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