I AM NO PROPRIOCEPTIVIST

Sometimes when nothing
Happens the world
Feels terribly

Sincere, the gloom unsettles
Perforated by dazzling
Banalities, just to stare out the window

Conjures children to go out squealing
Over the half-obscured remains
Of a bird delicately sprouting from a snow

Bank or a man relieving
Himself into a trashcan someone
Has placed in the trash, it

Is altogether too wondrous, though likewise
Disconcerting, to be a thing, to be
A thing that is, that organizes other

Things into its own harmony
Or discord, sitting on a sofa cluttered
With posies, contemplating The West

And her talking horses when out
The corner of your eye something rises against
The crisp blue winter sky

And you assimilate it, a manufacture
Of sorts, all peripheral
Inquiries subject to a coloring

Of the senses, bluebird, bluebell, snug
Bellbottom jeans eliciting
An involuntary blood flow, there are cyborgs

Proliferating endlessly, sobering
Pockets of research and contamination
I lust after a curve and there are advertisers

Clamoring after its import, stereoscopic
Objects looming into our very
Selves, but this is no news

To you, you live
Here ever day, the fish
Swim and your hands

Have touched them, impossible
Notions have come to you as simply
As breathing, you don’t fear

Your own sun, that which
Nurtures and browns
You, or you do, it terrifies you

Every morning, so it is with our minds
They make us these things
That are, and as such we stand apart from them

Ladders interrogating
Half-curtained windows, I have
A trophy from coaching a girl’s basketball

Team and it pleases me, the ocean
Is somewhere relatively close and I think
Of it rarely, as I did

The mountains of my youth, so you can
See I am no proprioceptivist
Giddy at my own interior

Movements, the wet way a finger
Knows its duty among the twittering
Of its counterparts, I carry

On, my legs do, I see no point
In letting them talk
It through, any talk of within-ness

Merely locating a hypothetical
Point along the widening spiral of being, I am
Within a mind, a mind

Within some winsome casing
Just as my body wanders
Around this metropolitan apartment

An apartment within a moment
Of New York City, transiently
Abiding a certain

And meandering consciousness, which really
Resets the game, not to mention the impulses
Firing like snipers, so many

Guns inside us with no hope
Of legislation, I am
Antiwar, antibody, anticulture

And for absolutely everything, I affirm
The radio waves, Otis
Redding, even the stupidity

Of traffic, give me a pane to spy
Through and I will reflect
The world in its dubious elocution

Of forms, I don’t have time
To rub my own eyes or
I have forever, a natural disaster

Strikes and all the animals survive, can’t you
See what I’m saying, nobody is going
To give you permission, planets will go unnamed

Woman will bathe, unprofitable
Beings will suffer terribly and smile
All the same, if God has to

Die, so does jazz, all I’m asking
Is for a comely child to wrap
Its hand around one of my fingers

At the end, it will know what to do.