This is a working sentence.
Someone walks by.
Three sentences standing around bonding.
Terrible, terrible sentences.
The third sentence resents the fourth sentence more than the fifth.
Sitting in a late cafe crying.
Trying to stare down carbs with the mistress’s tools.
A panoply of belated newsprint.
A drain stopper with a dripping faucet.
Coming in and coming out of the same entrance marked urgent.
Paragraphs concealing whole illegal phrases.
You marked me like this.
Your flesh was a Styrofoam packing glitch.
My flesh was plastic rotary phone alimony.
I carried about you into my term limits.
No one could see the vast crowd.
Is my protection really there.
Is my storm drain a liar, I said, a lair.
If you can hear the sound of my voice.
If you can weep.
Who seek the quiet non-quiet ingénue
showing up with awareness strapped to her back
and frills, and seasonless outhouse-amending night.
If you can swallow a horse pill.
If you can correct the record so it
flips closed. If you can barrel through the legislation
with a fringe. Pages and pages
betray one another on a whim.
Stand up to the breaker maybe.
The surface is grime. The spandrels
a delicate balance. The fasces
that made our avarice great.
They entrap a womb to leverage mani-pedi channels
Actually, I don't have a mani-pedi lack.
Resistance comes back.
The tumbling locrian meathouse of our maker
our grower, our pretender.
Very very very very very very.
To flatten out the stomach acid.
To paint the birds closed.
A public forest of intangible treeless forms
applauding their ascension. The recycle
bin moves me to tears like a
second chance for ampersand hearts.
A lariat and a missile shield.
What is this poem really about, Trace. Well,
last week you died. You did.
Everything was getting so concrete.
I didn't know you were going to leave
and the medium was keeping us apart.
A panoply of belated newsprint.
Sitting in a late cafe crying.
I discover just as you have become
a signal rushing through a wire signing off.
People are not words or sentences.
I hate social media. You were so
positive and I argued back continually.
If the floor pulled out with each new
memory blaming a distraction.
How many more will die. When does
the surrealism dry up completely.
If you can hear the sound of my voice
tonight I'm at a protest march in the cold.
In socialist realist syntax I am shouting
up at a distant apartment window trying
to provoke any action from a
complacent person in power.