I CARE ABOUT MOVIES

It’s afternoon and I look at digital equivalents of music, look

insane because my eyes are bagged and my hair is stringy

like an Aztec sun I can’t stop desiring women with children their eyes

forceful no, seriously forceful of course I’m afraid

of women I’m afraid of men too, the day thrown to pieces

symphonic goading a word—cognac tempering the air

a cognate lurking insidious a country in my skull

She is a sleeping thing warm like a machine or a broom

among brooms The world persists machinic I want you

to find its little blots its unclinical wefts, I want

to bed in the unknowing your fingers become I care about the movies

* * * * *

It is said the last woman who tattoos you is your wife

To be a self is to be a sudden cipher interpellated by faces

a tattoo that moves A man’s expensive shoes invade me

ballistic earrings quiver around the soft circle of a neck

this false peace a pantomime of not falling

I want to locate a no stillness this false peace

Topographies of rumor jutting in the streets

The one about the country without torture, torture so

plain it seeps into a garland of irises islands of nail

clippings caught in the leaves coincidences all

that matters that matter inebriated, tenebrous

We awed so much that tending to life put us to sleep

JOY, A BRAILLE

There is nothing light about being, nothing heavy either

a heaving ether peppered by noise I am not one who thinks

the disordered part disorders the whole I do not even believe

in it reggae punctuates the street I wish for birds

Johnny Cash in the street then ambulances mediating

joy a Braille of slumping shadows rides away

Who are you gonna ride with boy? I’m gonna test the gray balloon

brains of my enemies no I’m gonna trim my beard

gonna breed sulfur in a flummoxing smog, train

it to believe in the shapes I make breathing

Order is not peace it is death and we can’t get

enough of it Rather to intimate to overlap to happen

again to already know now again A phone on the street woke

me up the next morning then I heard it as a directive—change

your mind

THE ORIGINS OF A SCAR

There is an immense rain and nothing is saluting nobody

My father’s ankles were shined bare and I reasoned it

had something to do with going to work It was feared

I would become knock-kneed, but I was frightened more by the prospect

of war Our substitute teacher, who was also the soda jerk

had to have his friend’s brains removed from his ear by surgery

The night we first bombed Iraq, I had just returned from scuba diving

class, having been informed repeatedly of the myriad

ways I might die Our babysitter drank perfume until she

died Though the rain stopped, the news kept “pouring in”

When my finger was crushed by the weight of the canon I refused to scream

SIMPLE, RIDICULOUS

There is such action here the yard we can’t decide

is front or back a black fly chasing my breath

Courtney tentative on the harmonica The leaves dip and twist

frantically modern though their shadows show them up

The bees are out-buzzed by the hummingbirds

at the feeder, where ants go steadily to be drowned, now

Courtney reads The Known World as wrens fill in

and neither of us feels the least bit ironic about it

We live amidst the machines of our thought, a geometry

of sleeplessness forged by quiet, unnamed desires

I pay my ear to the simple, ridiculous happinesses

a plane blanketing the air, a bee scissoring through, aghast

at the plural these interloping ghosts overlapping

truth in the unique startle at the jackhammer’s

bony knock, a woodpecker (I swear) looking on, or

it is just as well nowhere, wanting the things to thing

for us, wanting to see so as only to settle into a blinding

OF HUMAN TORSOS

It was Saturday, cicadas

like expiring / mechanisms hidden

in the leaves

I was thinking about literalness

feeling literal and cloudlike

simultaneously and what imbecile

says a cloud isn’t literal?

I was thinking about human torsos, those lighting

cigarettes and those huge

female torsos coming / in from the sea

If you drew a diagonal from my hipbone to my penis

and bisected it, you would find there a scar

doing nothing, like a thick iron

worm the size of one of my fingers, dead

I have really long fingers

But I was happy to see my neighbors, Caribbean, walking

to church, happy to

drink coffee in my underwear

and stare out the window, a tiny

spider on the screen

rotating like it was connected

to a joystick