)
of this
(which must be, which will continue,
which can be in part construed as, when heavy compressed,
when said, when crude,
when this communication is what culture is
(it is): the beyond and after of the horizons
the daisy chain falls back and onward into).

Then again, often, I am thinking,
and have a lot I think I want to say.
Often what it is is: I wrote a poem once.

 
 
 
 
 
 
**
 
 
 
 
 
 

HMBURGER MN, OR: THE HEART

“Hmburger mn, coc ure & wi
rom moun o ooe eh ripping come
etchup out hi hmburger woun”
said my keyboard, whose home row
recently was broke,

So much the same as hmburger mn,
so weep the little children
of his sad fate.

I can smell the grease from here:
putrescence, fat drips
decohering as ersatz:
sweat, tears. Anything of use
sloughed off in
some inferno,
(perfect broast
on their backs)
as if the black skins
of half chickens
at Pollo Express,

Transmuted to some poor creature
come to in the instant it
must give up the ghost.

Also the heart
so pink in the flesh,
and so weak,
as a weeping infant.
In xerox: all gray,
dry. This heart of mine.

At home, against the news
it says: Love is
an ugly riddle.

But on the bus sometimes,
I think it’s not so right,
or: it is but
I’ve solved it,
simple,
after all this time.

To think: love,
a person among people,
on the bus sometimes.

 
 
 
 
 
 
**
 
 
 
 
 
 

CLASSIC JOKE

Did you hear the one about
?
What about the one above?
I heard another, positioned
some other
way near the door, maybe,
“bouta dip”
was the general mood
then, with it, as it were,

but what of it I heard I
can’t quite call up to
mind right now.
Anyway enough with these fucking
jokes, let’s get
serious, and down to business,
let’s have the courage
to face the world and today

with our talking full of points,
our letters wan little, pallid
pale little things, actual
-ized in their inner reaching in
-to naught but pasteboard masks,
but pointers: to something
other than themselves
is all what is important,
let’s us all be

adults out loud, let’s copy our letters
all their smallness, those fair transparencies.
Look, I mean, behind you’s
so important; look behind:
the whole world.

 
 
 
 
 
 
**
 
 
 
 
 
 

(SCENE: THE PERSONALS SECTION)

BE MY MIRER
Gots to be: selcouth, nigh inenarrable,
a tongue that love fennel & stay fecund with taste,
metaphor-burdened,
& out-of-there view: half-lost but that ain’t news, ain’t no
harbinger of adriftness from the standard rout
like a case of metaphysical pica, mind all insular, pied

on itself, type of mind like NO entry posted,
but over there the side door swinging a smidge,
hopes of a flock glimmers in
from far off,
then say to them: brighten this inside,
inoculate me, gimme your antique cure.
— One-of-a-Kind Dime

DEAR DIME,
Ain’t no self-styled bodhisattva coming possible
in these dharmic hinterlands, hence the ego attachments
like: I been knew intrinsic truths; I been my own chief persecutor;
I done trembled before death; I stay on that ‘I am’ parataxis.
My kjv remix read ‘Seek ye the illusory’ which mean see yourself.
Self-myth as quick as a chessboard queen. Narrative, life = husband & wife

which always already been the situation.
So why not love myself & mine,
embrace the bulk protruding phallic
as a tree behind my forehead? Why risk paralysis
rejecting the false me when all of me false?
Other words: I feel you heavy means I fear the scythe’s interception.
–Just a Mire-age

The respondent waits weeks to no avail, fearing they came off too bold.
They have no way of knowing, much to the contrary, the poster found them too dull.
The poster, for their part, is very lonely.
They have only loneliness in common.
The loneliness would have been enough.

In another world, they met & fell in love.
In yet another, they met & killed each other.
In still another, the mushroom cloud put a stop to their second date.
In still yet another world, neither of them reached the personal nadir which,
in this world, drove them to so blatantly misuse the classified section.
In a strange & far-flung world, bards will sing of the poster’s exploits,
in this poem left unwritten, for a thousand years.
In that same world, they are enemies & have a secret affair.
In the majority of worlds, neither of them were born.

the color of love

I love poetry, but it’s a death cult

Of love, non stop repetitive chiming of the I

I love language but I hate the way

We use it, we use

The bad shit we do with it

Constant renegotiation of the text with its particulars

Fragmented bright phenomenal quality

To break down the face of meaning

A kind of freely burning syntax

But my syntax doesn’t repent

To clear out these blades of light and reveal a pattern

To work your life out

To black out for a week straight

To do it for the money, to use that money

To fund your life, your education

When the academy spits out a hundred bright blue scars

The color of love, a symptom of that

It makes me feel helpless when I think about it

Everything is so loaded

Viewing an aerial photograph of a forest on fire

Mediated by the blue light of the screen

So loaded with eventuality

It’s not like I want to write poems about how fucked everything is

I feel sick mostly, it’s local

To the signs, to think of what we do

To them, to each other

In the long hallway of incident, this bright unfolding

When memory becomes a hinge to violence

To coat the moment with some kind of charged gesture

A powder I snort until I get localized

By a feeling, or

It’s more like in every picture we’re all so blurry

Cuz we’re always running away from the past

When the future breaks us up

I always choose the more floral option

I find myself lit by the perpetual music of the market

Watching reality bloom on television

I fictionalize a concern

I work my brain off in thick resolution

What does tolerance mean to you, what does love

I listen to Sade’s ‘Kiss of Life’

Eighty times in a row then fall against the hard perimeter

Of a day spent fragmenting into value

But look at the sky, it’s the color of love

Everyday

So much of what good poetry does is to destabilize

A concern we all feel so haunted by

I feel haunted in the CVS, the ambient suicide light

Of desire reintegrated

To recognize that actual human flowering as a kind of love

A material consciousness through which the fabric

Of our wanting gets filtered

Brittle light falling against my brain and my hair

I light the same cigarette you do, I shake in the spring air

Bereft beneath lights I walk a feeling back on repeat

I obliterate meaning so I’m nowhere

But I don’t wanna be there

I think the project then is a kind of scraping

Of the plaque off the localized idea of what it means to be

Or a collectivized embrace of the rot

Inside the completely shredded register

Of a collective moment

To incentivize and propagandize dissent

Is probably the best thing we can do

It’s a blessing just to stand here

Adjacent to the hum of love

The feeling of love

As a kind of runoff of the total immolation inherent

In this era we glide through

Catching on things, obliquely

We’re always chasing something real

And falling backwards into the shadow of it

That’s called grace

To place the sky directly above us and bend the light back

Into something focal and true

An hour spent thoughtless like glass

Wet pavement reflecting a ragged light

Back into the faces of the ones we love

But my intentions are completely porcelain

I mean I shatter them anyway

Settling back into a kind of bright relief

As my landlord pins her eyes on the future

The law stays bright

The sky refracts back into a field of percentages

The color of love becomes

A shield of almost nothing, a transparent

Hole in the middle of consumption

Something real to rot inside of

Something totalizing to run my mind through

Not like water but like the smooth

Dewy morning halo, the drone of the sun

In the brittle shimmer hole, the corporate blur

Mediated by this thin network

Of vulnerability, the afterimage

I weave the bad light back

Into the fabric of what I’ve lost

And because I was so flattened by the idea

Of success, harshly streaming

Awkwardly holding up my private life

Knees buckling, head backlit by advertisements

I watched my fear spread out like lightning

Bright in the night, we’ll fall asleep

But we won’t dream

Fuck it, just look at the sky now

It’s the color of what love could mean

we are obligated to love that which destroys us

like fashion is a little death
to the senses
I want the dull violence
of something stupid
and meaningless
to plug my mind into
a stunning lack of
inspiration I want it
like rain absently tapping
on the back wall
of what braids us back
into the real
whatever life is
a constant bridging
of thresholds a sequence
of little deaths
little mirror reflecting
what writing is
an arrogance I think
the constraint of
the avant-garde
is fucking useless
a washed out
ego trip the senses rip
and nightly I return
to the room where
all light goes to die
in the poem
in disappointment
ennui, literal memory
loss, dumb light
streaming from the eyes
the industry does love
true love
self-destruction is the hum
we love to live in
the negative of
a belief isn’t
really a lack it’s
just honesty in
the singular, honey
in the air, language
braided into measure
weak conceptualism
made to look radical
enough for a buyout
I just want
to entertain you
tonight, my loves
my little nightmares
diffusing into non-descript
tokens of light
like music or a kind of
logocentric tinnitus
sublimating into drops
whatever blank timeless
and framed by all this
moonlight and reticence
really, it’s cool
to fall apart
it’s exhilarating
standing at the edge
of the night
wiping away
the day’s clotted epiphanies
and misplaced pleasure
a polyphonic series
of soft rituals
and the residue
on my hands, whatever
we need to convince
ourselves this shit
is worthwhile caught up
in the repetitive acts
of daily life
the ceremony
of quiet returns
we adjust
we ribbon out
beneath the gesture
before the mural
in reception
as it straddles
the burgeoning affect
the stylistic and the prophetic
the total occultism
of waking up
adjacent to the heart’s
mediocre symmetry
we want that
we want it matte black
and suffering
the serene blackout
of night above a field
lace covers our eyes
we go to sleep for three days
wake up renewed
that’s deathless
render it
perpendicular to the new
dreaming it’s all about
exactions, shot material
little hand like a curtain
over the mouth
that’s childhood
that’s subjectivity
split into segments love
a proximity to stars
what kind of stars
a prosody of stars
shot melody eating away
a brittle polarity
there in the song
that’s definitive
there in the heat
of the procession
the street
pulsing forward like a wave
and your head opening out
like the idea of a style
poetry isn’t a substitute
for living, I know that
but it makes things
bearable when the night looks
like a death’s head pinned
against a fucked up sky
and the present fades
into place all around us
that’s just me standing
in the middle of an era
inventing new reasons
to lean against you
and wear the absolute like
a dress, a pretty absence lit up
and streaming back
through the hyperliminal
why shouldn’t I, I want
the little deaths
the motive flung
back against a formless
total current humming
in the body brittle like
a feeling got caught
in the back of the throat
that I could sing this
an arrogance, a partial
paring away of what I was
and who I had to be
to get there, shaking always
a nexus of light
and syntax constant
ringing, constant sound
then nothing for hours
when you held me
up to the night so casually
I kind of lost all sense
of who I was and what
I was supposed to do
then the hours shot back
through the open mouth
of what I had back then
I just want you
to take it seriously, ok
tilt the idea back
and let it all drain
through the corridor
it’s so isolating
and human
to believe so utterly
in aesthetics
it’s fucked honestly
how much I care
about what you think
I mean, life is mostly
just instinct
time falling out of your head
like rain
and the light just goes
a horizon of outcomes
I’ve done a lot of bad shit
I think most institutions
are satanic, I pay a lot of money
to break myself in half
I’m into love
stimulation
of the limbic catalog
the sky fragmenting
and constantly lit up
by an ever increasing need
to fuck up my whole day
overcast sky just
locking into my head
thinking pattern
bloodless and true
it makes me kind of
feel sick watching it
turn the world in winter
light looks healthy
watching the birds
come apart so utterly
it felt like reality
or what I imagine reality
feels like when
you let it happen to you
without reservation
I’m sort of immobilized
by the way that I think
things through
the latter half of
a decade spent
oscillating in the blacked out
chamber of my own ego
spitting out sunlight
and reciprocity ascending
a gauze I bleed my way
through every day
I have no fucking clue
where this light will end up
or where the day goes
when night gets draped
over everything
like a mood or a shawl
uncompromising
brightness filtered
through a lack so lit
it replicates the moon
it’s been autumn
in my mind for like
three years now
and I’ve been blending this
idea of experience with
this idea of what the past
looks like
when you drop it
and watch the morning light
recede like it’s spiritual
and so filled with necessity
a bundle of pain receptors
like whatever
I integrate the sky
into my daily life
and pull the mask
of my face down
whenever I need some relief
in the quiet dark
I was bold
and the song was unfurling
from my head like
a ribbon of literal blood
and what does that make me
now that I’ve seen
the face of god up close
it’s exactly like I always
imagined it
fucking freaky

Women

Women still must be sexy in order to command attention.
Men continue being completely on the nose. There really is
a famous very rich male artist Painting very large
paintings Of mutilated vaginas And calling them Dead
Mother In the midst of a divorce in which he isn’t allowed
To talk to his little daughter and the paintings
Are priced at a million dollars. He’s just arrived
In Los Angeles with his very young little girlfriend
For his opening. It’s her first trip
to America, she’s an Italian
beauty pageant queen. Her sixty-eight
year-old boyfriend’s ex wife
complained that she would never have any power
with him. “She knew what she was getting into,”
said his gallerist over the phone to someone. His girlfriend
smiles sweetly. She’s definitely going on shopping sprees
which I respect. At the opening she looked lonely,
kept stepping outside, so I said “how are you” in a way to invite her
to conversation if she needed it, but she walked away quickly.
I feel like a servant around her. We’re not that different,
I want to tell her, she just has those Givenchy boots.
About “Dead Mother” none of the press had any questions.
As mute as if they were at a lecture for a required class.
The artist loves to say that women
have a natural access to blood, while men
can only access it through war,
circumcision or hunting. What about doctors?
I want to ask, but I’m only an assistant. I no longer
menstruate. My IUD has finally cut off
my natural access to blood. The artist
talks about his colors, his famous blood red and
electric blue which looks nothing like the sky
but he speaks not on the flat pale Crayola flesh tone
of the body of the mother whose vagina he’s torn apart
to access her blood. Who is she? Kris Jenner, a famous mother
wanted to meet the artist and see his paintings, so on Sunday
morning when the gallery was closed I came to turn
on the lights for her and to offer her water. She was just like she is
on TV! She gave club and restaurant recommendations
to the artist’s girlfriend while the artist took phone
calls and made her wait. She gifted the artist
a SKIMS blanket for his long plane ride back to London
or Venice or Miami. Actually he’s going to the Bahamas
She mentioned her daughters a lot and said Kylie
was building a new house again with walls
big enough for these big bloody paintings. She wore a black
velvet leisure suit and arrived in a black Escalade
her driver kept running for the entirety of the visit.
I talked to her bodyguard Alfonso, who said everything
would work out for me. Then Kris asked for a cappuccino,
and while I was running across Santa Monica Blvd to buy one
from the LGBT center, I got hit by a car and I died

 
 
 
 
 
**
 
 
 
 
 

Hollywood of the North

Paul Thomas Anderson was filming a movie
in the town in which I was born and raised
far away from hollywood. My dad refers to it
as Hollywood of the North. I knew a scene
from Indiana Jones had been filmed there,
at the university. Fat City is a film
about this town. I’m sure there have been other scenes filmed there
but not in a long time, and never by paul thomas anderson.
I wrote paul thomas anderson a letter.
I gave it to my cousin to pass it along
because my cousin was somehow involved.
my cousin printed the letter and said he would hand it to him
in person. But I never heard back from paul.
My dad kept referring to him as Paul Anderson.
Paul Anderson never got back to me.
My cousin put me in touch with paul’s location manager
whom I kept bothering to give me a job on set.
Finally they said I could come up
and keep pedestrians from walking in the street
during a car chase scene. So I drove north
through wind and rain and tumbleweeds
and I stopped pedestrians from walking into the frame
while three actresses ran from the bank to the getaway car
over and over again. You never know
what the public will do when you tell them to stop walking.
Some people get angry and say you are keeping them
from work or the bus stop
or court. Some people yell “Officer!” and some people
take their phones out and film the scene over
your shoulder. i was grateful for the opportunity
but I realized that to run away with the circus
would be to continue running away from my dream
of being a writer. So I quit hollywood of the north and went back to work
at my full-time job at an art gallery
in actual Hollywood. Much like hollywood of the north
actual Hollywood is a place that doesn’t exist.
Sometimes at work I’m afraid the world will start
ending, and because of all the traffic
I won’t be able to get out of hollywood
I won’t be able to get back to my apartment
to die with my boyfriend. I’m afraid of dying
in a place that doesn’t exist
because it will say of my life: you did not exist.

My cousin who helped PTA, he is my mother’s first cousin
once removed. When I was in high school
he opened a bar, and I gifted him an original painting
of an image I found on Google images.
It was a painting of many martini glasses
in many different colors. My cousin hung it
Inside his bar, and it became a lucky painting
for the owner of the local hockey team.
The hockey team owner wanted to buy my painting
so my cousin sold it to him. i never saw the painting again
and i never knew how much it sold for.
I never saw any money.
My dad used to refer to that painting as my Andy Warhol painting
and to this day he still refers to it as that.

 
 
 
 
 
**
 
 
 
 
 

Men

At the opening of Patrick Jackson’s show
Liquid Clay at François Ghebaly
sheets of glass balanced atop sheets of glass
on which were arranged multiple
of the same domestic objects
such as pots, towels, dishware, and teddy bears.
The sculpture with the teddy bears
was called “Teddy Bears” and it made me
remember the time I was playing
basketball with my cousins after school
when our parents weren’t home and a man
in a car packed with stuffed animals
pulled up and asked if he could play.
My oldest cousin told my sister
and I to go inside, and my sister
was wearing a red bow. The abundance
of visitors to the opening made the artist
nervous (his sculptures were glass
balancing on glass) and soon the gallery
started to kick people out. By this time
I was on my way to my old college roommate’s
thirtieth birthday party, to which
I brought a book of photographs
of the home of Elizabeth Taylor
whose final husband was from the same town
in which my cousins played basketball
with that man. My friend
introduced me to her new boyfriend’s
roommate and I could tell immediately he was
looking for a girlfriend that night. Something
about a twenty-nine year old mild-mannered man
going above and beyond in conversation
in an apartment courtyard in West Hollywood.
My friend’s mother pulled me aside and said,
“We have to find somebody for Wyatt”
and I nodded though I knew everyone
at that party was taken. Then the party moved
to Saddle Ranch, an Old West-themed bar
and restaurant on Sunset Blvd, which has a
mechanical bull that in the past I had ridden
to completion. I went first and failed to live
up to my reputation. Each
member of the party failed
to hold on as well. Then Wyatt mounted
the mechanical animal. His long
limbs flailed with each sharp pivot
and the longer he clung on, the more interest
he drew from the crowd. Then the bull
gave its three final thrusts
and a little shake before it came
to a stop beneath him.

 
So lost inside this visiting bruise
Eyes fastened, a husk of prior revolts

Blue tearlight clogs your prayers
Through their looser slats

When I spot you in the morning
Splayed like dormant magma
seeping past containment
My dog smiles very hungry
at the rivers rivering down
your blue forearms

Like an ill historian
my dog sniffles and my dog thinks

And in her blank, citiless mope
your blank and citiless next life

congeals as a cloud be
tween two foul confusions

 
 
 
 
**
 
 
 
 

 
One slowblue huff down the aircraft cabin

Lifeless forearms curtain the aisle

You part them with resignation

Glum pinches of light burn

blue off the carpet

Soon there’ll be none

no electricity left

in this tired dirt

(So much is already

swimming towards the sun

Like billions of sperm or billions of minutes

Spent on unresolved grief

Huddling in a warhead, frivolous)

I look you under a bridge

in this park in late july

quivervox out some damaged speaker

some speaker, damaged blue

it didn’t belong to anybody

It didn’t belong to you or me

Two cannibals

weeping in a park

passing under damned airplanes

dewy papercuts

on our thoraxes

Once, on earth, there was theft

Now there is sloth

And a blue dent in your mouth

where the battery never fit

 
 
 
 
**
 
 
 
 

 
At the agora everyone glares

One paranoid tryst unites all god’s critters

In shimmering antisociality

Music grips the boardwalk

Feral threats hiss behind

smiling faces

When I arrive at your castle

Alligators deliver me

Baskets of oranges and alligators croon at me

Of bygone destiny

Of skeletons disintegrated with the biological vertigo of wet love

Of rapturous clarion politics

And i say that’s fine but

my knees are sore my teeth are stolen

there is a soup beneath my house

blubbering and scalding

like manatees stranded

beneath a venutian summer

Two hours later

Gatorblood yolky

on my hands

on the glaring face

of my glaring mirror

Breathless martyr complex

Bound inside a prism of prolactin

 
 
 
 
**
 
 
 
 

 
Battery is an energetic crime
to which every living creature
commits unchanging

I think
when the sun finally sinks
into the broad stomach of the horizon

I will break a screwdriver
inside your ignition

and all the poems we wrote apart will melt together
like hot steel
on an untended highway
somewhere below los angeles
animalic, afloat

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
**
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
**
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
**
 
 
 
 
 
 

BLOOD LASER

 
i have come to know girlhood & unfortunately am still there:
folded in the rain room face apocalypse
failure not the movement of fluidity though certainly its residual
& agency leaky a spokesperson antique authority needn’t
like a crease a shape is set whom we try to hear if we can’t hear everyone
like a lamellaphone my back of me or the sword damocles
kit-building repair culture & the fact of the fad itself honorific
is the opposite of honorific what? my sympathies to matter
an attempt at due reflexivity? whether any
retribution music pleased?
when information loses its occasion i know how to move with different lives
the crawl significant us all being lesbians nowadays
i mean you can barely assemble a team let alone rob

 
 
 
**
 
 
 

HEAT WRITING
for ༄sophia࿐.⋅ from the bath, dominos, & mandrakes an order to destroy ❀*̥
mwahhh❀*̥˚

 
empathy was yesterday
today we have something the enemy does not
chandeliers off calvin’s popping pajama peppers big frozen
you can’t even eat right
you are an easy target for transference
less the smoke of yap & more the plasma to practice defense
even snakes hold angle grinders like a cord knitted in mold
i remember asking the generic human question evil or whether sitting in trees
labor was hot
on urainus
raining diamonds
kids tossed jacks metal hedgehogs made technical down streetlamps
we licked cupcakes off caterpillars & flew walnuts over yellow dragons
we burned badges off hästens como soy un hostage
wilding you moved to colorado & sung regulation songs for whiteness
the proliferation of display possibilities a border gore
you can’t even smoke anymore…
imagine critique a difficult person test
it too the characteristic an incident report
& now even more community property

 
 
 
**
 
 
 

SMOOTH DIFFERENCE

 
you bite me there
nothing new about virtual reality not even the soft imaja complain-y:
taskinsight:
i see it i show it i see it i show it
inside every lipstick a laser
death & furniture at least for me trapped water where
floating things are bones
who even cares about bugs? a dumb neck
a dumb neck dangling like a knee can they not be able?
where for & about of care are putting on myself from being in a wilderness
me me me me caprichoso me re administered events
for reasons of edges no se si he lo completado
a sensitive world? where
i see it inside a kiss adventure
building a bridge from big log letters across convention fetters wildlife safari

 
 
 
**
 
 
 

homed

 
there are people who stay & people who go
coming creature the matriarch & phone
waving an artichoke mattering the stems
signs something unseen like trespassing sails tipping stars
draino & fabuloso over a wire fire cleanse
where places like this are built of girls such a thing as negative kinship
some stone islands some fence islands do not wanting the wretched
routed in flight land not even lifting your luggage
their closets blooming boulevards in the toyota
a miumiu plagiarist imperial registrar remember
the whiteness of parody ten years ago when men made presidents rap
& stayed studied out of reach the reassuring denial of their social world
waking up pressed bowling for waves over packets
twice as nice as photos get real
down a piazza feeding our kiddies feeling we-will’s off tourists’ in tuitions

A Poem on Oil for the Occasion of the End of Winter

1.
 

To state something simply
To unfold your hands–
To have the compassion for anyone–
if it is what you are moving toward
To spend the day in bed–

to become a bed–to rhyme in “slow-time” and silence–
to bend, to flinch at the sun–
to marry the moon,
to drink moonshine with friends–
to ride the subway
with friends–
to hush in the flowers,

cold in root,
mute in love,
and wild landscapes
breeding poetry, to loth the roadside,
to see the roadside, to quote again:

 
“It takes an American
to do really big things.”¹

 
Of life
leading toward
an elegy
An existence of things
left over.
Little notes and photographs,
books and
notebooks,
a magnet from a
dinner in
Connecticut
we ate at
in the
summer.

Of the memoir too,
a diary of experience
and living,
who can say
what has happened?

2.
 

Imagine– a proper language of sleep, considering daylight, or bush clusters, consider
breath and eye movement, my heavy hands seeding, reading lines as the sentences of
turning over bodies, clouds and fertile dust, the living coat, an oil-slicked horizon.

3.
 

There is, of course,
first the stretching out

of my eyes across
daylight, bush clusters again,
in the morning and breathing

slow nutrients
from the heaviness
of all the world cycling

on and off,
all imagination happens

at the level of the atomic circle.

The bending down of the pupil
inward always swelling
in language.

Each sentence
filling the space
between breath and idea.

Like all others
in public,
the ecosystem
of the city
holds in it
the history
of all burning nights,
cop cars and barricades,
pipelines and retaining walls,
grease and the fat
of whales and
sheep, fishy haze
of the what-once-was,
energy always
moves in circles.

Hamlet cries
for the worm,
later staring
from a pit into
the foggy twilight,
we think about
dying and
coming back
again from it.

 
Melville working
in the customs house,
later narrated by Krasznahorkai
walking around the city,
the west-side waterfront
now the
Whitney.
Gansevoort St
named for Melville’s
grandfather, a
colonial Colonel
fighting the British
and Iroquois.
A fort constructed
then torn down,
a market constructed
then torn down.
The art
hanging above
the street,
a building built
with green bonds.

4.
 

Manhattan panorama,
rose petal building tops
on the morning commute
in which I take several
forms of transportation:

my feet walk to a subway which moves toward
the ferry across the river, watching carefully the other
boats. The UN comes into view, the police are set up
in their boats too, the president is in town.

Slow and violent,
this is the rhythm
of grass and coal fire.
It is history,
we saw torching time,
seagulls dance
in the piles of trash.
There is no way
to locate
the self here.

The social existence
of coal in the ground
and air, and in
books, Bleak House
twilight:

Smoke          lowering          down       from        chimney-pots,
making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in
it    as    big as full-grown snowflakes — gone into
mourning,   one might imagine,   for the death of
the sun

 
Sooty conversations
over dinner thinking
on the poetry
of giving up, of
blowing up, of
heaving up desire.
This is another way
of holding
the world together,
into spaces
of past and future,
the sentence performs
the same trick,
a slice of moments
strung up
on a hillside, explosions
stumbling through
the creative
forests.

5.
 

In 1993 Chevron named an oil supertanker after Condoleezza Rice.

7 years later Condoleezza Rice would resign from Chevron’s board to join the Bush administration.

2.4 billion people live within 60 miles of a coastline.

In 2012 the Dong Fang Ocean (formerly, the Exxon Valdez) was sold as scrap for $16 million.

Oil and gas companies, fossil fuel-burning utilities, and the banks that fund drilling donate to police departments’ charity foundations.

On December 10th, 1967, the United States Atomic Energy Commission detonated a nuclear explosion in rural northern New Mexico to explore whether or not such explosions could be useful for natural gas extraction.

6.
 

I want to tell you now about my lungs–the in–and–out failing voice of the morning, the snow outside, the coke-plant history of midday.

In the end, I am a ratepayer. It is electricity moving toward history, thoughts come always after. Freedom flows from the ocean.

THE WAITING

To follow a thought,
think in its way
and think at its end

I did. I did it
well, maybe not at all.

Attached, to each other.
What is attached?
What is to each other?

Almost all of the tulips
startling today. All heads
startle. A slight tension

in your shoulders,
raising them
when I notice.

In the construction—
a frame for the man
sitting in the diner,

unaware of the frame
the paper taped around the glass
makes around him.

This is a photograph I saw
and think about sometimes.

Sometimes for me
you watch out,
your head slanting.

Early, the window
makes a shadow of itself
on the wall with all its lines
and not at an angle, just exact.

Then I looked. I’m looking
toward the glass door
outside the wood
one, the glass frame.

You can tell
the difference between outside
and air by the smudge.

I’m looking at
the one that opens even
when the other is shut.

Is it you that’s coming
in when I hear
the door lifting?
If it is and if it’s not?

 
 
 
 
 
**
 
 
 
 
 

POOL

Meant to cover
The roof, water

It sifts through
Hits the furniture

In droves
Rinsed out

Revealing thoroughly
There I am seeing

The ceiling
As if it were floor

My feet pointed up
It was a grey house

Or what is behind
Is grey

In place of a living room
A pool

A house once
Unbent though

If you looked at it
Like a child held

By her ankles,
It looks bent.
It looked.

 
 
 
 
 
**
 
 
 
 
 

A MEASURE

A part unlike the rest and coiling,
my arm, now, once
around someone
for a length until it wasn’t.

The regular motions
of arm, leg,
other things,
felt fine. Only one tug,
uninterrupted for a minute.

Falling asleep
I slacken
between and under sheets
with no parents
standing by.

They’re lying down.
Their bed is near
and made. I wait
for them to wake.

Stand by, reclusive,
thinking only
of a thing I did
and was restrained for.

What was the noise?
Parts without
distance I reach
around myself, my arms,
small enough
the way around.