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.