Who are all these people that have doubled, scanning in all these
old photographs
we can ploy them off
and confuse the tenets of stardom with the precepts
of geological failure. We can twist their imageries into new
rhetorical explanations and sometimes travel to an island
and dress like them—
confusion, salt, hammocks, gelidness, unelectrified barracks.
We’ve met no one
who dwells
in photographs
like that.
And, sometimes, we spend hours clicking that little greater than sign
stalking and stalking the regret we will
later have
as these conquests
are not real
and someone is across town sleeping alone un-wondering.
Wish, look. Look
at that wish disappearing into the absurd sulfur
of birthday smoke.
We are gravity’s gallow slaves.
*
Time puts the bark in esophagus and helps Leviathan
plan an egg hunt in our backyard; we’re blindfolded
and felonies are slid into our pockets and strange powder
hazes up in our reluctant drinks.
If a man
be a man—
signed plume, crumbling symbol, vacuum policy.
We’ve been.
We come back, unsung, boiling the silence of clouds
in favor of squeezed rain.
We never knew that playing roller hockey just to get out of the house,
to get
away from them
would end
in these processional questions.
And, for some reason, we masturbate
to all this previous satisfaction.
*
How
the hours
fell
into joy.
Said, I’m still trying to figure out how they fall like that.
Is it
us
or is it
them?
Here, we may find some gratitude for the grieving appearance of home,
for Kentucky. The sun rises,
not really,
we do.
*
We thought we might continue down this track but it’s covered
in batter. We write up new body budgets on the backs of these
legal pads—English-to-English this, I the body, I the tryst.
The leg-drop of January and May hulks its operatic way onto
our open adjunct throats. Even for a burrito, the credit card
gets denied. Switch that passive; the ? forces the clerk to deny
our burrito due to our diffuse credit card.
This
is a note
from yesterday,
last summer,
all year,
in public,
humping the pole next to us while we wait for the bus in stained coats,
bombarding pelts
fixed with transnational agreements, choking.
The neighborhood’s getting taller and pushing out as far as the fear
of robbery
will go.
Walk home,
together—
talk, train map, untitled days, volunteer wagelessness, Nubian negations,
jazz constitutions, hands.
Jazz constitutes a fraction of the night’s lights turning back on, below.
We’re waiting for the figure in the backseat to frisk
the unmanned steering wheel.
*
We’re most passionate about the business of touchy-feelingness.
Our original dream compares accurately
to a sexually transmittable disease—no one knows how
but wants to get rid of it—
Alice, Naima,
waterspout, spider web, broken windshield.
Bechet and Brecht dance an outlook.
An inventory of obligations:
soundboards, rivers, knuckles, closed lips, dignity.
A list of expectations:
weather, ennui, chiffon, underwear holes, deerticks, mornings,
the nearest shoulder, Illich,
brothers.
And, for some reason,
we masturbate
to all this
as it revolves
and revolves
toward nothing
more than mêlée.
*
A marrow
picks
a me.
In the contents of Kentucky, we find a skipping stone, landlocked
and a candle well-charred on an empty porch because everyone’s gone
working,
every one
because.
And now, I think:
by sharing a link I can
save someone, by clicking
a petition, I can come
together with others.
*
The tornado pilfers all our good knees.
World: it’s no longer. We’ve made ourselves too long lines—
agate boulders, mingling pennies, flattened copper statues,
failed concrete meaning. Astonishment
still demolishes
the onslaught
of consistent seconds
we hope
will just
slow up.
World: what
a letter
is.
We were.
World: what
a sound
does.
Fun to dance like this, need more hands, need
to put my drink down, need to
stop drinking and start running
every morning
toward the same point
we keep overlooking.
