Of course we understood
the world was over.
Go out and return unhurt. And go out.
To be like lightning.
say, “I am trying to get to the pit inside you where I lost something valuable.”
you extra letter in a misspelled word
The highest gravity called me like drumming in my guts,
or a flare set off.
Almost carelessly, she casts a feather-
tendoned arm over his meagerness.
I fell into a bottomless crevasse
then deleted from the world
by a sudden gust of wind
They say you can’t have honour without water,
and wheat-flour is the daughter of the rain,
and she and all her train have been insulted—
The shame, at its work-desk, busied itself
a tumbling deer hurled down the collegiate range
queuing for commodities your head
bears the pharaoh's crown & its little asp
but the heliotropic plants can still surprise,
the defensive postures, the hackles
Earth, it’s just dirt under the sun.
Some maps
contain deliberate errors as a sort of signature
and this is how I try to sign everything.
Since the world did not conform to our desire
for instructions, we took to naming things.
we were so careless with those silver slings
that flung photonic pharaoh gems to space
keep it light keep it light
Release came through a number of straight-up friends involved in strange poetry scenes
My hatred of perfectionism
It’s Me vs. Them.
At once / each time
eMachine
Oh a stately pleasure-dome decree
& lavender & turquoise & the woman
You say your publicist is here
an overturned lantern
a little rabid wolf perched on the threshold
I’ve never crushed on fire fighters, but I understand
the appeal of their hive of fire, seduced
Our bodies have one life
Sacred to some and to others
Ephemera:
No need for telepathy – they see
(themselves as stone) emotions,
use them.
Reconstitution’s in vogue, all
that’s solid is old, what we keep
in mind comes back to us. For real,
like, five percent of what we think
so the afternoon was devoted
to helping beginners dial into endgame necessities
Tell me who
is your devil
and why.
a sprawling skyline stanzic unescorted
a recumbent cadence now absorbed in mother's fingerfeel
Dead actors were once impaled in the heart
and buried at a crossroads,
because they embodied characters
too effectively.
i like to try on formal dresses. ones i can wear during piano recitals or on the rare chance i go to the symphony to see papa play cello.
a violin case in the passenger seat. the neck tipped down like a bottle being emptied into the sink.
The things around the person bring out their hidden colors. Just
a theory, like economics.
To rebel against being a woman seemed as foolish to her as to take pride in it. This winking is banal.
A tea bag filled with cold water.
Then, did the pull of the tide fail to mirror
the pulse of the blood towards breath?
Not hostile, but not agreeable enough. Not dumb, but
not the smartest. Not fake, but not genuine. Not warm,
but not cold either. Not smiling, but not frowning.
Diesel soot, a plastic bottle for that lung
Wracked in a good autumn, a Saturday bath.
To build anything
From original
Terror needs some-
Thing like and not
Like stone,
we watched a lot of Marvin Hagler
It’s also a relief to be unloved
he thought to me
there are infinite—
cloyed across eyelids
myopic edge of night
windows pass
God’s handiwork shows in Jack Lemmon,
Lord, let me deliver key capabilities
Nothing personal. Nothing impersonal, either.
it does not heave
Machines of the Evening
Yes, OK
on your Opening Ceremony shirt
A man and a coyote in a room:
I started stripping layers
Dylan sings
to unstuck from inside
Doesn’t have to be the cello
with tongues in a pouch
outcroppings flicker / every
by McDonalds in 1979
It arrives from Haifa on a slow long ship.
Shattering, it makes a kind of music
Whether it hurts or not
simmering ruinous
unrealizing disquiet:
Under lumps of fake green grapes
in a place of futures
but in their future
against a Donut background
I once hated
Iggy Azalea for being a ‘bad’ rapper
I think we buried / a piece of the Sun
what a silly little name
What a vast & unpopulated forest
a single blade of grass longer than the rest of / / the patch
my mood undarkens
Her father had pushed tyres / all his working life.
If we’re being honest with each other, the story is quite unlike beads of sand.
Turns out he and Claire were MFAs together
Our faces flash red from the heat of prose:
His fat older brother wears a green diamond snake.
I came home late over the gully
Nothing runs past midnight,
no one drinks just one. No one comes.
Do you feel blessed?
Your avatar goes ghostly,
then pops back into flesh.
Astaire case. Nude but for top hat, cane, spats.
Sliding his finger along the crease
of the paper,
Now I can only express emotions
in metaphors insects craving blood
whoever
All we could offer were words,
words. Nothing worked.
incandescent butterflies flit
How to greet
the creature at the gate?
toward the very start of an embrace, which is too harsh a word,
Goya had his candle hat,
I have darkness
under whose assumed name
in what empire of vice
It wasn’t clear what this meant.
I said thank you.
block over, 9/8/85 feels perverse, maybe to have searched
What sticks
through the eating, speaking mouth
Keep hold my ears until
The pain subsides wonder
There’s something quiet
So alive it’s changed
Possess me as
Non-object & I won’t
Stop flowering in your
I am given over
To their hearing.
I am given over
To their singing.
Was and is seen—the brood pulls
A muscle—a tendon in the jaw
Sparks—the tongue would
Every day as you wished it
to be, once. No one else.
Cats. An empty house.
Poison is a tool of quickening
It makes things urgent, inevitable
the waves knock against
the bottom of the boat, ceaselessly
I hold my actions outside of meaning.
when a woman falls into bed facefirst
when the water surrounds the bathing ears
I’m just kidding!
Their eyes are compass roses
on maps of lost cities.
and swallow bullets
with sips of Chardonnay;
You wish the people would drive slower
for that kind of thing, limit their intake,
but I get it.
underground.
I don't know how
shadows and their coup
of space a cop
before your tongue forked and
your pen ran out of words
Derails, sets swale limber, burnished
your nobility blue blowing the nobleman blue now bring me his blue-blooded face
Prison guard all along. Neighbourhood caught like
A face that has never seen
All landscapes appear
vast from the confines
of the eye, and movement
opinion was against him anyway but
of doomed romance
Pravda announced business as usual, wet papers in doorways.
Blame's anesthetic.
i slept off thoughts / of the abyss
Drugged jellyfish. Wild hive
as if supervened by the words to come
she withholds so many things
like black mushrooms
winter air draped around us
If we die only once let it be with fireworks
Stay with us. Sink in our fields.
to help my purpose. I have purpose
bloodshot with sunset—
a place with many monkeys and snakes
bringing me rice in his drunken stupor
from the photo-studio with my portrait
It swindles in cup games
& then it’s just.
a shadow of poison? or clear skies
Or did she? Did she cackle? Did she moan?
it’s hard to explain my desire for smoothness
money don’t care never will
ahem... ahem...
A swarm of bees blind and full of the dye
A novel all scenes of sailboats
dubious
—wepa!
drizzly / then heavier
He did not regret
same but different cranes
& evening—between the glass walls—
her batwing round my arms
An older planet tried to get with me one time
I’m not under your spell, I’m under your piano
mercury gives me away
asymmetrical as any choice
each wants the pomegranate-eater for himself,
emerald seas and cities ruby berries
piled in my underwear drawer
lemonade on a Saturday
Four a.m.,
to spill out of yr head divot
too much of the forest, too much half in mind
over the neighbor boy’s head
the snake was in fact a snake
On the one hand, / desire, on the other
so many of our greatest clients are anxiety
implausible, sensitive
In Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh sits up and hits his head.
a bead on dew point for the calyx,
Live all you can, and hanged up a phone
I lost a poet today,
You are naught, you are naught: I’ll mark the play.
Slaying is the word. It is a deed in fashion.
like a fire extinguisher behind a little glass door
Pansy, rosemary, rue—
Frailty, thy name is woman!
numerousness of eagles
and the shark under you’re the Whistler
countable and temporary stars
In the long fairy tale of Nabokov’s childhood,
slick mother of ________
from a salad spinner lightly salted
“Make an effort, boo.”
with stone hips clown-car into Ovid’s mouths
and join the NYPD write a poem or two
interrobang?
fox snake pig dog sow
O. That beaux-arts style.
You’d like to believe that, wouldn’t you?
fed biohazards to an incinerator
I loved my husband best when he was spent,
where the genius is paying rent
Live oaks
I ran up Peter Island
blah-blah, blah-blah.
We say fête
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD SAVED ME FROM DEBAUCHERY
IV cleave
I Googled Rihanna’s Maori hand tattoo
The pair of skin slacks was well hung,
and capable. Yet in the icy
through the green ring of a plastic bucket
my mother / wants to be deep in the ground
or a special coin for scratch-offs
all of it unfolding in layers
And which did we love best?
some other sort of hands]
anonymously haunting
“it filled the truck bed” many times
Turn up the wound.
of Dutchmen cutting flowers
[High Rise Fire and Security]
just dreams that come true
in front of a huge blue tsunami
Sadness is my favorite video game
Hello, my name is Charles Baudelaire.
Discrepancies in the look of trees and men
All peacocks and plumes chortles and grunts
Where you berate the audience (for paying to attend such a thing)
no, i am
The will to change is a resolution that extends beyond literary innovation to personal/political/moral alteration.
is it for certain that memory helps us in so many ways?
“The language looks a lot different when you look at a lot of it at once.”
go in peace, broken tumultuous
gone than displaced
The mechanic fixes the error
In a museum there is a town / carved into a peach pit
It was a beautiful day to
that dia de los muertos she became the flowers of graves.
Elvis tremors in your voice
Sun stained / Tell them / I’m sorry
what, where the styrofoam niblets
Unmarred by so much work of delusion
Every window tinted
I thought my homes better this way
bolster to my oblivion bling booth,
Two tusks in the myrtle
There were the usual photo-ops & spell-checked swoons
Tough world out there. Trees scream.
An alcohol glare / snaps in the lake
You could be riding a Citi Bike
The politician erases the blackboard
Just shut up and you will hear love.
Not hungry
that has no chance / Of getting published
all the keys are sugar.
This I, adrift, a sea of me, impossible wobble
I’m tightening my watch
Left all my footsteps in Paris / Left all my money in Rome
Three little maidens dripping buttermilk Four of them with glass heads
in January’s Chinatown,
shot through with the noble light of neon
anyone could see not even me
Don’t shout, don’t follow,
continental breakfast’ll
just, like the rambling knotty bench I
after redwoods, I remind myself
but nothing was truly illuminated / on Avenue C
against the milk crates
the candles light themselves.
He couldn’t even find the time for a meal or a break.
It was the end of the summer / Julian was the most wanted man in the world
He whose chariot was drawn by wild beasts / could not sail because of a persistent calm
“There is pre-laid and post laid / Yeats”
“A god has taken a shine to you”
Am I addicted to Adderall quiz / Will I die before my children / Is glass even a thing
today I am elsewhere / Relaxin’ at Yorkville
When you hear something / Act right away / Why wait?
Workshop of potential lit fuse
US poets have taken it upon themselves to perform the role of public intellectuals.
poetry is a selfish music!,
“does weather” “begin” “where the desert” “stops” “is it a matter of” “maintenance”
The partygoers set the host ablaze,
Without / Your glasses on you see me / Like I have your glasses on
another Bildungsroman
Heaven, you think, / Is one place you’ll be pleased.
I read Murasaki in Genji Monogatari as the site of infinite projection.
Hey you, father-mirror aspect
Fantastical turquoise unicorn binders look / the same but can’t be looked at any longer. / This is my suffusion. This my captivity.
I steal a line from radio static. Catch a face within the crowd. Paganini rebounds with dippy violins across thematic centuries.
I lost / my loss / in a collective / of loss