HERE'S HOW IT CHANGES

17

If refuse is the refuge of time

If philosophy is music with content

If one has a duty to reveal impossibilities

(stop me if you’ve
heard this one before)

I want to be real
as a hamburger

You’ve never played
a game that wasn’t real

It’s February for the third
time two loves later

drinking coffee at noon
under doused neon

the girl behind
the counter exposes
the match-sized gap

between her incisors

teeth are said
to erupt

When Brakhage films the bodies
disorganized he is disallowed

to display their faces

What is the value of a face?

A man is said to live by his tooth

How am I
naturing a cadence
of independent

joy?

When Xavier is a table
I don’t understand why
the chair doesn’t

kiss him

How does one successfully waver

between the poles
of the haphazard
and the overdetermined?

Marina is not the first
to fall over and the moment
she becomes a part of

the gun she is not
the one that stops
the performance

18

Whoever thinks we surrendered
the hallucinatory satisfaction
of our wishes has not lived into this

century, not seen
the melancholy constellation
of objects, the way we

answer only
the call of lack

(however)

The windows look simultaneously

into and onto

The voices transmute
the blank room

into a cathedral, a cathedral
which nonetheless opens backwards
when the voices reverse

into snaps and steam
fortuitously ascends 54th Street
on the stems

of undressed city trees
and there is no end

to the burlesques
and the office of the image that I call

my body is does not emptily
retain its retinal store

19

What are we built
to do? Why are our
bodies breaking, our

care carving solicitous
empathies? Here’s how

it changes:

Blood goes carousing
at the periphery, I think of your teeth
and am smiling, I think you

are in surgery and dutifully
amazed over the opening cavities
of motionless men, now

I can’t stand
the fact of your being
gone, but tonight

we live amid

the immediacies, your thighs
disrupting a fallow
thread, your thighs detonating

a terror I’ve held
too close
for too many

weeks and when you leave

nothing’s changed

TENGO HAMBRE

13

A triangle in the bathtub
A bite mark on the arm

Do I want Vincent Gallo
to be in this poem?

Too late

Por qúe los gallos gritan todo
la noche?

Los gallos no gritan, los
cantan, y los catan porque

tienen hambre

I can only begin this once
I know enough not
to begin again—a bus engine

revs outside, keeping the masculine
time of streets intact, I seem
to lack something sufficiently

violent for this world

The painter’s name is like an elbow: Yves

I carve a boogie
of vectors from room to room, my hair
curling at the neck, itself gone

tingly at the acknowledgement
of his landscape, its silly distance
coursed by melts

in wondrous penumbra

Tengo hambre

14

Brilliant trilobite, this
form traced on cardboard

Everything happens
at once
but not only once

Here is a story: A man

descends into a silver portal while his wife (blind) awaits him in their wedding bed. He passes into the past, a time when birds ruled the earth. He barely doesn’t die for months, sleeping in magnificent trees, and one night, as he’s glaring astonished at the miracle of the stars, another portal opens up and returns him to the hotel only minutes after he’d originally left. He hears his wife calling out his name, frightened, and though he can’t speak, still inundated by the shock of his adventure, he walks toward her. She gropes toward his heavy breathing, still saying his name, and when her hands finally find his face, which is now covered with a dense, redolent beard she screams

15

I once knew the smallest
dog in Brooklyn and serenaded
her on our short walks: Millie

dog, Millie dog, small enough
to be a slop for a hog, small enough

to be a little watch’s cog, Millie dog

Last weekend I met an Italian
Greyhound named Bologna

Millie moved to Minnesota

where I once shook
a hologram of the hand
of the President

When I dream I am waiting
with a pregnant
woman at a French

airport for a bus I am
drunk and now it is already
noon, my hair

disheveled, becoming weather
as the MTA strikes and the wailing
of molecular discordances

is drowned out by
the whistle of the radiator or
the hum of the desktop or

the strings of the guitar
which tell you a melody

just by looking at them

16

Do I suffer only from abundances?

The latent choreography
of the body continues

to perpetuate the dislocations
of astonishment

Witches in Bikinis—
an advertisement on the miraculous
bodega storefront glass

I ate a balled-up
one-dollar bill and was sick
for two days

So if you will
gently tip the assemblage

I will breathe
my torrent once

more

ELEVENSES

9

This is
my favorite
number

Is it common to become
weary over the worry
of glut, the way it so readily

becomes need?

I do laundry
get a haircut
make coffee
pet the cat

and obtain an active sort

of boredom, for it is abhorrent
to me to know
beforehand what a thing is

to become. The unconscious

is not incautious

Laundry
Haircut
Coffee
Cat

10

The silence of Marcel
Duchamp is overrated

The forms of farms are far
from exhausted

The suitcases in the tunnel
on the way to the 4 train bob
like the heads of birds

and a transient
serenades himself in the keyed
gleam of the advertisement

If you recognize the flower’s use
as a Geiger counter

you no longer look
down upon its seeming

simplicity

Books yaw atop
the green nightstand
but I won’t

tell you their names


Okay, just one: Silence

11

A word is to me

like a button

potentializing

a handful of noise

(let me say it more directly)

A word is to me

various and becoming

(no, more directly)

A word is to me

toward

12

Elevenses is

a word, as

is February

warbling trapezoids
stalk the stoop-ridden

periphery for warmth

The stubble of winter razors
zero forth. I feel more

comfortable amongst the indefinite
articles. I feel no
relief in the parentheses

dictated by men. When I was a child
I wrote body is where
the knowledge comes from

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?

FANTASTICAL AUTOPSIES

Not that what

is is

not actual, these odd
bodies garbed in the accident

of space and one
can’t pay it too much
homage, hernia

throbbing, uncodified

as the moon is silent when you’re not
looking at the beach

We, who may
fight as bravely for slavery
as for safety, the sun

crashing between the train
cars like a drug
firing in the brain, a man

sneezes onto the book

because he can’t
take his hands away

from it, a girl
somnambulantly

drags a cord of hair so
it no longer curtains her
shyly evading

eyes, a soldier
elsewhere steps over
the leaking resemblance of

a torso and a course

is determined to prolong
such images

2

One falls into all
the confusions of an equivocal
language, the body moves

eye disappears
without preparing

We perceive that which

exceeds us, sparrows
congregate on

the clothesline, our arms
grasp each other’s backs and our stomachs
bulge to touch

one another at the point
of their turning

inward

From you I see a desert
which holds everyone

in their inconceivable lateness

Brooklyn here
But myself

Remembering the skeleton
of a two-headed calf
named Spider, the crowd fevered

with visitations, the clouds lured
with infantile pinks, hues

tricking us into volume

3

Holland, 1945, fuzz heavy

as the dead
bulb shivers into a bloom
of eccentric shards

I’m asking you

to accompany me
through the deformations

and into ourselves

I’m asking you

if it is possible
to refuse
to go blind

Outside there is a marathon and marathons
always make me cry, a man

For whom the divers tones
Of a mental life meld

At once

Does infinite movement lead us
to attempt to equal

instantaneity?

Do verbs only betray
the impossibility

of not acting?

4

So much in my life happens

that’s not poetry

these days, the black-eyed
woman who in the middle of her
rant quieted

to whisper god

bless you in the direction
of pinstripes, the drugged-out

glare of the boy
embarrassed by

his grasp of fractions and yet
his laughter is impressive

the kangaroos in the park leaning suspiciously
on their tails, the heart
of a mouse stretched like a ribbon

across the curb as certain
small mysteries continue

to animate the instant

This morning I dreamt I
was purchased
by a large, wealthy Italian

family to “fix”

their youngest daughter
who spoke only
in tongues and woke

to the hydraulics

of the 75 bus picking
up strangers outside the movie theatre

There is nothing arbitrary about this

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?