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We are a public forum committed to collective reasoning and the imagination of a more just world. Join today to help us keep the discussion of ideas free and open to everyone, and enjoy member benefits like our quarterly books.
The trees are men, men strange,
Strangers come into a house to speak
Across a table made of trees.
Waking was fighting at it while
Looking at a thing you own is
Sleeping outdoors without knowing why
The reasons escape, so continuing
To eat and drink. I think you have to
In order to be ready, a cup seriously
Open, ready to talk or gesture with it,
Show the house has no roof,
Men are coming in, this is a cup.
We make a tableau called embarrassment
At a physical past, the one prepared
Accordingly your instincts stopped
Now in admitting daylight
I was fighting or talking about this
Feeling taken from a box of scarves,
Cardboard box from another move
Marked by faint incursions, games
So called because all was still
In play, that table for instance,
Where a hand is trained to follow
The eye into goals, this cup
Moving on its own through the single
Family dwelling space contracts to,
Angry from the outset
That a hand is still involved
And scene. I went back to sleep
In the middle of our argument,
Speech about forgotten labor
A lamp can sing with its head bent
Remarks I should anticipate I am
The shadow objections to, streaming
Out from the faucet to be cut in half
By hand. The entire room far off
Talk content to happen tone
On tone, the strong illusion,
And night, deaf as a mural,
Not made so much as lovingly
Assembled from memories of those
Who couldn’t get out of the way
Now here in the form of a cup
Alien when brought to bed
From table and the table not
Made so much as overturned,
Evolving from its legs a depth
Morning is the answer to
Geoffrey G. O’Brien is the author of four books of poems, most recently People on Sunday. He is an Associate Professor in the English Department at UC Berkeley and also teaches for the Prison University Project at San Quentin State Prison.
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in your carpeted office you lay my life down / and say open up to that small room in my sternum.
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