And if you can’t do, think you can’t do
anything, think again. Hold a piece of me
in your hand. Hold it in your hand
and place your hand over your heart.
See what you see. Do not close your eyes.
Recall the way I smell after rain.
UPS brown truck parked one wheel up on the sidewalk blinking its back
yellow lights where a movie theater used to be on the south side of
Market Street near Sixth Street
We like to swallow yesterday.
Time is a transitive verb.
Or a railroad. Speed bullet?
We might be rain in another country.
If we can do it.
If I am a victim of murder I might never notice.
It happens every day and to others
More or less deserving.
Why should we write this down if it happens
Every day in this life to anybody?
The gnomes are bored
with being enigmatic. Have
dumped the seasonally
changing menu &
its old world sensibilities—
Listen closely and you will hear the moans of the damned. Listen closely and you will hear animals singing the songs of the angels. Listen closely and you will hear the horizon approaching.
Whales, smaller now, approach the shore
to urge a creature
like the proto-bear that became the proto-whale
to adopt the life aquatic.
I thought that I was running but actually I was leaning, creeping at most, without direction, following instinct, reacting to what threatened me, to the strange and sudden difference which had come without forewarning
Rising rates, hot spots, piles of bodies and I suddenly feel like I am in that story I read as a girl - the end of the world and the woman writing her last words about how they all loved until the final minute. OK then. I will keep writing no matter what.
slier floe ,,
ra(w)mous bramble ,,
unblenched neap ,,
balloonish idiom ,,
aerial chuzzle ,,
And so
some dreams will merely be delayed a year,
some dreams will be realized ahead of schedule,
some dreams will be deferred, perhaps permanently,
I play the fox with Mad King George
with thrice sent hells to damn the gorge
with bottle rockets crotched inside
that one-man-show you all mile-highed
Compulsory education continues
nonstop, over eons, at the heart
of the genome. Failure is not
an option, but a resounding
scarcity of incidence and resilience.
they gowned only ink &
ink haunts their hands yet, never so tremulous &
literary as when cherubs're
smeared between'm,
& you, too-
Oceans boiling up bubbling disintegrating into
Large lakes of nucleic lava
Swathes of humanity displaced into oblivion
cause resilience is fertile, imbued to bursting
without braking, so much a skin can hold on its surface
waiting for the next waft or rivulet, where air and water
co-fervesce, no need to separate the crystals from the solution,
curdling is just one way: engage marry ferment and proliferate
libido badgers
dissemble their bleary hypotenuse
bangles
in conversational storage
The land, to their amazement, seemed to constantly rearrange itself in wild new patterns of rage and decay. On the border, they saw small brown children languishing in lockups. On city streets, they saw young black men in police chokeholds begging for breath.
face naked at a corona hoax party
in a negative pressure tent with some beautiful tests
in a bout of magical thinking by an open mass grave
no matter what
dear viewer
there must always be
a horse race
Yankees fight back
in late innings
And aren’t you and your friends undismayed, standing there,
nose-to-helmet, pressing back American History
and the cops, dressed-for-a riot, or a high school play.
Maybe you wished for just a little hollering and shoving,
(This isn’t a poem.
it’s a Scream, Scream, Scream.
Which now is a murderous trap
once that was his foremost impulse,
collapsed like laid
out playing cards.
1984, I think:
heroin was king,
crack was coming in.
A strange word called AIDS.
Soviet Union downfall hadn’t happened yet.
But forgive me if I see clearly,
And underline the fact, that what
Did not matter might have mattered,
And that this deafness is still full of single
And irrefutable caustically crystal notes.
It is getting to be a little bit
too much. Things are getting
a bit out of hand. I do not
want to make excuses. Life
is getting the best of me.
I take pleasure in seeing how cities disappear,
how streets, parks, names get deleted, how
my denial washes even the holiest gardens away.
I mock the mountains: Can you see?
What tiny mounds you all are, if I want you to be so.
Since the war began,
nothing tastes the same,
neither my mother’s soup,
nor my granny’s sponge cake,
but the taste of snow didn’t change at all.
but there's a guy I know
who scribbles words on paper
and believes, in his heart,
that it's the best thing ever written,
that there's a great author
eating bourbon chicken on rice
make a solar contribution
make curtains from a hemp parachute
one of those people with a lantern
dressing up like a llama
And you, my ear of wood
separate floor and sky
floor from sky
and hear my sin as lack
on the midline
The riot police’s armored vehicles
prevent
the apartheid suicide of
disobedient
transcendentalist
hermits
an empire reborn, or men of straw, or
a form of ashes blown on the wind
down corridors to arc once more
or dissolve into nothing.
You say this city is a river. I say it’s a sea. You say no,
A river for its constancy, those slick coats
In a row and the daily shoop of dreams
Dipping into manholes. At least a river
Has direction, you say.
hidden fault lines
under the eight-mile bridge
where gods spoke
through broken wine bottles
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