Friday, February 17, 2006

THE ECCENTRIC BALLOON

5

Chinese men stand

on my foot on

the way to Manhattan, the hair
from my armpits pinching

in my t-shirt, to be blind

each day is a senseless response

Is there responsibility without
judgment, without

prohibition? It occurs

to me to obliterate
an intuitive symmetry

The wall outside the train
window reads POCKET

POOL CHAMP, the wall

of my cheek forms a rank pocket
of air, stalling the unconscious

current from within

When I was a kid
I believed I
went fantastically

long periods of time without

breathing

6

What is forgivable?

I move to bare
the little splitting
inside as it

reds between

the pink on the end
of my finger

Somehow this coincides

with a faith in
the world as a place

to go on living

I wake in a catastrophe and move
about the
city in a tiny

raft of glee, my gaze always
already yellow because I’m not severe

like a dancer, nor perverse
like Balthus, though of course

I am

If I want to be
as real as

a hamburger, can I do it
without harnessing myself?

7

How does one not
harass the world
with the promiscuities
of one’s eye?

slurring over the resemblances

Your body
is oscillating
and I want

to bed in between
the waves of
that becoming

This body
is a thoroughfare
which 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

8—2.17.06

Can I say the air
is beautiful?

Can I spend my whole
life as a guest
inside the eccentric balloon?

Let us hold

to the appearances and in
our holding release
the burdens of these bodies made

thick with unconscious
care while the tic-tic
of the birds goes thrillingly out

Can I spend my whole
life as a gust
outside the eccentric balloon?

How better to unpack
the impact of thought?

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