"we are not meant to be parers"

You are in between
The cars, on
The other platform from

Where I momentarily
Stall, you collapse my field
Of perception, do

That to my anatomy and I seethe
With affection, I see the compulsory
Phantasms of logic

Pass numbly and retreat
To the galaxy named Fangs, Yves
Klein manned a blowtorch

To portray the presence
Of absence, I betray
The damnation of a brain

Made barren by its necessity, today
I thought about all
The objects unperceived

And went slurring over the resemblances
A transom jittered with pins
Of light like the little injections

Of voice that overwhelm
My own, then again I am no
Surface, I am a node

Bleeding with oddities, half-tongue
Half-gut to strangle this reticular mess
Of wants and you

Are nothing
Else, this is what I
Mean when I see

The drawing say the eyes
Have it all
Wrong, it may

Be right, wrought blue
By an ink headlight
And if you think in pictures

It’s easy to imagine
How animals
Think, it’s easy to be a dying

Thing thinking of
Life, the world is simultaneous
And we are not meant

To be parers of
It, stripping the densities
Bare, we are not meant

To be anything other
Than transducers of a multifarious
Noise, ecstatic

With occurrence, timpanis
Tippled with chimes
Of accident as the unsteady hand

Of time tocks its way
To here-there
Hoping for a mysterious

Intervention

"being attenuated"

I will breathe
My torrent once

More and read and read
And get lost
In the feeling of being

A part of the feeling
Of being there and knowing it
Here, I have had too much

Free coffee and the paper
Cut on my finger stings like a divining
Stick from back when

I was a boy in Colorado
Which I liked tremendously
And in a different

Manner than I like being
A man, the Romans
Were bored, the Americans are

Bored, I move to bare
My little splitting
Inside as it reds between

The pink on the end
Of my pointer
Finger and there is happiness

In its exhibition, a belief
In the world as a place to go on
Living as foul men

Go on tanking
In tranquility, something
I misread and I would

Have them like Ted
Talking in it, perhaps building
A harmless mobile of air

Which could carry forth in a spinning
Wince as I run into
Jeff on the F, then off at 7th Ave.

To meet Ben for some Sunday
Beers and a little ping
Pong at the underground Mexican

Billiards hall, where Hilda
Gives us Hornitos gratis
And we play seriously as little children

Do, I’m never not in
The picture, my sneezes are borne
By the wave and then returned

To me in a draft, I wake
In a catastrophe and move about
The city in a tiny

Raft of glee, my gaze is always
Already yellow because I’m not severe
Like a dancer, nor perverse

Like Balthus, though that does not stop
Me from falling into my own
Leers, reeling like a knockout and I

Have struggled tremendously with people
Who would not be loved, a cuckolded
Prince sung his child to death, today I thought

About how beneath
My beard I am
Growing old and in a dream

It was gone, my dream
An ink composed of fine
Bone particles

From the foreleg
Of a horse, Chico tags love
Stinks, I’m not crazy

Just enthusiastic, breaking
Into stagger like Thelonious tiptoeing
At the plateau, moons

Are not silent, there is nothing
Written on your fingernails
The gratification of graffiti lingers

Within the greater ensemble
Of nostalgias, Lunatic
Fringe comes on the radio

In the ice cream shop
Where I stop
In for coffee every Tuesday

And share my affinity
For Al Green with the ice cream
Lady as outside

The snow’s fleeting white
Wastes into gray, just as the sun’s icy
Beams bleed through the haze

Of Third Avenue, if I am as real
As a hamburger I am not harnessing
Myself, nor harassing

The world with the promiscuities
Of my eye, your body
Is oscillating and I want

To bed in between
The waves of
That becoming, this body

Is a thoroughfare that enables
Various energies
To transact and curve and to lose

Love is to feel
As if a significant piece
Of oneself is being

Attenuated, so I go
Out to walk the streets freezing
And overheated, blank

As a plank of
Wood, the leaves left
Skeleton by ice

And grafted to the grates, I heave
Winter by its latest
Air, ears gone slate as the train

Billows into its burrow
Of tile and I am on
My way back to Brooklyn

"the love of a doctor"

Each piece duly piercing
Its own consequent
Glint, each fragrant fragment

Exclamatory of its berth
In the whole and not merely another
Aspect of the whale

To be turned, that’s right
Yesterday I watched Fellini astride
A blackly garbed curve

And today a strange
Italian stranger engages
Me on the train

There are dreams and then there
Is running late
Again up Lexington, a copy

Of American Music shuffling
Mute in your bag
The startling collision

Of two men in howls
As the light finally
Changes, the sun balanced on

The pin of noon for only
Its non-moment as we both know
The limits traipse

Away in lame constructions
Of air, Giulietta is left
Fumbling after the spirits have left

Her in the same way we wear our hearts
Down to symbolism to
Symmetry to be worn to be blind

Every day is a senseless response
We don’t hold a train
Responsible for the killing

Of a man late
Saturday night, we know enough
To peer behind the bloody

Body at the Body
Politic and what appears
Carelessly lodged in

Its teeth, it is said
A man lives by his tooth and I
Feel compulsively too

Engorged by the signals
Of our age, Chinese
Men stand on my foot on

The way to Manhattan, I bear
A cancer of sense
To drown in the freezing

Poison, I hear
They’ve got Bison in Golden
Gate Park and I have

The love of a doctor who
Herself is learning to love a premise
Of mine, somewhere the maize

Is flattened beneath
My car and my car is the promise
Of emptiness, of a treachery

Forgone as I still rail
Against an empty
Twitching coda, so if you will

Gently tip the assemblage
I will breathe
My torrent once

More

"I indolently excerpt"

we live amid

The immediacies
As the temperature lowers my lids
Seem to also, I see less

The world contracts
And ideas slide like dress
Shoes across

The frictionless
Ice, making one almost
Nostalgic for sweat

A distorted buckling in the Path
Train plastic windows
Becomes almost prophetic

As lady and I slink
To New Jersey
For sushi and a glass of Spanish

Champagne, my head feels
Like bourbon, my nose
Like a pomegranate, in this density

I indolently excerpt
Portions of the skyline
To forcibly imbue

With sense and sometimes
I find the inhuman eye that lets
Things be, being being

Such a concussive set of castoff
Suffrages, much raging
Never punctures the skin or does

So only as a means
To treat threat
Like a balloon, I wake in

A strange bed beside the hum
Of electronics, my hand
On a feverish leg, the suburbs busy

With food and we’re already
Unabashed as for each tremulous
Step there exists

A pivoting fan of vectors
To refract and continue, last week
I found myself without irony

Helping an old lady cross
Third Avenue, she feared she
Would be blown

Over by the wind and why
Not, even should
The beauty of the world shine

Forth like a mountain
Of snow I would
See it famed into crystals

Each piece duly piercing
Its own consequent
Glint

"body is where the knowledge comes from"

Of synesthesia as certain small
Mysteries continue
To animate the instant and you are

As much thrown
Into it as you can be
Said to own

Any contingency in its improbable
Production, this morning I dreamt I
Was looting the house

Of a former reality
Television runner-up only
To be squealed

On by the rich kids, my books
Are yawing atop
The green nightstand

The flow of thought does not
Follow a fallow
Plain, the plan of the day

Is to let desire more or less trump
The mere pleasures
Of fact as the squat woman

On the train garbles
Obscenities of gender and the car
Precipitously buoys as she

Makes to leave before
Abruptly returning through the pursed
Black lips of the door, yellow

Is calling out
To brown, warbling trapezoids
Stalk the stoop-ridden

Periphery for warmth, the stubble
Of winter razors
Foward and I feel more

Comfortable amongst the indefinite
Articles, I feel no
Relief in the parentheses

Dictated by men, when I was a child
I wrote body is where
The knowledge comes from and now it has come

Time for me to choose
A different body, one that intercorporeates
The world as one

Would hold the pattern
Of words unresolved, each a plane
Which normal consciousness

Does not reach, intervals
Where the absolutely new revives
Its excitation and yet I can’t

Get the image of the man on the bike
Smashing into the cab
Door I had just opened out

Of my mind, or is it my mind out
Of the image as the sun
Has left us in a prematurity

Of night

"that's not poetry"

But I must do laundry
And get a haircut, make coffee
And obtain an active sort

Of boredom, for it is abhorrent
To me to know
Beforehand what a thing is

To become, the unconscious
Is not incautious, the
Forms of farms are far from

Exhausted and this boy
Is never so, though
This man regularly solicits

The energies
Of others in inhabiting
The accidental garb

Of space, if you
Recognize the flower’s use
As a Geiger counter

You no longer look
Down upon its uncomplicated
Eye, I no longer

Look forward to longing for
Words that disguise
Me, as even now I resort

To assume because knowledge isn’t
Possible, I perceive
Because I am less than

A part of the world and am thus
Excluded from its still
And unitary embrace, when I embrace

You it’s because you
Are possible, I feel a feeling
That elaborates those

I bear, I hear
Here through all the moments
Of there, these verbs only

Denote the impossibility
Of not acting, the song says be not so
Fearful, be not so

Pale, the guitar strings give
Way to trumpets as
A man in a kilt casts murderous

Expletives at a figure encompassed
By cardboard beneath
The Psychic’s eave across

The street, so much in my life happens
That’s not poetry
These days and yet it persists

That way, the black-eyed
Old woman who in the middle of her
Rant quieted to whisper God

Bless you to the pinstriped
Man on the train, the drugged-out
Glare of the boy

Embarrassed by
His grasp of fractions and yet
His laughter is impressive

To hear, the screaming of the black
Transient is carelessly
Remarkable and it feels suddenly

As if one has a choice, all the suitcases
Bobbing like hens, all sense
Conflating in a dim whirlwind

Of synesthesia

"constantly astonished anew"

Because they’re there and we’re
Skipping the marathon
To make love, marathons always

Make me cry anyway, applause drowning
Out the fourth cover of Foxy
Lady, a fat man named Klaus veering

Toward the median and I was
Reminded of the end of Cobra Verde
When Kinski eventually

Abandons his body to
The tide and the terrifically deformed
Man quits his pursuit to gaze

Upon it, we do not appear
To prepare to appear, yet I am not
Without myself, let us

Hold to the appearances and in
Our holding release
The burdens of these bodies made

Thick with unconscious
Care, the tic-tic
Of the birds goes out, my head

Dissolves into the Babbling
Flower, a panoply of hues is resolving
As constantly I am

Astonished anew, a man
For whom the divers tones
Of a mental life meld

At once, though I am still
Too man to know how, to no use
Is it that I wrench

These meanings as it is our fate to live
In the bulging zones
Of indetermination, each hastily

Snagged difference alighting
Within the necessity
Of trapping the next, it is thus that

Our being free diminishes
The existence of all
Other, that our choosing makes

Objects in its sweep
From here to there to here
Again, our needs

Not only consume us
But tear at the very world we deem
Available, a dancing figure

From China leans to
Gesture with her fired breadstick
Arms, one circle converges

On the next as Hiroyuki Doi replentifies
The present, Berdie slumps
In a chair and is bronzed into choppy

Waves reaching nowhere, living
Matter is from birth
Irritable and the office of the image that I call

My body is emptily retaining
Its retinal store, though
Not with less longing, not with less

Blood to go carousing
At the periphery, I think of your teeth
And am smiling, I think you

Are in surgery and dutifully
Amazed over the opening cavities
Of motionless men

"I will know my song well..."

I can only begin this once
I know enough not
To begin again, a bus engine

Revs outside, keeping the masculine
Time of streets intact, I seem
To lack something sufficiently

Violent for this world, these windows
Shut against the literal doom
Of birds for the first moment since

March perhaps, what alerts
Alters, what separates us from all other
Living matter is the intentionality

Of our aping, the rest
Are content to ghost, we must be legendary
Psychasteniacs, commanding

Stillness from bone though
None is to be found, one encapsulated
Day makes possible

The next as a nexus of moment
Ripples within each
Thin leaving we unwittingly

Enact, the sparrows congregate
On a clothesline, the sun
Mocks us with its patient trajectory

Though not without warmth, our arms
Grasp each other’s backs
And our stomachs bulge to touch

One another at the point
Of their turning inward, the songs says what
Good is the vision of a world without

The will to despise it, the limb
On the tree between the teeming apartments
Remains unburdened by the black

Plastic bag shuddering from
Its branch and we likewise shoulder
Remnants of lives compulsively

Lived, I want my friends not to feel
Slain by the slickness
Of art but the incommensurable

Crowning of flesh, the crowing
Of blatant mouths
Whose cheeks flush most

Shamelessly in the challenging
Of weathers, I make bad
Coffee, flout the proprieties

Of dress and carve a boogie
Of vectors from room to room, my hair
Curling at the neck, my neck gone

Tingly at the acknowledgement
Of a landscape by Tanguy, its silly distance
Coursed by melts

In wondrous penumbra, for you
See I know that desert, the one that holds
Everyone in their own

Inconceivable lateness and I’ve thought Yves
A name unfamiliar in its elbow
Like pose, the mugs in the cupboard

Wobble in response to the underground
Train’s relative glide and I’d like
To put something difficult together

Together, as often we are in an un-
Certain confrontation
With the things, the play

Of lost objects, the shifting
Limit of equilibrium we ceaselessly
Lurch toward, our instinct for

Renunciation burning
Coldly within a coda of disappearances
As if the world were a solution

Of magnets, though higher
Than actuality is possibility and I
Find these movements

Temper themselves, in my dream I
Became purchased
By a large, wealthy Italian

Family to “fix” their youngest
Daughter, who spoke
Only in tongues, I woke to the hydraulics

Of the 75 bus, which was picking
Up strangers at Bartel
Pritchard Square, as perhaps

I am also, these lines
So solicitous, gently intertwining
The desires of company

With the commerce
Of possible gossip, the street so
Acoustic in its precarious

Lanes of performance, Courtney
Wants coffee and bagels, Serena wants
Apples and coffee, I want

Coffee and the anti-tranquilization
Of Holland, 1945, fuzz
Blistering like the nervous

System tapped by microphones, delirious
Cells amplified as they carom
Through a dying spell and I likewise

Want to keep white
Roses in her
Eyes, so I go

To the park to be pelted
By leaves as an Italian greyhound
Named Bologna begs

For my food, I once knew
The smallest dog in Brooklyn and I sang
To her on our short walks, Millie

Dog, Millie dog, small enough
To be a slop for a hog, small enough
To be a little watch’s cog

But she moved to Minnesota, where I once
Shook a hologram
Of the president’s hand and held

The skeleton of a two-headed calf
Named Spider, I want
To name this poem something

Long and people it
To crowding
With fevered visitations

For you see I see
What I mean and these beguiling
Visions are inseparable

From me, I’m not afraid
To admit it, the clouds are heavily hued
With infantile pinks, the spinning

Blades of the fan have lured
My skin into volume, the paronomasias
Of advertising exhaust

Me in my hapless groping
After sense, I am
Not content to peck

At the surface of an inexhaustible
Depth, I want these
Scripts to be less of who

We become, just as the dead
Bulb shivers into a bloom
Of eccentric shards, I’m asking you

To accompany me
Through the deformations
And into ourselves for

When you have no
One no one can hurt you and I
Refuse to go blind

Amidst the threatening
Of affects, there are people on
The brink of a green

Ocean, their eyes green, their arms
Crossed and they are roping
The tide for you, your green ocean pulsing

Because they’re there

DISEQUILIBRIUM

I don't know how long, but for the next section of ill-defined time, I will be posting selections from a long poem I've tentatively entitled Disequilibrium. My understanding of that term is initially related to Piaget's concept of it, disequilibrium being that disconcerting space where you face novel information and must find a way to make it useful to you. It was his conviction that it was only by maneuvering through this space that we truly learned anything. I also feel the world to be a complex of systems striving for an equilibrium that may, in the end, be a specious concept. As you may have noticed, not much writing is happening for me in the way of poetry these days, but with this new work spinning into the darkness, I have hope there will be more.

I GHOST

If I say I
Am romantic, I mean that
Any beauty that persists

In abstraction does not belong
To me, any longing
That does not conspire

With me nose
To nose is inoperable and little
By little it came to me

That walking along the street I am
Saying something even
The streetlamps are doomed

To listen to, to
Embattle within, to illuminate
Without, I observe

The illiterate ramblings
Of the F beneath the softball
Outfield, buy a new

Hula-hoop at the carousel
Concession stand and envelope
The blood-coursing

Hands of a dark-haired girl under
The surveillance of many
Horses, lions, giraffes lifting

And sinking in the paradox
Of frozen motion, if I
Say I ghost hummingbird-like

Amongst the braids
Bobbing atop a toddler’s skull, I mean that
Nothing is safe

From the interventions
Of sense and the color
Of the human face is not less

Mysterious, I remember the broken
Nose of the man that taught
Me how to kill with the sound

Of my hands clapping and emerging
Into the eerily natural
Light descending on Astor

Place I have been
Thinking about the quirks
Of anatomy, how they

Resurface, how even the disciples
Of disciples have disciples and I returned
Danger to the tiny

Inner disturbances we share, your tongue paused
On my neck, your nails grazing
My back, I cautiously pray we have the good

Fortune to avoid the habits
Of reduction and I would have my ceiling suffocated
With aerial photographs of the Nebraska

Plain where my mother was
Taught to read, red
Rectangles abutting black, beige

And the occasional green, or Queens
Just before 11 o’clock
At night, its pulsing nebula

Congregating in veins the way
The body’s discarded
Hair gathers in airy balls

Beside the radiator, the subway
Warns if you see
Something say something

And that’s exactly what I intend to do.

THE ASYMPTOTIC APPROACHES

I woke to the laughter of a friend from
A dream that life
Was ultimately a balance

Between teleology
And the moment, suddenly I knew
Buildings were just sideways

Horizons, that the sky
Was an infinite
Moment looming

Above our heads, that sexuality
Is not a reflex, just
As the intentions of a cloud

Are coupled to the eye, which in
Touching the newspaper relates to me
Partial things, my friend

Ben tends to shake
Superfluous things from the tips
Of his fingers, this car

Things like an immaculate
Animal at the far
End of 16th Street, for

My ear has its own crass
Manner of making phantoms
Of beauty into

Familiar symbols, I say the earth
Is not unfriendly, the end is not always
Deadly, when the desert

Closes one in
Its alien
Throat and discloses

Its whispery valence, the sun
Leaves his perfect
Shadows strewn like capes

Upon the dazzling
Promiscuities of America, I read
That on the side of bus

Bisecting Park Avenue as the song
Sang men make sense
When they prevail, I make

The bed, turn on
The light over the turtle’s
Head, just catch the 6

Uptown, tonight I will register
The pornographic
Constellating of smog-woozy

Stars, but here the man
Daydreams with his fading tattoos
Peeking from beneath white

Sleeves and a previous
Occupant has left a crossword
For me to complete, pen

Jabbing my thigh, my thought
Distracted by its asymptotic
Approach to reality, we are never

Quiet, never quite
Free from the hallucinations
Of meaning, the feather

In the hat of the woman is not even
The limit of her
Body and as it stirs within

The passersby, I say to myself I
Have made your body
Hurt, the weather says hope

I get the wind right
This time, Hiroyuki Doi says suppose
Every creature is a circle that exists

In this world, how many of them can I draw?

RECOMMENCE EVERYTHING

If I am to be committed
To transcendence, to merely say that
There is a body is not

Yet to deal with it, if my looks go
Everywhere they are
Selfsame slaughtered by the manner

In which they snag, a car
Illuminates in panic every thirteen
Minutes or so and it’s driving

The neighbors nuts as the socioeconomic
History of golf pollutes
The branch in the hand of the kid

Swinging at an imaginary
Ball, the handshakes
Here are reversible, we touch

Touching the way these fall dragonflies
Flee the invisible weft
They sew into the air that unites

Above our heads, today’s weather
Report calls for abundant
Sunshine as a man with a limp

Plods past the girl
Asleep in her tiny camouflage
Bikini and if she dreams

Of the secret blackness
Of milk, it’s only these pinks
Lazily invading

Her back as a sigh
Descends over the scene while the girls
Put on their shirts and we must

Recommence everything just
Moments after it’s begun, the sun
Shines abundantly down

Upon the clouds, or briefly
Breaks on the totality
Of a dog, or our impression

Of the totality of
A dog and there’s something
About lived life that leaves

Itself in intractable
Tufts upon the heart, it’s tough
Being a thing

Which understands enough
Of what it means to be
Seen to see others in the nightmare

Of consciousness, which is nonetheless
A dream, which is nonetheless
A choice without choice, spiraling

Like the intertwined black
And white on the disc
Of the hypnotist, whose colors

Remain fixed, we remain
Unconvinced by the spectacular
Passing of modes, want

Our ears near the frequencies
Of I hear myself
With my throat and what the throat

Thinks we drink, let
The very next idea that enters
Your head represent all

Words that never made it to the page.

TOWARD PERCEPTUAL ENSEMBLES

The cat does not avert
Its gaze, it is in
The room whereas I cannot help

But be of, often
Stuck between my wanting
To observe objects

And my responsibility to the objecthood
Of my own watching, so it
Is that my eyes escape me, fleeing

Into the pulse of a summoning
World where there is no
Silence, a night where there is no pitch

Black and I remain
Engaged in the endless
Task of expressing

What exists, if my life does not
Explain this
Sentence, I think

To let the sentence attempt
To exclaim my life, much as a vulture
Flicked the young Da

Vinci’s tongue with its tail, I ate inch
Worms for money and smacked
Stale crimson peppers for Miller moths

During the occupation of ’85, our attic
Transformed into an insect
Mausoleum, even today there

Was a squirrel in Washington
Square Park which brazenly
Did trounce the toes of a studious

Girl in sandals, her pen top
Tossed in terror among
The half-smoked butts, so is it

Any wonder to be subsumed
By the operations, to exist as one
Life crossing 16th Street

To overlap the others in tremendous
Inward and oblivious
Leaps, powering the air

With intractable charges, or
Part of the parade of phantasms
Bottlenecking at First

Avenue and Houston, where salamis
Solicit distant gunmen and the retirees
Converge to leer cross-legged

At the exigencies of cinema, even at this
Intersection if I
Tremble my trembling divides

The sleeplessness of others and still
I would not be a wound in
The landscape, even had I found quarter from

My engagement with the codes, if people
Like to put things in
The ground, I like to fumble

Amidst the noise our
Handsome collisions commend
To being, the hopefulness in

Our movement from sleep
To the world when so
Often there is only yourself looking out

As the actor climbs down
From the proscenium to stand
Beside you and glare

In near silence as the near darkness falls.

BEING-IN-THE-BEING

If I contain a likeliness
There is no dead
Of night, my immensities gather

Breath around them like bulky nuclei
Harvesting paths, the sun nearly
Always recognizes my hair, the cat

That arises from beneath
The bed is no longer
Ambivalent and wrongdoing does

Instruct as each particle arrives struck
By an intuition of wholeness, I
Interfere until I can span as enthusiastic

The day as dark, I desire to indulge
My feelings unto matter, perhaps to loose
The folds of this waking

Into film as the eye
Cameras through a complex
Act of awareness, you

Don’t have to wait
Until you die to reconcile the variegated
Guesswork of experience or question

The possibility of the question, so
I listen as an unknown
Source of animation kicks a soup

Can down the avenue wondering
If it appreciates
The interruptions of clunk

How they penetrate
An otherwise
Dull continuity or work

Their way into dreams, I dream
Of brand names, suspend
Myself in the protracted plummet

From sky to sky, lay
With tigers and sometimes I sing
To keep from cursing, braced

By the tedious pangs
Of incarnation, but it wasn’t always
This way, I once secreted

My name within the idea
My name became, allowed the magic
Of talk to ricochet

Like a bullet into the entire
Future before folding
Itself through its own beginning

As flesh alone dissolves
Any thoughtful stab
At purity, there is no manner

I wish to absorb
Nor a shape this veering attempts
To conclude, I have dust

To remind me of myself, a cacophony
Of dishonored steps to take
No notice of, there is a church

In California that I hold
In my head and its thick-tongued
Towers toll without

My being there as my being
Ebbs only to erupt
In directionless code, I was born

Into The West and the joy
Of unintelligibility or I was born
Into fluorescence

And the hands of a stranger, I will inhabit
Abstraction or inhibit it, as
The vanishing point of my mouth

Explodes, proffering
The air with tiny quarrels
Of self, I either writhe

In the baptism of ether or
Soberly find myself
Happening ceaselessly, these

Are the uncertain occupations
Of an object in the act
Of appearing, it is now

Time to consider your own.

DISLOCATIONS OF ASTONISHMENT

Landed in Albuquerque, drove
To Santa Fe, doves
Scattering in the driveway, my sister

Was reading about Mormons, my mother
About mystery in the Virgin
Islands, I slept on a bed composed

Of air, chased it
Each morning with a cup
Of coffee, a storm

Hit and the ponderosas dutifully
Bowed, a skunk rooted
Beneath the hot tub, near the night

Spider whose body resembled
A bird’s egg and was ornamented
By a single diamond, all

Week I chucked rocks against the monotonous
Adobe, my shoulders turning
Pink, the clouds turning charcoal as so

Often morality dwells in the driving
Out of fear, so that what
The centrifuge flings malingers unseen

And this wall remains nothing
More than a loose flag
Of fingers draped idiotically

Across the eyes, we need not be
Let alone, we seek the acknowledgments
Of company amidst

This cycling of refuted systems, the shocking
Green eyes of a young girl
Named Kori widen as she tells me of an elevator

The size of a living
Room and I watch as hummingbirds
Spar in abrupt fits over

A dish of sugar water, I myself
Worry over a world grown
Pathologically soft in its revulsion

Of horror, in its acceptance of error
In the late summer breeze
My forearm hair feels particularly

Inarticulate, receiving so much deciphering
So little, too often I invigorate
A line of discourse only to have it

Stump when the telephone
Rings, I dreamt I was a comedian
And the audience was

Laughing so hard I never
Was able to tell
A single joke, so here

It is—the work that I do does
Nothing to things, I leave home to imbibe
The dislocations of astonishment, to lose

My way and find another, tricking
The moments into line
Before defecting into rearrangements

And if I write as if language
Were a series of decrepit apartments
Harboring squatters

I am apart, the sun
Penetrates where the air
May not pass as

Each experience happens twice, even
The panic you feel returning
Home to a strange figure in the dark, even

If it turns
Out to be the innocuous
Shadow of a Buddha

Planted among the flowers in the garden.

NOT AS HELL AS YOU

It was a whole
Day had passed and I
Said so

Many things that might have been
True that my lips
Were chapped, my fingertips

Calloused and white, this evening a song
Says you better come on
In my kitchen and I feel doomed

To absorb disquiet, tiny
Trimmed hairs from my mustache sticking
To the damp bathroom wall, a friend

Calls to tell me he slept
With his boss, another broke
Her leg biking along

The Everglades, when I say I
Refuse I mean trash
As in I trash the idea of a voluptuous

Remoteness and I trash the tyrannical zest
With which our minds injure
And betray us, if consciousness is

A train they’ve uncoupled
The sleeping cars and supposing truth
Is a woman she is

Like Marilyn, stripped
Of all but the most conditional
Meanings, I wish to crowd

This believing, to imperceptibly shift
The spotlights until each
Angle has been teased bare before

The libidinous mob, the man
Under the psychic’s eave is rather
Pacific today, his ear

Crushed against a book-sized radio, no drunks
To taunt him into rage, I fear
I may have misguessed the wallaby’s

Sex having spied it
Grooming a pouch yesterday
As wailing toddlers rode

The carousel for free, I want you
To take me not
As I am, but as I intend

For you to become, this only
Works in poems, the song says I am
A young man that’s inclined

To seek pleasure and I sneeze
On the already grimy
Keys, only the most used letters

Free of it, my love finally
Sleeps, a book of clinical neurology
On her breast rising

And falling like an overturned
Raft, we are determined to sneak
Into a movie, I simply

Have to replace the strings
On my guitar, have to explain the use
Of beliefs bound

To change for a perfect user
Of words uses things and I am so far
From doing either

Subliminally rapt by my
Intoxication for all things bent
On sincerity, on

The hinge that separates a concern for objects
On the lens from the impulse
That traverses an axon and I know

Its silly to think care
Could exist in any sense unsullied
But I also know that it’s bound

To be raining outdoors.

ALLEGRISSIMO

My eyes are no longer cut out
For the likes of midtown, they’ve grown
Accustomed to roofs, stoops, stores

Suffused by an affable
Dinginess and the textures of low
Sound droning

Without tedium, men call
My dad a man
Of decency, an old

World word, would that surprise
Might rupture the hideous
Simplicity of causation, that the tortoise

Might take the hippopotamus
For its charge as perhaps all faithfulness is born
From sloth, "they who have contrived

To retain ignorance" dare
Not tempt the wolf
When wolves they most easily

Become, bombastic architects
Of mediocrity, media’s winking fingers
Upon our knees, yet "no one lies so much

As the indignant" and I weep
Once every five years or so, dent
My knuckles on closed

Storefronts every month, give weekly
Thanks for the absurd
Surpluses of others as my sense

Of direction daily rearranges
Itself in heat, so I take out the fruit
Flies with the garbage

Don my silver shorts and whoosh
Around the park narrowly
Avoiding midday dope smokers’ fishing

Poles to visit the white-tipped
Wallaby recently tagged as Caribbean
Women push towheaded

Boys in overgrown strollers and "I want
To always be on film, to be
Caught in the cut coffee sober," to thrill

Allegrissimo in the perseverating
Predawn dash of birds, I applaud the real
Bodies of women, collapse

Into the tenderness of leisure and all
My bitter recriminations are sloughed in the line
Between void and voice

Between abyss and abundance, shoplifting
Teenagers spiriting lipstick amidst
Half-torn movie tickets, the roots of a once

Stately oak tree sprawled like tentacles
Across the quiet New Jersey
Street, tonight I will play ping

Pong and drink Negro
Modello, eye Elisa’s budding
Belly and anticipate

"Casimir Pulaski Day" at the Bowery
Ballroom, for life continues
To astonish, even as the bomb-laden

Believers of Iraq reek
Their fiery remuneration, a skein
Of cool air descends upon

Brooklyn and the incongruities
Mangle in ways that awe
My ability to reason, which is finally

Unnecessary, as is
My attachment to behavior for
We’ll all of us

Be new here in the end.

A GEOMETRY OF SLEEPLESSNESS

When I was eight
I knew I would never go
To war and so

I knowingly deformed
My knees in an effort to approximate
My father’s, knocked, a little

Awkward, I’ve never been
One to calmly stomach
The mundane violence of being

A man, nor my own
Coursing potential to harm, hands
Thick-knuckled and shaky

Even on my twenty-eighth birthday
As I toured to the Bronx
Zoo and lurked amid The Land

Of Darkness, where umbrella-winged fruit
Bats keep pink-eyed
Deer in fear, I refuse hate as a kind

Of occupation, also kindness
As an excuse for simplicity, now it is
Friday and "blood confuses

The heart," which dithers serenely
One moment only
To be throttled the next, when I was

In high school I used
To keep myself
Up at night envisioning strange

Geometric shapes, each expanding to the point
Where it seemed to miraculously fill
My head and transcend it, this uncanny

Mathematics of volume turning
Spiritual as whole
Hours passed untended, unintended

Fatigue suffusing my days as now
There dwells a plenteousness confiding
Itself by honk and whisper

A squalid transient barking
At pigeon chicks
Hidden behind the psychic’s eave

Today’s miscreants hardly want
A mound of clouds to lounge
On, they want Mom and Dad’s job

To mean something
More than a fruitless lull
In the maroon

Between existential jokes, my love
Needs sleep, my knees
Need skin and I am becoming too much

A part of this
World, the callous-thick
Feet of a bearded

Bum swelling and bruised like plums
As the heat index touches one
Hundred degrees, "one should not go to church

If one wants to breathe
Pure air" and I now
Know the sum of learning: love

Terrifies the lover and loved alike.

THE THIRTEEN YEAR-OLD SCREAM

After work you re-park
The car, head
Over to the Russian hairdresser

For a trim, make small
Talk until Night Moves comes
On the radio, then close

Your eyes and tingle
As the razor grazes your now
Pink neck, come home

With the words
Rasping repeatedly, "woke
Last night to the sound

Of thunder," though you woke
Last night to the thrill
Of naked legs, the air conditioner

Clicking metronomic to some
Circadian pulse, what seems
To happen becomes its own happening

As the truths of a new
Millennium dabble and abscond, each
Consequent possibility—comfort

Nothingness, ecstasy, hope
Mutilation, wonder—occupies
Its provisional realm

Only to misplace itself in the relentless
Shuffle, this morning you gave
Sonny Pain thirty-five cents, Jews

For Jesus gave you
A brochure that asked if you were
Interested in "Computerized

Donuts" and you weren’t quite sure
What they were getting
At, the scar on the forearm of

The woman wearing white
Linen pants on
The train was shaped

Like a toy boat on the mottle
Of sewer waves and you proceed to grope
At what can only be approached

By a gape, mouth hot
And dumb, top lip
Thin as the bottom protrudes

In its sensual idiocy and don’t you see
The eyes of splendor
Penetrating the face of travail, the interminable

Act of remembering wrongly as "the night
Takes on a weird electronic
Tingle," for this is the place you return

To through the need
Of living, a cavern translated
By an immaterial

White profusion like
The color you see in the middle
Of clouds beyond airplane

Windows, you were asleep
When the foul world
Changed, your loves revoltingly

Aged, your hands grew
Cumbersome and a whole lifetime
Passed before you

Realized that it hadn’t, you were back
On the train where
The stifling obscenity of being

A thing causes the thirteen
Year-old girls to scream
"I need a dick" in harmonious unison

So that you might
Cringe, so that the transparency
Of grief might blush, so

That the silence might finally fuck off.

THERE IS SOMETHING LOOMING

The humidity surges, a bird
Furtively huddles on
The stoop quivering, the air is still

Composed of translucent arrows
As tenaciously we stand
Vigil at our own diminishing

Prospect, I am not heavy
With reason, have yet to grow
Enamored with the tragedy

Of monochromes, Colin
Drives with his bicep
Half-out the window and loses

Himself in the contemplation
Of bird’s breath, I see the future
Announce itself in

The inexplicable carom
Of ricochets now
Outreaching their dubious reports or

The lingering buzz
On the lips
As a famous older poet

Unexpectedly plants
A kiss on you in San Francisco
Or how the ruby panties

On the woman in the advertisement
For coffee shock
You into a buried remembrance

Abuse is no more
Real than tenderness, the branches
Outside the window group

And sway in their snaky
Amicable way, a groping mass
Of cable cascades in black

Tendrils from the roof and my eye
Is full of promiscuity, the graffiti reads
YOUR PROBLEMS LIE

WITH THE POOR, the dogs
Make their concerted dawn
Howl, an hour is lost in the augury

Of clouds, August
Impends, consciousness
Punishes and if

You think there is something
Looming there is
Something looming, the difference

Engines we portend
Locked in a stutter of forms
As when the blind woman

Recalls the faces of ski
Jumpers or the retired fireman
Eyes the figure

Of a stranger approaching and I am
That stranger, in need
Of a haircut, my arms pendular

With a secret happiness, one large
Foot passing the other, two
Hours playing softball and then down

The avenues to beer
With intelligent and carousing
Friends, a fortune

From the Chinese restaurant
In my pocket, which
Reads YOUR FEAR CONTAINS

ITS OPPOSITE TO BE BROKE OPEN.

AN INTRODUCTION TO THE MECHANICS OF DEFORMABLE BODIES

When Erica says
I am feeling myself and jovial
I think of the orange

Tipped trees between
The buildings out
My window, their penknife

Leaves grazing like air-bound anemones
Haunted by the jellyfish
Forms of black plastic bags, today

My love turns another
Year older, youth
Though she is, her kind, fooling blue

Eyes kindle wonder and I find
Myself wishing for her
Happiness more often even

Than my own, a picture
Of the crest of her
Back in my mind, her sheepish

Smile tremoring the air
Into joyous throbs, the song
Says 'all the bleeding

Drums, celebration guns' and somewhere
She is drinking guaro, dark
Plaits of hair striating her already

Reddened face, I search
The pages of a Medical Encyclopedia
For images, place a diabetic

Within the coils of a Child-Headed
Blengin, her hand missing
A finger, the afternoon free

From employment, 'every breath
Death defying', so I go
Nowhere, make too much

Coffee, read a biography of Warhol
Call my dad, mull over
Health insurance, stretch out

On the couch and thrill
At the idea of my love’s impending
Touch, the plain

Of my chest pale beneath
Its T-shaped turf
Of curly hair, would that bodies

Could rearrange themselves
Like thought, that these gangly
Arms were telescoping

To where you are, the way
My eyes run over
The geography of where you were

And will be come Monday.

SOBRIQUETS

I was never able to help
Myself as a child
From rifling through other

People’s drawers, my sister was
Afraid of the kidnapper, but I knew
I could knock him out

With a lamp, in college I used
To rap my way out
Of fights, after college I could not help

Pointing out the absurdity
Of violence to any aggressor and thus
Absorbed many fists

I punched a hole
Through my boyhood
Door and my

Parents installed a punching
Bag in the basement, I bludgeoned
A young, flightless bird

To death with a fencepost
With a friend, we were five and neither
Understood previous

To that what death was, it’s still
The worst thing
I’ve ever done, my stomach

Sickens in contemplation
Of its backyard grave, the one
I visited regularly

As I grew, Ted dreams
His hearty glass
Shoulder is tapped by a procession

Of two-headed nails and a pregnant
Sea turtle kicks sand
In my love’s face as all actions

Are consequent to the extemporal
Implosion of choice—what is not possible
Is not to choose, so we close

Our windows or dash
Into the cacophony, submit
Ourselves to the sadism

Of timing or acknowledge 'god
Is what we make
Of him', I wanted to flower

Spontaneously in the nightgown
Of rust, to vivisect
A dragonfly mid-flight

And trace the minuscule
Scatter of its organs, in County Clare
Sits Bunratty

Castle and there I left the casing of my index
Finger under a canon after my first
Sampling of snuff, I revel in the iconic

Boredom of my name, secret
Myself in the panopticon’s rotating
Eye, if a phantom trudges

Elephantine from room
To room—that’s life and far
Be it from me to

Burden a figment with sobriquets.

HYPERGRAFIA AND THE CONJUNCTION OF DRONES

I will not condemn our 'esoteric
Embellishments of personality', those that forge
Intractable wefts in the translucent

Bubbles our thoughts waft
From, each inane
Jaunt to the Laundromat is a dance

Within the unsuspecting
Dance of another’s cigarette
Run, the guesswork

Of perception dutifully fills
In behind, the apparent world falling
Into a chirp-heavy

Accord, or does it conspire to
Slay us, these urban shades
Always skulking with their jagged

Grins, you see it
Depends upon the pedestrian’s
Gait, the one long fingernail

On the woman across
From me or if
I am picturing how it opens

Skin, which is how I know
I’ve been on the train
Too much this otherwise fine

Tuesday, the tinsel
Nightlight of Brooklyn
Cascading over

The dull, thick, chemical canal
As I have plans to
Convene with my sister

In our living room
For a beer, where the thin
Cardboard dogs howl in

Black marker off
The edge and a child’s red
Accordion languishes

Untouched, there are two Blind
Willies: one crossing
Jordan and the other taking

His burden to the Lord, Lord
How I sense a trouble
Come to perplex the good

People that do bend
Before dogma, that do cauterize
Doubt in the hope of rooting

A lame leg before giving way
To the inexorable
Aesthetics of empire

Which in readiness debilitates
Its angular chill for the musty pleasures
Of inefficiency, these are the songs

Of ourselves we sing
For others, simultaneously
Indulging an altogether

More elusive melody, the one
Within the head, though I see no
Need to dissolve

The crutch of selfhood, to shun
Culture for nature
Minutia for perpetuity

Intuition for the deliverance of air.

LO

My first wire
Job was a fortune
Of violets

And I dismantled them
To flee my own
Flaxen locks in a pot

Of coffee, it was my destiny
To spend the summer on the porch
Lifting a dumbbell

And now here
I am programming daffodils
In the guise of leisure

The girls of Windsor
Terrace propped against Sabella
Pizza’s glass doors, I never

Made claims to portraiture
Am merely a sketch
Artist, a draftsman gracelessly

Devising devices to further
A kind of compassionate absurdity
Like the words in the bathroom

Of the Buttermilk
Bar, which read 20,000
LEAGUES UNDER

MY NUT SACK
But also like the Nobel Prize
Winning novelist who

Writes 'Because I own this
Rifle my arms and legs
And blood and bones are superior to yours'

For man treads perverse
Amongst the mute
Consciousnesses, he is a she

And we are all of us
Stunning in the magnetic
Fields we toil

Over, the saliva of our tongues flung
Before us as they dart
This way and that, panderers

To the throne of the Frog
King, who eyes us suspiciously
And ribbits with the full

Timbre of his royal blood
For he too has seen the girls
Outside the pizza

Joint, their plaid skirts
Stained with the yellow grease
Of garlic knots, he guesses

At the rude waves
Of heat which sluggishly billow
From an idle downtown

Bus and he fears the bodega
Cat napping near a bag
Of quarter chips as the palpitations

Continue, we dwell in a constant
State of self-immolating
Gasps and yet there is something elegant

In it, the way we glance
The commiserations
Of biology, join the psychic

Potlatch of inimitable minds, verily
Drift on the abstract
Sexuality of time as it contours

Bleaker existences, there are so many
Pregnant women in July
And as I watch the incandescence

Of bodies abut
On the gum-covered walks
I am content to peer

Through the humiliating impasse.

SUBCUTANEOUS CONCERNS

Ambling down the summer
Midnight streets of New York
One gets the distinct

Impression of drifting between the walls
Of a clammy cave, the lamps
Like masses of bioluminescent

Worms casting orange
Light into the grumbling depths
Beyond the subway

Grates, I know a man
Who quit his job at the greeting card
Factory in St. Paul, a woman

Who saw little animated
Tennis shoes every time she closed
Her eyes, I close

My hand around a fork
And eat saffron rice and black
Beans with jalapeño

Pickled carrots from a Tupperware bowl
While watching the horse
Breaking scene from The Misfits

That purportedly killed
Clark Gable, his stubborn heels
Dug into Nevada’s

Desolate earth, it’s so late
In the history of literature, so shot
Through with older raptures

Which chime dustily
Upon the shrinking bell
Of the West, once

I drove 4,000 miles to realize all
My ideas were still in Ohio
All my kindhearted abominations fed

Into a tiny voltage
Of axons and yet nothing
Compares to the melt

I feel in observation of humanity
Watching NECKFACE’s glory fritter
Away on the roofs

Of the Gowanus Canal, this stunning
Industrial “eyesore” where I used
To walk hand-in-hand with a lady of German

Descent, I know a man
Who was mistaken
For a bear, a town where all

The hamburgers are
Named after chess moves, a depository
In the employee parking

Lot where we’ve buried three Christmas
Trees, tomorrow I shall flash
My thighs upon the river and wed

My friend to a keg but tonight
The subcutaneous
Concerns dawdle unmet

By the dizziness of glee, stray
Cats call out their lust
Or terror or both and it's impossible

To fall asleep.

NEUROLOGICAL THEORIES OF DENIAL

Heat seeps to sprinkle
My forehead with sweat just as every
Morning we return to the cold

Liberty of distance, droves
Of the enchanted exchanging
Lives, I will build

A strange child to reckon
With such horror and cause
It to seek absences

To stare at truth like a gleaming
Toxicity translated by
Breezes and it will glean

Also the private conspiracy
One makes with
Oneself, for if we are

One with explosion
It is combinatorial, the ice
Cream man’s melodic

Transience merging with the human
Traffic as bodies perpetuate
Their chemical escapade, ardently reveling

In the catalog of soft
Abstractions, when you are gone I listen
To The Transfiguration and am lost

In the cloud your body
Becomes, I mean
The one you possess

That which possesses me
In the eerie stereo darkness
And if grammar

Is the direct result of how
Humans feel in the world, perhaps
The obverse is also

True, adverbs make me who
It is I can be said
To have been, I can practically

Hear all those words out
There amassing to make the journey
Inward, blistering

Pings and haunted whooshes
Triangulating at the self’s too
Permeable periphery

As if it were no
Surprise to suddenly dissolve
Into a tome-like tomb

Of syllabic feedback, the poems
That these days
Have become more

Real than the indentations
On my mattress or
An unwashed cutting

Board, this cigarette in the empty
Beer can atmospherically
Sizzling to its obscure close

On the streetside sill, so
It is that a man
Marvels at the tumult

Or ease he’s
Become, balancing the neurological
Theories of denial

With the fact that the heart is
Beautiful as a seismograph
That if I dare to look a stranger

In the eye his palms
Will swell, that it is suicide to live
Conscientiously among

The compromising throng.

FLOUTING DETERMINISM

We eat afternoon
To bones in
A metropolis where ghosts

Are always hungry, their vivisected
Steam-plume quotations
Coddled by racket or carved

Into disappearing paper
Snowflakes against the charcoal
Doors, all these

Memories passing
The way veins
Collapse, little bruises

Surfacing like twice
Exposed film, I do not wish
To wash the fingerprints

From my thought nor burnish
An age made rough
By understanding, I imagine the cat

Dreams of a fluttering
Hand in a lush
Leafy darkness, when I was

Twelve there was nothing
More pleasant than the startling
Ping of crab

Apples hitting hoods and here
I am disheartened
By the flat, arid music

Of Western Imperialism, its accord
Looming, the epiphanies
Gutted, but all parts are not

Pieces, the eyes close most
Often to open
Upon the diminishing

Grandeur of amputated scenes
Those that ebb only
To bare the imperative

Quality contained therein, one has
But to walk the deserted
Halls of a museum to know

How much life these portraits
Need gathered about, how much trouble
Resides in the definite

Mind when our best defense
Against terrorist attacks is to be late
To work, my love

Loves me enormous and the coincidence
Of these emotions dispels
Dogma in the same way it spells

Out a burdensome absurdity, my sister
Fears the introduction
To her book will cast a wraithlike

Pall over the remainder but
I appraise her
Of certain things:

1) all well-intentioned beginnings
2) wander in the hope
3) of flouting determinism

The wolfman weeps
Unconscious in the unfinished
Suburban development

As here in the botanical gardens
The turtles stick their necks
Out for sun and if the turtles stick

Their necks out why not we?

THE HARMONY OF OVERWHELMING

Perhaps I exist to ruin
Objectivity, to dull
The shears that this insular

Art becomes, our proclivities
Mingling in the mangling
Street, since I moved to New York

I have not stopped
Sneezing, though I did pause
In writing this poem

To hunt down a frightening
Silverfish who undulatingly flew
Across the keys, even

If it never sleeps
It does awaken and one peculiar
Moment you find yourself

In the unfriendly grip
Of the octopus so
Is it in vain that I hope

To be less of a stranger
To you while at the same time trying
To avoid the disgrace of being

Well known, the city is
Harmonious mass, an Amazon
Of commerce, even

If it is the harmony of overwhelming
And collective murder, I had expected to lose
My virginity to my babysitter

At the age of twelve, Breton
Wished to keep the book
Ajar, the song says I can’t be held

Accountable for the things
That I’ve seen, but I refuse to
Deny the refuse

Of our lives the warmth
Of witness, I will not submit
Myself to loopholes

In recursion, the only phone
Call I got all
Day was a wrong

Number, yet that also
Has not stopped
Me from feeling a consequent

Note amongst many, kind
Words are no less
Instructive and I’m off

To the zoo for salutations
To the wallaby I call
Bushwick Bill, also to look in

On a deteriorating letter
I’ve stuck between the wires
Of a fence running

Along the ravine, all my
Life I’ve dreamt
I was able to see translucent

Arrows making up the air and thought
It feasible to spend
An afternoon not breathing

But when I stop
To remind myself of the way you
Smell when we’re lying

In bed I know it
Would be a terrible waste
Not unlike the beauty

Of insects, this apparitional
Night, this soft, silly
Music that has become more

Meaningful than I could imagine.

INDEPENDENCE DAY

I was trying to land
A plane in the Andes only
To wake to

The squealing brakes of garbage
Trucks once again, the soft
Focus of death reflected in a pigeon’s

Rooftop warble, this is
What it means
For me to be in love

To swallow grief
In wondrous subvocal
Gulps, I think

Of all the fingers
Wriggling in their crepuscular
Pocketlight and wish

The cloistered sublimities
Of touch to open
When the singer says feeling

He says it seven
Times and the rain that wasn’t
Due until evening falls

In tiny drops against
The ketchup of your hotdog
As you prepare

To watch America
Swim, Long Beach lifeguards
Drowned out by the shrill

Calamity of spangled
July, this is a film
About the ankles of a man

Cornered in the alleyway
By a sudden vortex
Of refuse, a song about a woman

Trembling in relief
At the absence
Of god, her windshield

Speckled with the elliptical
Distortion of lenses
In daylight, It was I who

Dubbed the cat Thirsty and I
Who staked claim
To Dirt Bottle Island

Where spokes of illumination came
Crashing through its canopy
To fill its meticulous scatter of glass

With glints, your shins
Ornamented by scars, one
Hand around my

Waist, the other flat
Against your lips and you
Have said nothing

Of me until you take into
Account my most personal views
About chicken salad

And the weekly catharsis
Of montage, I
Who left Colorado

To revel in the obscene
Pageant of tender idiots we call
Art, to fail in

Habituating the scotomas
Of class, to listen
As the baby downstairs cries

Out to the world its astonishment.

CONSEQUENT REALITIES

My love is studying
Anatomy and I
Am a dilettante resuscitating

The moaning anomie
Of postmillennial drudgework
Into daily veer

As Watts teenagers writhe
And jolt like shapely electricity
Victims and theirs

Is an earnest rage born
Of the absurd, a fit
Response to an irresponsible

Age, each morning’s paper
Soaked in a bloom
Of limbs, each ironing

Wife wrought by the incidentals
Of a life unwittingly
Defended by a spectacle

Of death, I myself often
Pass this
Way with my hands

Over my eyes, hopelessly
Mired by the gross
Mitigation of routine

As the recursion of the
Spreadsheet self
Grows misty, harmonies

Invade, the Voyager
Ages in direct
Proportion to my own ungainly

Orbit and literature wreaks
Its unstoppable
Pageant of obituaries

On the American lunch
Break, my great
Grandfather was adopted

At The Battle of Wounded Knee
And I called him Bernie
And I swear we will not be confined

To pale little moments
Of exuberance or the inexhaustible
Shifting of these consequent

Realities, it is impossible
To measure how
Often the phantom

Limbs of memory return bent
On self-mutilation, nails
That aren’t there firmly dug

Into a palm that no
Longer exists, though it
Does, has, always

Will it seems, aligned
With the body’s bewildering
Pulse, the eye’s fiery

Recapitulation of difference
And who will stand
With us against the relativism

Of sensory input? When
Is it but constantly
That these assumptions threaten

To overtake us? Who deigns
To bring my love
And I something to wear we feel

Like getting out of bed.

FOR

Another March arrives
You wake to the hydraulics
Of the 75 bus

A man you have scarcely
Met dies and you lose
Another indispensable compass

The fluorescent wanderings
Of your eye divorce
From the tolerant measure of his and we

Can’t escape the luggage language
Makes of our thought
Each nerve a courier wholly

Removed from the incalculable sequence
Of detours backwardly
Spelling out whatever finds

Itself wrung from moment’s lurch
There is no reasonableness
Fit, no grand arbiter of sense

To fix the tangle, no way
Of knowing what and who we need
Most alive, as today

My love’s eyes are like little
Animals opening
And closing in order

That I might survive, I feel
To live in them as a page
Must, want nothing

Of the lonesomeness of being
Closed and connected
Only by the taut physicality

Of spines, to shore again against
The smallness of the real
The horror of living forever

Interred within a reasonable universe
Because there is no
Impenetrable line, the months

Pass, dust gathers, a cut
On the bridge of the nose vanishes
And meaning slips in

And out of view, like stars
Surfacing on a night
Sky scalloped by cloud

Cover, your love’s shapely
Thighs tremble and detonate
An irresolution

That’s been terrifying
To bear intangibly for the past
Year or so, here

Are a few of the reasons
To continue: For Love, for The Immoral
Proposition, for All

That is Lovely in Men.

BLOOD ON THE TARMAC

In Brooklyn I contemplate
What curious maladies are borne
By the surprise drip

Of sixth floor air
Conditioners effusively
Placating heat

But here, static, out
The window of seat 6A
I see blood

On the tarmac, its elegant
Maroon arch like
One half of a pelvis

As a voice pervades
Enumerating the emergency
Procedures, I make it

A point to visualize
Such catastrophe in hopes
Of deflating

The cruel whimsy
Of a capricious god
A young child

Vaulting its merciless
Incomprehensibility from the shallow
Of its toothless mouth as we

Begin to roll and soon
We’re aloft, the cemetery
Like a computer

Chip and the impossible
Sky like itself only
Vaster, bluer, two-and-a-half

Hours later we once
Again pierce the shaggy moguls
Of the cloudtop

To reveal green protractor
Ballfields and a myriad
Swimming pools unblinking

Along the dumb, patchwork face
Of the suburbs, I turn
Off my electronic device

Thinking there is
No jet engine where there
Is no mind

There is no love in
The unerring, no embrace
Where the wind is

Absent and what
Is it to explode
But the pencil point

Extension of learning?
To evolve except
A heightened susceptibility

To the brutal modicums
Of furthering control? Thousands
Of glimmering autos

Wait in their anonymous lots
As we fall upon
Minnesota, the last

Place I could be called
Innocent and since then
My ignorance has

Not stopped alarming
Me, not grown
Less than a compounded

Sum of my experience so
You see there is no love in the one
True path just

As there is a canceling sweetness
In the poem’s last
Line, awkward thunder

In the airplane’s furious deceleration
Warm distance in each
Of the loved ones you return

To from so very far away.

ZIEHERSMITH DISPATCHES

The backwards fire seeps
Into its blooming
Woodpile as the poet mispronounces

Masturbatory, pinwheels
Of elk lining
The otherwise white

Walls wink, their fractal
Patterns coalescing
With the languid frenzy of

Birds aligning the unassigned
Capacities of the city
My egoism is a cormorant

Whose neck expands
At will, my heart
Too loud and these lyrics kill

Us, the saturation we
Become tracing
Ourselves into air, a jay

Crowds a turtledove
From the clothesline nobody
Uses, scatology trumps

Tenderness, the ovoid frames
Of a girl’s glasses
Clash with the rectangle

Face she was born
Within and what of
The part of

Me that embraces
What I loathe or how
A glove pierces

Its useless quotient
Of rain, the only meaningless
Catastrophe is the one

So large everybody can suck
It away in pieces, each
Minor fiasco gradually engulfed

By the vacuum it becomes, if I was
Writing the blurb for this
Decade it would read miraculous

In its quack solemnity, I am going
Tubin’ this weekend and that
Propels me, like I said, I like to get stupid

With my friends, to know my enemy’s
Great hero, to stare feline
As the variously colored entrance

Tickets to the Brooklyn Museum spin
On the blades of my ceiling
Fan or to sit enthralled at the mouth

Of the Union Square subway
Noting how our corporal
Parentheses are so fantastically

Different, the song
Says it ain’t natural to cry
In the midnight but I

See the guitar soundless
In its gently imperceptive hum
The way the dew

Removes itself and the poet
Has not yet understood
The consequence of friendship

She asks if she should go on.

TRAJECTORY OF A THIEF

It’s simple, a life
Of eccentric guessing
You move

To California, one night
Drunk you climb
Every fence in the neighborhood

And no one shoots you
And fog washes
The church steeple

Clean, months
Pass, you sell your car
To a surfer, move

Again, America roils, a man
Walks into a bar and then drives
Into a tree, you move

Again, one love
Recedes and another beckons
Smiling, your roommate

Gets rich and it befits
Her, the sun
Struggles over your eastward

Facing sill and it never
Occurs to you
To wonder how

It’s happening, it’s simple
Yves Klein invents
A color and it kills him

You steal six hundred thousand
Hours from god and fear
Capture constantly, one wriggling

Dactyl amidst the day’s lapidary
Scansion, you carry on
Unreasonably and bloodless

The moon is a rock that salutes
You for it, you forgo
Certain dignities, others

Are thrust upon you, animals
Curve to your touch, a schoolboy
Named Nimer Abderrahman

Writes 'Fire is tasty
You imbecile,' the leaves
In the trees in

The park ignite and you climb
The fire escape to the roof
To chart the buildings’ unwavering

Ballet of windows, a bullet is
Cocked nearby, the cops drink
Beer from Styrofoam

Cups on the street below
Ted takes you out for turtle
Soup, each piece

Of its floating meat
Wholly disparate, the cherry
Blossoms arrive then

Dissipate triumphantly
As does the sting
Of winter, the cephalopods

Adapt, an anonymous
Chinese woman catches
You when you trip

On the subway, the rooftop
Reads GODOT, the waitress
At New Wave Diner calls

You Professor, it’s simple
The wind hits
Your lips and you’re

Pleased, a deer hits
Your father's car and you’re
Inconsolable, a

Family of skunks makes purchase
Beneath the floorboards
And the impending decision puzzles

You—the stink or
The killing it
Takes to rid yourself

Of it, of them, who else?

GRANDPA WAS A SALESMAN

It’s the day the day
Everyone else is vacationing
At Fire Island, none

Of them trembling with the significance
Of foreboding nostalgia
But I tell them to mind the beach

Lights, my most virulent memories merely
Tantamount to the gleam
Of the glasses of the thin man

Peddling Duracell AA’s
From car to car, the inevitable
Thrill I feel being

Surrounded by anonymous
Creatures insolently
Daring someone to fuck

With them on their
Commute, the dreary sonic
Lassitude of burned-out

Churches skewering
The horizon or a wall map
Gone secretly glue

Under the damp blue
Corpse-light of an airplane
Bathroom, the defunct

Psychic persists, a distant foal
Stammers and stamps, what
Were you thinking crowding

The world with such a cowardly delirium
Of thoughts, the soft focus
Of death rifling each tacky eye

Of the passersby, I am not interested
In the pithy forensics
To which this contagious

Dream gravitates, I like
To get stupid with my friends
To get nostalgic for

Futures that never were
In the dusky resettlement
Of chances, Ben

Wrote a poem at age
Seven about a robot made entirely
Of panthers, yesterday I

Squeezed my bicycle past
A sleeping man meticulously
Wrapped in Mylar

Balloons, this is a study
For a larger ancestral
Portrait, this poem was actually

Purchased in Beijing in 1890
For a handful of silver
Fillings, I used to sneeze

Constantly until I had my braces
Removed, my dad
Tore his off through

The horrors of poverty, grandpa
Was a salesman who drank
Half-a-dozen Coca-Colas per

Afternoon, his mother had twenty-two
Children, three sets
Of twins, many died, as did

She, before she was fifty, before
I was born and it strikes
Me that every person in every passenger

Seat in every car in
Every town in every country
Is having some goddamn

Thought, this is mine.

THE SCIENCE FICTION OF COLOR

The Throat of Winter, Evenings
In Demask, King
Of the Rumbling Spires

That’s life in the twenty-second
Commercial of childhood, only today
I discovered John McEnroe

Owns Gerhard Richter’s Girl
On a Donkey, the nature of perversion
Perpetually shifting as one’s dream

Dwindles in the lens
Or is lost adrift
The swifts’ delirious plunge

As gentle earthquakes pervade
As the little tear gland
Says tic-tac and petty octogenarians

Crowd the Lexington
Storefronts where teenage girls
Spill their blank

Guts between pages in the cloud
Book, waiting for Max
Ernst’s Science Fiction of Color

Summer correspondence
Course to begin, each
Benign conscience quietly plagued

By the interregnum, it is not trivial
This death we die not
Dying, the blur of sexuality

Metastasizing in blinks, I never
Imagined I’d marry
An aristocrat nor quote

Sections of broken Austrian
English, some stupidity
Is heroic, some heroes assume

The village children
Are blind, I can’t
Count the number of times

I’ve thought the world
Different only to find my fingers
Twittering in their familiar

Way, the reflective scallops
My nails make shaking
Like gusts furrowing a sail

I am too fraught
With this calligraphic
Landscape I speed

Too sure these unsteady words
Are like a frowning woman who wants
Desperately not to sleep

With me, if reality
Is temporal why not write
Poems the size

Of cathedrals, that’s life
In the ten-second
Opening of train doors don’t

Be afraid to give everything away.

SURVIVING DESIRE

Coming out
The tunnel from Carroll Street
The graffiti reads CHOKES

HIS CHICKEN EVERY NIGHT and we
The passengers convene
Momentarily, the entire lot

Suspended slant as if
The F were some roomy
And ad-laden

Rollercoaster safely blasting
Through the patently everyday
Landscape of traffic

And ruin, rivet-studded
Girders grumpily trellising
The smog-blue-gray

Sky, May and too
Many mornings have I spent
This week observing

The recumbent figures
Of capital tragedy
Their scaly ankles dangling

From soot-soured Wranglers, it’s cyclical
The way one devours his own
Carefully tended ignorance, a slow

Canceling of accumulated skew
As the mutilations fall
Off and are just as quickly

Replaced by others, the spell
One conveniently
Forgets, the mask one

Tries on and unobservantly
Absorbs, the train’s
Sibilant burble hurrying

Forth as the signal greens
I deny the existence
Of anything barely beneath

This concrete, any lurid node
Pulsing beyond the sky’s stately
Dome, fuck this

Forever grope after
The mysteries of a sphere
Eaten by worms

Regurgitated by birds
Paralyzed by windowpanes
We are all of us

Pulling over to mourn
At anonymous tombstones
Rifling 100%

Cotton clouds as a little girl
In a purple sweater
Chases a brown pigeon

Along the platform’s edge, believing
Is a form of expectation, all
Knowing is actually belief and 'something

Tells me tonight I shall
Dream of newspapers
Wrapped in fish,' dreams always

Having lead my kin
Through the variegated
Thoroughfares

Of skin and smog and sometimes
I tremor at the way
The world seems so vigorous

One second and the next
It’s swimming, each dumb leaf
Resorting to metaphor

As every winking turn traps
You into thinking life
Is a meticulous plot allotted

To you alone, people
Topple, transubstantiation
Fails, the board

Reads KNOWING IS NOT ENOUGH.

IT · WAS · THURS · DAY

It was Thursday. I was in the woods building a strange child. Birds fled from branch to branch like restless salesmen hawking manic and euphonious wares. A sudden, crashing din erupted from the rich man’s house, spewing debris from a third floor window. I set down the child to investigate, but then remembered what Pa had said about other people’s business and eventually sat back down. For days I had been unable to escape the ghostly chime of a coin dropping into the crowded guts of a machine. The denomination was either a nickel or a quarter and I was pretty sure it was being inserted into a payphone. Just as I picked up my tools again, the rich man’s car tore along his driveway, chucking up clouds of dust, a clump of auburn hair protruding from the sunroof. The dust made its eerie, gradual way through the leaves to where the child and I were sitting. I could see tiny motes glinting and swirling as the birds rushed around noisily. I was letting the plink of the echoing coin tumble back and forth in my head when suddenly it was interrupted by a small, fragile cough. I looked down to see the child—the strange, uncanny child I had been building was now gently quaking, as if caught in the oceanic throes of a dream. I took the child into my arms, one hand on its back and the other under its knees. Every five minutes or so another hiccup would emerge. Even after the body had gone basically still, its tremors subsided, the hiccups continued, like a drunk sleeping breathlessly. At some point the sun went down and I myself began to shiver, having only dressed with the expectation of being out for a couple hours. I could barely remember leaving the house, or when was the last time I had eaten. Ever since Ma and Pa died, I had been growing more absentminded, my thoughts stuck in some kind of feedback loop, abandoning practicality for weeks at a time. It was a small wonder I even knew what day of the week it was. It was Thursday, I said to myself, somewhat less sure than before. It was Thursday, I said again, spacing the words out so that the coin’s plink could travel between them. It was Thursday, I said once more, this time waiting for a hiccup to proceed from syllable to syllable to syllable to syllable.

IT

To fix it.
To save it.
To undo it.
To dread it.
To put it off.
To dress it up.
To cover it up.
To pin it down.
To strip it bare.
To see it ruined.
To let it atrophy.
To secret it away.
To tell how it was.
To choose it twice.
To imagine it done.
To whisper in its ear.
To know what it isn’t.
To render it abstractly.
To knowingly ignore it.
To treasure its opposite.
To say it for the last time.
To get to the bottom of it.
To know only its reflection.
To refuse to ever do it again.
To feel it when it’s not there.
To know and to do it anyways.
To act like it’s never happened.
To meet it head-on at full speed.
To say it looks like something else.
To describe it wholly from memory.
To become merely another part of it.
To work through the possibilities of it.
To erase even an unknown quantity of it.

HOCKEY NIGHT

Flank half in
Shadow, palomino
Terrified by a

Rich lady’s dog, we all
Stagger in the face
Of ugliness, in the stead

Of truth we find evidences
Not forthcoming, you
Carry a little set of demons through

The world between its words
And what remains
Unsaid, bubbles of thought

Swaying hallucinogenic
In the dusky skyscraper light
Of 3pm, 23rd Street

The fifth day of the fifth
Month of the fifth
Year since the disillusionment

Of the millennium, I stop
Into the Andrea
Rosen Gallery, snag

A handful of Felix
Gonzalez-Torres coffee
Candies, turn

Flush into the monolithic
Dénouement, its feedback
Soundtrack haunting

The alleyways with sparkling
Guitar fuzz, next thing
I know I’m in San Francisco again

Then St. Paul, the Mississippi
Gurgling slackly beneath the cars
Of commuters fleeing

To the suburbs as the ghost
Town recommences, someone
Has left a crate of apples

In the parking lot and despite
Our best efforts to consume
Them they begin to rot, so Sunday

Morning we hungover haul
Them to the tracks and as a train
Passes we deliriously fling

As many as we can, splattering
Almost before they leave
Our hands, mine thrust into slowly

Dissolving pockets as skeleton
Night pervades, the fume-ridden periphery
Of Union Square abuzz

With transient glee, the fiery ritual
Of carousal recapitulating
Itself before my eavesdropping

Eyes, my friends you
Are never far
From mind, we continue

To thrash and smoke, we flare
Through winter atop
Our wiry bones, we barrel

Headlong and we are the ones.

HORSE STORIES

The sun is a headache
I take with me from place
To place, a duck’s

Yammering green skull
Beaded with lake, I wonder
Who turned on

All the birds today? A young Slovenian
Woman reads Kant between bites
Of ice cream sandwich as Kindergarten

Children impersonate a chain
Gang staggering astride
Their flimsy string, no one is sleeping

In the thicket for once, no
Suffering lady stuck
Interrogating the strangeness

Of air, a pinstriped man resolutely
Wades circles through
The cluttered water of the

Fountain, his leather
Shoes shuffling amongst
Abandoned coins

So it is of
Myself I must
Trust this

Massless core, the good
With which it binds
Me to the world and would

That all were possessed
Of such meddlesome
Middle, center, the sentries

Of self crowding out the sting
Of what relative
Ethics inextricably arrive

There, a soul is not
A gauge, no
Thing receding, expanding

So it is if
I crush two mine
Does not treble

Nor divide into thirds, her ice
Cream now melting down
The stick onto her fingers, pasting

The book’s pages, my knees
Thoughtlessly knocking, a pigeon
Narrowly misses the ear

Of a small girl, her mother
Screaming in terror, everybody
Turning terrified and when

Later the man on
The subway train states
'My name

Is Sonny Pain' I know
Exactly what he
Means, names being

Our small admissions of guilt.

SWANSEA

Tonight the moon is multiplying
Newness, caressing
Carcasses lit into alien readymades, an oar

Limbs itself ashore, where our
Eyes dutifully labor over the novel
Creatures cantering

Through the dunes, the moon
Snaps like a luminous flag
On the waves, there is a ghost lady

Looming here perforated
By the strings of her
Harp refusing to impersonate breath

RHINOCEROS

I was born in the middle
Of the end of
A decade in the middle

Of the end of
A century, my fingers
Always slightly

Shaking, holding them
Out to the various people I am
Thinking to love

The people who sit me
Down, explain
How very inside of it

I am, charging, a thought
Bubble blotted
Woodpecker red, the come

Down of our terrifying
Anatomies, our four
Hands thoughtlessly clutching

At the flash an airplane
Casts across the lawn, sky
Cloudless, noise

Sudden as every twelve minutes
Or so the shadow
Passes solemnly, a squabble

Of birds igniting amongst
The flickered blades of the lawn
This is how language

Malingers harmless things, each being
Busy dreaming in their sliced self
Self-portrait skin, the painting reads

PAY FOR SOUP, BUILD
A FORT, SET THAT ON FIRE
The song sings "most

Of my fantasies are of making someone else
Cum," the sweating bum
Sleeps beneath the unbudded arms

Of the cherry tree on the esplanade
Where I too lay, my head on
The stomach of a dark-haired girl

Who says I’ve been coagulating
My whole life it seems only
To dissolve, to "speed

Sleep, dream, and thaw."

APRIL 15TH

The bells of PS 41 fire
Like a jewelry store
Break-in as you turn
Left on Stanton, spying
A mottled concrete wall
Where you can sit, sun
Warming your ears
Which protrude ever so
Slightly from headphones
The Transfiguration
Building with horns
Over guitar, the voices
Singing “lost in a cloud”
As a xylophone tinkles
Broken glass in green
Brown & white arranges
Itself against pavement
Where a woman’s shoes
Clomp, returning laden
With groceries, the Gray
Line tourists whiz past
I am now a member
Of the Brooklyn Botanical
Gardens, having signed up
Yesterday on my way
To the Basquiat show
Which was fucking
Incredible, incredibly
Alive and sad all
At once & afterwards
When I lay down
Among the cherry trees
Of the esplanade, a young
Mother came over to rub
Suntan lotion on my neck
And I felt so full
Of something like love

OF MARCHES

It is an unfamiliar
Itch, the grass
Against your forearms

You sneeze and it
Is Spring again—enter
Birds darting

Through their improvised
Grids, testing out still
Denuded limbs, a young girl

Tumbles clumsily
From her undersized
Stroller, Latina

Teenagers crowd the laps
Of their boyfriends on
Park benches as a horse strides

By looking mightily out
Of place, I mean
There is a woman walking around

Here with an eye patch, broken
Glass cascades across
The paths, a cop just stubbed

Her cigarette into the pitcher’s
Mound and if you think
I’m getting away

With a poem here, take
Another look, the wind has
Blown the vendor’s

Napkins against the backstop
Where a chain
Of motley kids winds

Past, their hands clasped
Furiously, feet jumbled and mouths
Open as sometimes

I can’t stop asking
Myself little questions
About the world and other

Times I stare
Into the blotched pink
Of my own palms

And run as fast as I can.

APRIL 6TH

Subway early, first
Real sun somewhere
Above, so much hair
Mussed like stacks
Of frozen candles
Terror on the decline
Sunglasses on one’s
Head, I am headed
Home to Brooklyn to
“make big decisions”
If I can see my way
To them through the
Congested minutia
Of living as the train
Bursts from tunnel
Into light, graffitied
Roofs, demolishing
Machines stirring
Rubble, a teenager
Sleeping, all of us
Now stalled as a G
Passes ahead, there
Was a time when
I laughed the horror
Of choices off, sat
Around convinced
That the universe
Worked, now that
I know it doesn’t
I’m also pretty sure
It’s the same thing
Scraggly arms reads
Neckface, intercom
Mumbles, the sun
Refuses to abate
Streams of it slice
The car, in my ears
Tyrannosaurus Rex
The landscape jars
As we are in motion
Once again and once
Again I find myself
Suddenly tickled
By the absurdities

THE INNER LIFE for Robert Creeley

It’s no secret
I’m little more
than the congress
of my thoughts

the body mostly
bewilders or else
carries on in
its ambient ways

god has yet to
intrude, the sun
and dirt feel much
closer, as do

friends and family
who are likewise
astounding in their
goodness, while often

there is no real task
at hand, one’s fingers
lightly sweeping
the dingy surface

of the keys, eyes
trained inward
as a thing incapable
of so many things

but pleased within
thought, the inner
life being the only
life according

to Noel, a quiet light
ordering shadows
about the deck
of a caravel, unraveling

lines to make some
headway through
the debris of a vast
and impenetrable

sea, it’s no secret
the heart continues
despite blindness
just as our eyes

only see a fraction
of what the mind
determines, perhaps
led by what people

call the soul, an idea
I revile, feeling
the center of one
to be forever

radiating outward
to tangle and be
wove, which brings
one back to the heart

which has always
seemed an apt if
pleasantly hilarious
metaphor to me

misshapen, muscular
tough as one’s fist