GROSS EXAGGERATIONS: PART I

And then to wake molecular in the fetid
gaze merger of trees, I wrest my wearisome ear
from the window’s distant thunder. A woman walks
this town on death’s whooshing blade. I don’t seem to know
Her. The rain begins and everyone else begins
acting like children. It makes me feel Antarctic
to stand in between so much electricity
but I swore I would never be afraid to leave
the bed. Thought-buzz, air-split, pain-spark, throat-fire, waking
molecular in the fetid gaze merger now
neon by day. It was my birthday weekend’s dead
celebrities: men whose anvil voices led them

to a rupture of blood. But I was not feeling
ungood. My cat had taken to sleeping behind
the television. The newspaper contusions
slipped yellow and festive into a new conjure
song for those who would remain animals in spite
of wealth. To wake molecular, to dust the trees
with eye-blear, to stand incarcerated only
by virtue of one’s heart, which spurned all metaphor
to beat on, to bruise, to wake in the rhythm of
a body turning force in the trees’ fetid gaze.
A rupture of blood in the air. A blindness caught
in the leaves. A manner in which to obviate

the sex of dying. The streets weren’t easy. Blinking
wasn’t easy. To know one would forever lurch
forward, oblique, wasn’t easy. Looking out from
a moving target without violating some
body near constantly wasn’t easy. It was
wonderful. Waking molecular in a crash
of sense, not worrisome for the fragments or each
simmering affect shook loose from the dumb-mirror
that had been paid to stand where we could point with ease.
No! No standing, no shooting, no sinking, never
another coaxed boat of sense to moor in time’s mud.
Only this nerve-cape, only another flung veer

for the seer to follow. To look we must grow
weary of looking. The cat does not avert her
eyes. When I was a child I understood how
not to breathe. Now that I’m a man I find myself
taut at each swerve, unable to liquid sideways
to solidly slosh where a miracle might pass.
But as the trees in the leaves wave my mass also
finds a break here and there in its impossibly
convoluted curtain. A slit through which to slip
new, feral, punctured—everything now necessary
in the fetid gaze mergers, the blood rupturing,
the earth not unfriendly in spite of our terrors.

But I know what you would say: out there are people
trying to kill me. As if our lives were but scenes
from The Red Circle or The Samurai, something
with Alain Delon. All of which is true, but death
remains the thing we do not dying. And besides
there are people inside trying to kill you too.
As if your life were a scene from Opening Night,
which it is, as Gena Rowlands inhabits each
of us, or we inhabit her, the flesh of our
reversibility aching through the fake wall
of language. And yet the iterable returns
like sunlight, a weightless expression already

in the act of being said again. So let us
slip together into the contradictions which
pool at our feet, knowing how little knowing can
help, its addled hand groping at the darknesses
that abound here. No here, then nowhere. The reasons
to go on lodged whimsically in the trees’ Y
shaped arms, in their fetid gaze, in the merger we
make simply waking unto sense, waking anew
to ourselves molecular, joisting the air even
in a farce of stillness. My love, your face goes on
parade then, its wiry bouquet of forms morphing
at each symphonic turn. I hand you an answer


my love, always yes. Our eyes sunk into the flit
our hands make roping in the sun’s twittering twine.
We retune like molecules, waking anew now
in the fetid batting of each leaf’s unfurling
eyelash. Like archers who have forsaken targets
we let the world hit us. We who no longer see
allow sight to pour forth like a lewd font upon
the trees’ untaintable flesh. So if I see red
it is only because I love the uncertain
neck her hair curtains or the jellyfishing pulses
that bring her mouth into flush. We suffer only
from abundance. Lack is the lie that has served

to sever the few from the human. I’m going
out for milk, laundry, the bakery’s bludgeoning
air, the crossing-guard’s bored loiter, the cars’ violent
arrival and retreat. Breathing in-out, a bell
for conquering absence, a machine for killing
its own cells. Breathing out-in or conspiring
with trees and dogs and horseflies simply by virtue
of surviving. Killing, conspiring, simply
conquering, bludgeoning, and suffused with the mind
of lost tribes. Well, fuck the mind, and bring all those lost
tribes back for rememberment. Aborigines
deemed agriculture a menace to the glory

of the earth and clothes merely a means to strangle
the music of the body.