THE FUCK ARE BUTTERFLIES

Truth is desire / there, I said it / as if the cost of admitting

something was something / geographic, like a tiny / blinking bug

made of ideas a spy / adhered to you / All knowledge brings up

new problems / All knowledge brings up is new

problems, but that’s exactly / what we are / desiring, there

I said something adhesive / a body that always

thought it was the consequence / of an image / And finally, here

we are coincident / trysting in a flare / of flesh / You

called while I was riding / the F for the first / time in weeks, too

dark to make out / the graffiti / I wrote my name on

a beige building wall / and it became a thing again / I say there

are butterflies / in my stomach / You say what

the fuck are butterflies / doing in your stomach?

A SLOW, SLOW POUNCE

Alex swears / I transmuted / The woman on the 2 used

a magnifying / glass to read the police / blotter, naps

of afro jutting from / her hat / A woman may extend

to the tip of the / feather in her / hat, or further / a bullet’s

wet anchor / I was studying rhythm / a slow, slow

pounce or drag / the way a flame disappears / in the tube

of a shaft of sun / the tip wet / magnifying afros

A woman used a piece of glass to read the police her hat / a slow, slow bullet

disappearing in the tube / Alex swears I’m wearing my Dead

Ringers surgery socks / swears I’m singing My Pistol

in Your Mouth Blues / an orange light / blinking on Bleeker

blotter / further / feather / anchor / as certainly I grow

sick at placing myself, at replacing / myself in the scenes

NO SMALL ASSAILANT OF MIRROR-LIGHT

It is the first day in October and how I burden the apartment

with sneezes lemons from the bodega exploding with seed

Someone set a pagoda on fire on the edge of

the lake, my nose still running, Once I Had an Earthquake

in my ears It is the first with sneezes how I burden

the edge of the apartment with earthquake with

whisper-talk, how humans make caricatures of air of

the reanimated now She lied when she swore she wouldn’t read

the moon any longer, no small assailant of mirror-light

In my ears the edge of whisper-talk of mirror-light

Then I is heterogeneous electric with broken ghosts

Don’t use words Don’t use words Don’t use words

* * * * *

Getting drunk keeps cornering the brain and in that we punctuated

happening but you are the one bereft of intelligence, thank

god I never wanted Wednesday to end never wanted

the separations to endure The church tolls the time I sneeze

The neighbors take Silence their dog, out for a walk

When we confide we do not confine incipience a flooding that adds

imperceptibly to deluge a surface that glues itself to the surfeit

I want to sleep in the sleep that you sleep as ferociously

one must drive on to tenderness Repetition is desire

I sneeze with sun a cool wind on my arms, half-grown wrist wisps

from recent surgery, my pelvis not long closed and in the deep

stiletto branches I’m always touching double-jointed

women, imperfect vision Silence insists on so much noise

A YEAR IN THE LIFE OF GOING TO THE MOVIES

for ben


I wanted to leave a testament to the real to things

verily happening above truth Punching voices

to always go sincere to always go sincere in the blur

And it is already changing beneath the vast

shadows of drunkards in uneasy amaze People are more

interesting than poems but we need them

to understand them Terror is only another kind of error

There is too much choice, but there is never enough

choosing a flock that perforates the sky into arrows

but what is an arrow if it moves? This is a year

in the life of going to the movies a current of fortuitous noise

Is there a part of me that is a part of history? It is unimportant

A PHENOMENOLOGY OF NUCLEAR HANDS

In yellow pants the newspaper Courtney reads, the sky the color

of mine We sweat to dissipate the sure empire of knowledge

as the night cigarettes have made my eyes heavy

These daily nuptials braiding air to bone or lost amidst

the agony of suspended flesh The television puts forth its phenomenology

of nuclear hands I want to kiss you while the phone rings

but you are the one calling Punching voices braiding the ends

to celebrate the middle, the already changing romance

bereft of intelligence and in that we punctuated the sighs with air

Manning our nation’s boredom murder, comedy

getting drunk keeps happening in words

Outwardly, the pressures tricking us into flight Heroic weaknesses

cornering the brain which was itself a version of blank