Spare Generators

Frank Guan

You would be underground
Yet beneath a sky of liquid provenance:
The message in its song would be a crystal,
Carefully and frequently transferred within a dry expanse.

Words, have handles.

Let them go.

So that music grows, shedding definitive rhythms all
The way, as what is urgent shades into
Particular daylight. You were saying something
About redundancy—the body summers elsewhere, but the rest
Is lowly pitched just like a tirade in Racine,
Wisconsin; let us never
Speak of only politics, again. Dock
Instead: I am a great fan
Of the tan land and its ban
On begging: just raids and rails
Can do, or else the nothing which
They both accentuate. There
The things we do to catch them will catch
Up to us or perish preserved in the attempt.

Something will change in
The rock
Music: shocking and anticipated, fins
Dissolve the tribe whose subtitle was
Error Free and spoke of rising just
In the drums, guitar, and bass.
Here they're—just kidding—we're
On the way to the poetry festival on Governors
Island all the time, can't be serious and successful
At once, assuming antic dispositions; all of
This leads you to a fateful question of intent, but the server
Goes down, meaning that one had
To find an apartment once again, like a sestina
Coreless by design. The junk fleet sank
Into a subway with the possibility of destination,
Much. So I remember you. You were
The sober one at the bar, the clear
One with a fondness for clandestine verbs
Known otherwise and elsewhere by their hair. Strength,
You had, to arrange the situation, now mirrored
Over oceans and tumblers alike, and then retired
With it, having said your piece against
The backing band to follow, yet using them

Regardless. And the change came: you can see it
Coming now. So late—could each of us
Be friends without an adjective, a people stripped
Of adjectives, without the wish for adjectives,
Like possibles, abjects and whites,
Glad and somber in the summer, agreeable, of
A tree beyond our music which we nonetheless compose?