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.