Tagvverk

devastated
kingdom
you broadcast
erstwhile
eclipse
and with
the sickle
curvatures
of the moon
every night
dispossessed
your light
blooms
bisque as
i wallow
inverted
the hither side
of an aurora
once
invisible
to us

 
 
 
 
 
 
**
 
 
 
 
 
 

HOW SAD I WAS TO MISS IT

i speak
you speak
honeydew
did you
not hear
the trilling
conducting succulence
the serrated blade
giving the gift
of breath
a sheen
to seeds
a sarcophagus
splits
transcendence
that performs
its haptics
immanence
how sad
i was
to miss it

 
 
 
 
 
 
**
 
 
 
 
 
 

HUSH

in what
kind hush
has its
beauty held
and does
allow to
listen of
soft hums
the hope for
untold blossoms
enters but
tepidly
another solstice
gone
to make room
for that same
shameful garden
a wilderness
of wilt
hitherto stalks
my starry
eyed palm

 
 
 
 
 
 
**
 
 
 
 
 
 

PART OF ME MONGOL

still
nowhere
with myself
beckoned
i lost
my reason
to abrasion
archiving ancestor-
strewn valleys
dimly passable
slight-eyed
& cached
the third-
person
of another
pasture
shares my
blood type
after years
of siege
and a western
residency
resides still
a part of me
Mongol

 
 
 
 
 
 
**
 
 
 
 
 
 

I’VE GONE QUIET

for the dishonest
wager
the number of
the riot
wielded by
flight attendants
valets
bike messengers
& mercenaries
humoring appetites
for the journey
reach
reach deceivingly
the laughing
summit
the ipse
oops
labyrinth
a minor accident
an apology
looking for
something
to say
of repair
that would
save us

~

somewhere hidden on the high line

fox has weaponized pastiche

like an x-man or john cassavetes

and can harness the red light of a summer squall

fox possesses the great animal genius

the flemish painters sought in slaughter

everyone knows a fox

in new york is a bad idea

and none more so than fox

who’s gone transcendental among the tulips

resplendent in his raiment of rain

conducting sorrows and shadows

like a lotus of bodhisattva

the wet wind off the hudson

making maelstrom of manhattan litter

fox is a fixed object

stripped like an orange

as an answer to the rain

 
 
 
 
 
 
**
 
 
 
 
 
 

from “vole clock”

/

quietly coughing thunder
braised the air of alabama
as the bronze effigy was pulled
from the public square
like a rotten tooth
the third in its likeness
a hat trick of justice
albeit retroactive
vole is a tender artichoke
bleary below a buick
from a bad season’s nap
but fistbumps the air
in celebration hoping
there will be a party
which is a pity
no one gave him the news

we don’t party anymore

 
 
 
 
 
 
**
 
 
 
 
 
 

from “mothman retrograde”

*

everyone’s favorite porcine capsule

unctuous mothman takes the wheel

with all their vitamin strength

eyes inert like miami neon

hungry for the insurrection

their dreams black as goyas

a ballroom of billionaires hang

from their own balustrade

and sway in nocturnes

mothman so horny for revolution

they’re nearly inept but who else

to reverse the tidal swells

the curse of federal negligence

these odious engravings of men

on mountains each world

more onerous than the one it survives

and mothman’s seen them all

both as fact and phantasm

every single soldier of art killed

or subdued basquiat became a glove

of money and bob dylan peeled back

his amphibian skin and what happened

to lil kim who could have castrated

an army with her cadence

loaded on long island iced tea

mothman has lost all practical function

and clings to a few explosive frames

of diegetic action because like keanu reeves

mothman is immortal and can leave the sequence

from points a and b to special effects and bad writing

still greased up from the barbecue and blissfully sunk

by benzodiazepine the night is a cherry in their jowl

the rich lights of the art basel soon to be subsumed

by the solid fats of a forced animal

 
We walked into the pharmacy.
(Oh. I’m starting with “we.” Oh well.)

I bought the pill. It cost me 3.5 times the hourly wage of the clerk who unlocked the case and handled the transaction. I contemplated standing in the pharmacy for 3.5 hours, so as to better “earn” the pill.

He took my pointless contemplating, my body’s stance as it housed that pointlessness, for worry over the pill’s cost. He offered to split it.

Then I contemplated us standing in the feminine hygiene aisle for 1.75 hours. Would rather have spent double that time alone.

It was his whispering. He was whispering a word. It was one of “ours.” One that hadn’t seemed to exist: the word for children one might have had with one’s lover but did not.

He had coined a word for it. Well I’d asked him to. But I had never, ever requested that he say it aloud at an apropos time.

From the pharmacy, to a cafe–

I had bought the one pill. But I’m a nervous eater. Emotional eater.

I was NOT nervous about taking the pill. It was what was happening across from me that I felt…unable to bear.

At the cafe table across from me he was reciting a Richard Brautigan poem. The one that goes something like, When you take your pill I think of all those people lost inside you.

That was the poem he was reciting. To me. For me? It’s not a long poem. One sentence I think. And yet, the stress that this poem’s recitation by the man across from me was occasioning… I decided to chew the pill. A little mastication session, a small violent crush in the grooves of a molar. A commensurately small relief.

I brought my palm to my mouth to take in the pill. But it wasn’t a single dose. It was a handful. Like a whole bunch of tic tacs. Should I–

I had to. Off his loving look, I popped a good dozen into my mouth.

Down there in my sweaty palm a few remained, and so I chewed them too.

I definitely thought, needing at that point to align myself with anyone but him, of texting Kate: “i’m eating morning after pills like candy!”

He was still there, across the cafe table. How was it possible that the poem was still going on…What’s this poem called, dear. He was asking me as if I knew. I did know and he knew I knew. He was, therefore, asking me to be intimate with him. He smiled. Oh how we both loved poems.

–I gave the title to him sweetly, with chipped bits of pill stuck in one corner of my bottom lip. I hoped he would comment on how pale (powdery!) my lips looked.

Ahh yes. He smiled. Sadly. He was very happy to be this kind of sad. All rollicking in hypotheticalness.

He was not– he was. Repeating the poem.

I picked up the cookie on his plate. He loved sweets and sweetly sad things. I was going to let a bite of the cookie just sit in my mouth. Chocolate chip cafe cookie, rather gooey. Let it get stuck to the roof, let it take away all danger of smiling back.

I was going to nod all the way through this second recitation of the Brautigan poem. Mouth closed all over the cookie so as to better contain my despisement.

This despisement was a huge crisis and I needed to work it out quickly. Only hours ago, I’d–
what?
felt so connected that i’d wanted to have with him a theoretical baby?
why had i been like, yeah sure come inside me?
did i want the male’s experience– the fun frisson of uh-oh?
really, no
why did i invite semen into an obstacleless… reticule
“reticule”?
and enjoy
enjoy the idea it was roiling around in there
?
already had kids, already knew then… what?
something about space and time, how time was an annex to space but with kids there was no
…relationship? — between space and time…?
was it a youth-harkening thing
?
ugh maybe

 
One by one the chocolate chips in the cookie were turning into white pills.

It did not occur to me to not continue eating the cookie. Ate the whole thing. (the stress)
By now must have had what? 20? 25 pills?

The first noticeable effect was his head.

I could no longer see around it. It had grown larger. Had become sculptural, a bobblehead that accentuated certain of his features. The haunted sockets. The straight nose reminiscent of the cover drawing on my high school copy of A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.

The mouth on this head had not been constructed to open. Still the poem blared.

It blared from the large head and yet came across as a murmur. He was a murmurer.

The third recitation of the poem may have only been an effect of the pills. The bobblehead began: First the title, then the poet’s name. Then he reached across the cafe table and took my hand, the skin of which was a demurely chalky dry.

When you take your pill…

Parade loudspeaker volume. Yet the delivery was bedroom.

How–?

Afraid to open my mouth lest I find out I was eating even more pills, I nodded along to the poem.

I nodded. My head now also huge. I could picture what my own benevolent smile looked like when stretched to bobblehead proportions.

Another natant mound of bitterness in my mouth. Somehow three more pills were there, melting.

Sweet love, I asked, can we return to the hotel?

Gigantic nodding all around.

…

After our nap I knew something might still be different. Nearly 30 pills, maybe more, all in a few moments… Perhaps my uterus itself would be languishing between my legs on the hotel sheets.

Or it would be the city’s landscape that had changed. The streets covered in a dusting of hormone, pedestrians’ gonadal activities declining as they waited for the walk signal… And the trees’ remaining leaves– it was November– would be the little foil peels from each pill’s mini blister pack…

But I could see out the window from the bed. The trees had dead chlorophylled matter, not foil. There was no pilldusting of the streets.

There he was, lips very close to my ears, murmuring, murmuring. My uterus was still inside. It was him between my legs. All was the same.

I keep thinking about the word “and.”
This and that.
He and I.
Space and time.
                   and                    are what he had wanted to name our hypothetical children.

 
Days and weeks. He was uncircumcised. His foreskin seemed to have a slot, as though for small coins. Doll coins. It was not a leap from there to pills. I pretended to fall back asleep until he actually did.

When a man recites a Richard Brautigan poem to a woman who is no longer a teenager, little progesterone pills pop up everywhere. Mushrooms after rain. A law of nature.

All I had to do was reach my hand beneath the pillow and feel for three more white pills.

There they were.

Even the dawn here is self-congratulatory
Tuesday the counter-insurgency begins
Here’s to the extinction of all ilks
Semiotics w/semi-automatics
Megadoners pet dog owners
Disambiguation of trees
Or is your brain ok?
Shiver me pundits
Multiple guest
Tripod Elvis
Par is 13

 
 
 
 
 
 
**
 
 
 
 
 
 

HEAD ON A SWIVEL
for Scoots
 

So the working life of a plastic bag is 15 minutes
We are stuck in the Autobiographical Phrase
@ the intersection of Formalism & pjs
The paparazzi face the wrong way
Is unprecedented or car dented
90% of the game is ½ mental
Willows weep cafeterias
The Mechanism yawns
So much to delete
All wires down
Furtherance

 
 
 
 
 
 
**
 
 
 
 
 
 

MY CURRENT ADDICTIONS
for Ludmila Novikov
 

Atomic Fireballs
Fossil fuel propulsion
The very air
Long shot predictions: 2032 will see a Rottweiler elected President
Viewless wings
Speaking of the drivel, tongue & groove
A mishandling of documents
Optical delusions
Weighing the options on a not-so-grand piano scale
The milliseconds left

 
 
 
 
 
 
**
 
 
 
 
 
 

JET SET FRIENDLY
 

For every entrance an EXIT
Yes to spontaneous eels
All joking aside we debunk the non-existent cushy
Formica calamity
The semi-annual Fraudster Surge
The extended butt call
Neo-deployism
Who knew in walking not to walk but to sometimes run
As every fact turns faucet
Bidirectional hair
The Deep State demands another tweet
Incomplete fraught
Control remoto headbanging robots break camp outside DC come dawn
Broadly speaking, amphibious

**
 

There is no letter.

 
for 규, no
 

one G would communicate the bend
of 기억, the name

 
of the letter, which bends
between us, means memory

 
serves. the greater
river by feeding the lesser, the

 
many. K would not communicate
your aversion to K’s

 
harshness. To harshness.

 
Q would sound like 규, maybe, but,
unmuted, despite its roundness, staked.

 
in the ground. A tree
by the river at the river’s
branching,

its groundedness, even
tuning fork struck

 
this note through bedrock
rings of

 
규
 

alone would not convey the other
half, the balancing
act of branches

 
that is 원 holding the silence

in

of 이응. In winter a tree

 
still holds its vacance. You
contract s at the edge
of One and grow s outward as
do river s into their s

 
 
 
 
**
 
 
 
 

The Guard
 

Wood jaw under of

the key
Change s. Keyed
to. The

which-tree
Of the melody ironing
Out—that which is

 
Melodized, unrumpling the

note. C

-arries the paper through a crowd. No
Wind but it rustles the half-past

 
Hour round as
Gone’
s yoke is

 
Greening-in, unfastening—that which
is ours is an

H our cut short. An a.m.
of ours. An amour like a flag. At

Half-mast, us evens,
breaks the remote

 
future I crave
the news—Van, the H
R guy,
Relays
the news of delay. Delays the news

of relay.

Of course it snowed as a matter of

Course, it rained

Fact. Also.

You cannot hear me; you are too tired to

speaking of cars, the cars are

that us streets hiss

 
 
 
 
**
 
 
 
 

All and Only

 
 
 
 
**
 
 
 
 

어디든, 언제나 [wherever, whenever]
 

Was it looking at the speed at which rain through trees

makes sense and it isn’t rain’s speed through trees

or the speed of looking at rain through trees

looking for the light pull’s pleasing

weight in my palms counter it

wasn’t light’s

pull or push or light, or weight of one’s breathing-concentrate

on palm’s sweating—or sway, I was sweat and swayed with

the light consume me and I blemish that way ants tickle

peach ooze down the table’s dwindled

Leg. Loneliness on the clean floor. Radiator’s

outside-my-air voice when I turn to be reminded of the bay in every window, not the machine of me whirring

simple stuck wipe up the table leg, song against grains I can’t see

on my knees, desert-vacuumed palm. I half-remember looking up

to feel you there, my admiring your ankles and your knees—how beautifully you are connected

to yourself—unclasping the phrase from my some such mouthing. Was it when we crossed

불광천 on those wide-flat stones the current pushed into place you asked me did I like the rain—no,

not rain, but days of it—비 오는 날들—living at the speed

they force—yes—we were in one and it appeared to only be stretching on my glasses on the outside

of my breath, it comes taking down the day’s 미세먼지 and the last week of blossoms and the light

I slowed to wipe the streaks you slowed