A love poem need not be written

No, need not be enlisted in loving

So measure my love apart from those

Needless in the stack, thistle in the thatch

Which lie against meddling fingers

And latch beneath skin's narrow pass

The machinist's wife

I need to leave her

So that in rite I might return

A manicurist, but really

Just a better listener

Each machinist will break

His bits and pinch for screws

And bang his stubborn metal

So a love poem need not be written

No, need be only lifted as a lever

Were there ever such a machine

Which heat and time have worn

Against my numb and gnarly fingers

As then battered stuck to hers

As manual transmission

As it happens, healing happens

Perpendicular to the wound

A clemency pursed in purchase

And when witnessed, put to rest

Because love poems linger after

In the distant pangs of lover’s faces

Every memory, fresh cut, still strange against the page

Wolf

It’s a kind of banging, a constant saying which we beasts can reach without the least bit earning, only taking on the years, still aging—as if it could be worth waiting out. See, demons, we sight with focus, which needs such that we put off the pleasing. Put on our slippers and appear as these appear to be—easy. But light bleeds nightly, and we sit nightly by, whether deserving or faking. So what we do with the making—that cream beads, and dogs lead, and evening teeters after—is really where we need to learn to lean. Where we ought to rest our eyes, despite how the bird is calling us to rise. Only what happens when what might have been matters? The boy who cries will be believed, if only he can make the saying pleasing. Demonstrative now, as cowards run the backs and sit behind desks behind doors. All glory to the pages, the errand is the acting and the only visible god is acting out. Over-arching cost, we need to consider how irrevocable each stretch and shrink of chord or statement is. Can it be that the figures are all too individual to figure? I have two grandmothers, before them four great-grandmothers, and as we reach ever outward, the focus, the weight must lurch sudden as a child building momentum cannot stop his speeding downhill hurtle, can’t even think to hope for the glancing tumble in the end. How horrible it must be to be seated between your parent and your child, that awful gap upon your ego—that you have been fully skipped over, and likewise that this is probably the closest you’ll ever come to grasping in full any sense of place or meaning in your own accelerating stint. No, we must hold onto that devil telling us that all is not well. For in this we are given chase and purpose. And only with such a stacking are we given the chance to do something which is both truly of us and real. Mud is part of the human experience too—though who’s to know if our eyes are upturned? It’s always been about bettering the standards, salt and sugar to color the tongue, while hustling out of the hole. See, this is why though often I wish to consider your shoulders and neck as impossible porcelain and your hips and your legs as the tenderest stems, it can sometimes be hard against the other truths of physicality, a blight on the dirty honesty that when blood is simply blood, although love is love, I’m little more than a dog looking in. Though my eyes are begging and perhaps they seem sincere, my teeth are not and my hunger is never. So remember this glimmer as you wish. The telling doesn’t absolve me, only makes the hunt fair. Listen to the lending tongue. Hear what the heart is knocking. I’m in love with the balk of you. But I’m caught at the barking, what which heaps and hurtles time in skinny business. I’m a dog, darling. And you are the hand that feeds, indeed the hand that leaves a thought upon my head, leads me light through the lot, to the grass and trees and demonstrates that all is well and steady sometimes. That located above is something both better and believable.

You are all honkeys and saps

Perpetual motion as per purgatory.  Poetry of an imperfect city.  Operational repairs pursuing a smooth percussion, pressed against a ruling class of rhythm.  Rubble, that fat jugular of wealth.  Green spaces laced through stacks and renovation, graceless ragged grass.  Peaceful impurities.  Each cold lapsing paradiddle.  Collapsing, palsied tongue.  Part ways now son.  Your work is never done.  Split vicious lips, I think you get the picture.  No use waiting for them to pronounce my sentence.  I want desperately to read the lolling strays and uncut lawns as unbridled and unhurried beauty.  But I know well enough the real message.  You would stop whimpering if you ever found out that the hero who is never coming never was there to begin with.  That there is nothing above this.

The Dogs of Moscow

I’ve got trouble driving down the middle of the road.  But that’s because I don’t feel much, really, for it.  I’ve got to wax bombastic, assaulting my own indifference.  Smelly little lithe deceit, I’m not the only one complicit in it.  See when it wanes who’s unblinking, breathing quietly.  They will speak at each other as to a dog.  Less given than a dog gives when keeping rivals from his harem, keeping people from his pups.  The dogs of tomorrow have another thing coming.  Euthanasia, sterilization.  Meanness never knew such a true channel as this, pain, never this apt a receiver.  We see each other though—it’s all right there around us, watch.  But gruffly we feel each other’s space, invade and vacate.  Fictionalize the only true thoughts we almost have by stopping to think how we might tell them so that they sound true.  See, it’s been a lost cause (truth) since that first exaggerated gesture, indeed since the first metaphor.  And this is something we sense, so we go on sometimes letting ourselves believe, knowing the day will never come from our lips.  We’ve mastered the hidden place.  But this is also why the dogs are barking, why we must walk by unalarmed.  Holier than thou, we’ll find that if it really is God’s hand plucking us from the preterite or losing us within the fold, it is with at best fat fingers, so better that we own our lucky numbers and quit figuring our debts are owed.  Do unto others before they do you and you’ll never even see the blood.  You’ll never need to lie with the dogs again.

Dig In

Savvy to the deathblow really fed lines couldn’t carry the both of us, a piteous strangle for a fistful.  Dolled up and dipping, yes, hunger curbs more easily than the nerve it took to pluck a candy bar and coolly duck the guard.  Hunger puts the muscle on its ass.  

Sets it down and shows it its master.  See, we’re all on some or several tethers.  It’s just a wonder that a puppy-eyed shot can’t tug the food stores open.  That our young honest image is not for lasting, and we cultivate, indeed create, upon an empty belly.

Double Negative

A dastardly snug coffin, dragging nails and heaving.  Furls in the forehead, tapping on the balcony and replacing tired vocabulary with new old words.  The hegemony of it is that our chitin isn’t heavy enough to sit and soak the eminence.  Our hearts are leaden pipes.  And our ruling line is that the half-life of the first nuclear blast is not yet finished, but we’ve been born late into today.  A ways away from actually believing the hammers can fall, instead duded up and following our dicks around.  Instead of rebels, relevant now in only a mid-shelf crescendoing wakefulness that rubbers aren’t fun and coming with the customers is out the way of Wheel-O-Fortune, antennae, and this is your brain on drugs.  That we can’t commit is no new sin.  That we sit inside over eggs and toast like our granddads did is a hope, though even as the shit gathers in worlds of other orders, we’ve only got this little bit.  If there’s an answer out there, we haven’t found its language.  If there is one true tyranny of the human race, it’s in that single breath between extremities, such that plots cusp.  Believing is a personal past time.  But no one sees that nothing coming, not when it’s up to us.

Cinch

Pinching at the parallax

Clenching as plenum, mustard

Setting yesmen, yellow tamarind

Lopped side-saddle, keggered and ready

Dear you, unused, as was the prancing jigsaw

Jingling and quick like a baby rattler

Lingering and sick, as was the pocket figure

Look here, pastor, I’ll stand on my own two

Shimmy whatever deadbolt, hotwire

So I’m leaving you the keys

Management

Until they love the leash, it’s a lash at best, a goosebump stood straight to whip in wait.  The heat after fabric is for follicles whose passage is laid beneath a rash.

Until they loathe the beast, it’s a bath at least, a bloodhound turned retriever, a fella for the fuck of letting, a loosening of stocking.  Pull tight my pudding.  A touch is on that tangent.

A nose is pointed.  Whose I pierced through paper sheets once.  White was the makeup.  All of this is made up.  This is the boredom of bedroom left to its inevitable dogshit.  Its undodgeable, goddamnit undoggable, digs.  

So they wait for the food.  To them our feet are our faces.  Lead them through the park.  Forget where the tongue has been.  Shit bitch, lemme.

Slip

As long as we’ve got a word 

For it, we can kill it

So revel in the unspeakable 

Moment.  Lift your face, face

Him, otherwise hum

Is it better to be certain 

But wrong than uncertain 

But right?  Is it better to kill 

With discretion or without?  

The divisive occidental

Gives us a simple choice, stringing 

Negatives.  Either it is wrong.  Or it is 

Not wrong.  But can choice, a reduction 

Exclusion, really be 

the way to new knowledge?

Is there, with Ockam, room for 3?  Or

Is this a lapse?  A bridge

Stepping out on breath

OK, if I just step a little 

Lighter, until the apparition

Evaporates underfoot

I don’t want to be as thankless 

As trees.  Never so rooted in

The accidental story

As Cadmus is, or was.  But a partition

Rough touch, vulgar tongue

Teeth for sewing

That strange, if honest to god, casual 

Encounter, too meek for the reaping

A render out of solid state.  Bombs and contest

This being bread and butter

Here, the presence of a leaky dreamer

A look across the fridge

And the ruddy lauder’s sonant sigh

Are against the edge of headroom

Against the flush of faces

Such that après-day is put so far off

That snooze is already steady metronome

A rhythmic season of the arm, by the time

We enter sleep

“But it’s my own kind doing all the killing here”

I should be preparing myself for when

every expertise is made obsolete.

But instead I am guard-railing, telling

myself niche is really going to save

me from that bomb, that I’m on its outer-

reaches, behind, just maybe...  See, I am

a terrible person.  Simply run out

of page room, I stop struggling against

the measure.  I can’t but laugh at his face,

the thief’s, who thought to rob me.  But if I

were the thief, I wouldn’t have shown my teeth,

only leaped with purchase and, apart, leaped

again.  The way of doing things is done

for some time, until we’re chasing its thought.

Real Numbers

How does this thing of ours pass into familiarity but as a cloud, slow and deliberate.  As a hand passing money, taking money, across a counter, over a can of beer, goes through, or perhaps despite, unnoticed mumbles.

You are a weary sound against the sleeping body.  A translation of fingers.  A simplified tongue.  And our figures are moving for mostly invisible hours at a time.  Working toward nothing in particular.  Constant measure.

Continuous as the falling sky, linked as the frames we see, as we are seeing from, good as we want to be.  Drug brother.  Little sister.  Mother fucker.  Mister Sinister.  It’s best to laugh a little when things go over you.  

That’s the most copasetic coping means, see.  The truest soul position is a rehash.  The shaved and polished chin against the puzzling pieces of outside.  A head held against the storm.  A dip we found and eventually rounded.

_ _ . .

Each picture is a poem.  I know I’m late to say it.  But poetry is also a reminder, repetition, list, etc.  Or this self-assurance is what keeps me wrapped at night and at the pencil.  It keeps me serious about my work.

Well, define serious.  Petrol fumes and foreign gals are each smelly injuries against our agency, aren’t they?  Mostly unmannable pains, hips, ars…

It requires fluency to break the rules and sound like you know what you’re doing.  Either that or there’s inherent expectation in our speech.  Making any accent is a sure thing.

Some of us will never have the problems necessary of us (as a collective) to organize an exchange of prisoners.  Prisoners are an important aspect of anything, understand.  This is not about troop morale, so much as it is about real, close, personal security, about permanence.

You see (maybe you do see… I can’t know), the thing they can never admit to themselves is that ongoing war is the only stave against an imminent overcrowding of—not populace—but possibilities beyond binary.  No, they won’t ever admit that this is why war is allowed.  As always they convince themselves of a certain imperceptible depth of the soul, such that certain things will just thereby never be explicable.  And thus, dumbfounded at one another’s lack of common soul, resort to killing that indelible other.  This is the invention of they.

Those little girls and boys, motioning through superstitious tricks, which are less believed than simply enacted as a way of making peace with the word that’s around them, with the word on which they stand every day, the word that’s never met their tongues, these little girls and boys will grow up, you see, to rule the playground.  It only takes a moment for this to happen.  Though the rite itself is time itself in the making.

Please understand that I have visions of an unraveled world.  Where there are so many others who haven’t got a clue that maybe, like a dream, I can convince myself that I’ve got a clue.  No.  I just mean, I’m listening.

I can see a man of medium height, medium build, beard, and mostly shuffling gait.  He’s stepping up to the counter and simultaneously thinking how to ask and asking for a candy bar.  No, I don’t have a smaller bill.  Please forgive me.  Dear god, please, though I know better, be real in this moment.

If I can make myself forget maybe you will be.  For just that smack of the skull.  For just that jostle, and I want milk.  Dear god, give me a Snickers.

It’s not that I have love for anyone.  It’s just that I know if I owned a convenience store I’d shelve the perishables so that the newest products stood upfront.  It’s not that I want to be honest.  It’s just that I know if it were me, I wouldn’t even read the dates.  I’d just reach to the furthest back I could and take what I’ve become used to believing was the newest.

You see, I’m a terrible person.  Inasmuch as I have no inherent love for other people.  Only, I think I’d be a terrible success as a hustler.  I’d be an imbecile of a missionary.  Simply, I better know that former world.

But, in this very moment snorting/coughing/hacking, I’d (and it seems I do) trade my life for just the right word.  Not because I want it.  But because I know it isn’t out there.  You see, I am not a good person.  I am not an artist after all this succession of artists.  I am no kind of legacy.  If I could be, I’d be the poet to end all poets.  Maybe if I thought anyone was really reading this I wouldn’t be writing it.  Or maybe I’d be writing more.

You see, for me, I’ve always assumed it was a matter of being pretty enough.

You see, I write poetry because it is an illusion of that indelible invention.

I would not have written this on so many other occasions.  But today, it seems, ever and despite me, is in fact today.

I love a girl who can never know it (I mean both that I can never fully let on and, further, that she is unable of wholly realizing), lest it wrest itself dissolute.  And I always have.  Or it wouldn’t be true.  Seek as I might for a restless lover, the search is counterfeit.  It has been a feigned reproach of my observable loneliness.  I must seem to be interested if anything at all should happen.  I am allowing that double construction.

Taken for more than it is, I am seeking just that one well-defined principle.  Take me to your leader, I may as well say.  Not because I want or need to see him.  But because I already know the response.  It’s written in our hands and shoulders.  We have power tools to extend the idea.  We have hats to hedge our bets.

When our skin is scarred, we have only one obtuse way of knowing.  Dear god, please give me aspirin.  The sun has risen before me again.  But the clouds won’t even allude to his position.  So, maybe the sun is actually hung-over.  Truly, it appears he’s switched on some low-wattage fluorescent autopilot.  Come to thinking of it, I think I like the thought that he’s somewhere else today, snoring.  Maybe later he’ll grunt, roll over, and fart, getting up in time to watch his surrogate dimming.

Today we don’t need him.  He might see it and realize.  Or maybe he knows this already.  The moon is little more than his operative after all.  A mirror to the surface of each, our hidden animals.  Though, as Schrödinger had trouble living down, a thing like a cat in a box is just beneath our estimation.  We know what eyes are capable of.  So (and this goes for you too, sun), let’s either look into something more volatile—snares or sex or towers to heaven—or let’s shutter, capture, and sleep through the peace-talks, the ongoing negotiations, and that great wide galactic marble game.

This is a game.  This is not a game.  Maybe, as it persists or it perishes, while I revise, I'll know.

But really, I am that lab rat.  After so many bumps and scrapes, aren’t we ever closer to dead?  Aren’t we eventually exactly half?  After all, today I feel roughly half what I felt yesterday.  It’s in my gut now.  I’m sick on soul.  Hyper with the quantum.  And I couldn’t have been stupider, but I’m still at least partly true.  If something being only half-here is impossible, then it has to be all.  Because it’s not all gone.  This I think you know.  But in that case, what happens in the box?  What do we lose when the skull is struck and only almost dies?  Where are we now then if we’re not nearly dead?

To live through an experience is to wear against its little finger.  The finger that draws peace upon your forearm.  No not that one.  But the earlier livery of childhood lingerings.  The shield against the storm we’ve always felt coming.  Battered little swarm, I can’t remember the ending.  Spit the vicious form.  Split it twice.  Dip the disingenuous dimples.  Spot both somnambulant eyes.

It takes fluency to follow the rules and only look like a fool.  It takes fluency to draw it out and press those buttons.  To catch Z’s.  The lesson is just this: we never get even.  The meter, the wave, the slinky, the coin toss is—even if sometimes it seems—never really the same.

I wish I knew what it was.  What to give a thief.  What to tell a mute.  I wish I weren’t a terrible person.  That my cutting and filling was something microscopic as is the only observable cell division, or as the single flinch of skin when it’s brought to our attention that we’ll be going for a ride now.  That our chance to run is done.

You see, I love everything after a time.  But what is worse?  A hangman or a man who holds his breath.  You see, I am a terrible expert of the other party.  Shimmying across the line.  See, I only know my face from the terrible fright of others when they’ve finally sighted it—that dead fact that attraction is a mask, that patience is a path to placing each tender sleight of fate.

Sit a spell.  Sit and spell.  Line them up sun.  God’s only chronic.  A chance to disprove the unlikely assumption that history has slowed to a thin electric whine.  That the smell of smoke is unsubtle.  Unusable drums rattle as a lurch of taut ribs.  Go find yourself a friend.  I’m tired of passing breath off.  Or peddling janitorial work.

I’m tired, you see, of what God knows is the only greasy mechanism in our time.  That the cat, the wolf, is there and invisible.  Simply because we feel him leering.  You see simply if we are willing.  Listen for an injurious thing.  There’s our sour state, our welcome bell. We might have known what it withheld.

To drink, and drink, and not get drunk

Why does everything happen to me? she said.

Every time, as if the whole world were planar,

eye-level.  As a lover, I’d say she’s far-fetched.

Whatever that means.  When do hairs stop

growing?  These are the things that concern me.

Her eyes are the same as mine.  I’ve never seen

that before.  As a lover, she is a busy-body, a

paling warmth.  There is a small—what I’d call

—itch under my left ring fingernail.  It’s been

there for not as long as I can remember, but for

that other amount of time.  I can’t remember

when it first happened.  But I can remember

certain times when I was younger, running

through the grass, watching cartoons, climbing

stairs and cabinets to reach the honey and cereal, 

and I didn’t have a lover, or what my lover 

brings.  I didn’t have an itch to itch, an inkling 

to drink, or an idea what was in the top cupboard.

Blunt Force Trauma

Feet flush with floor, 

we are simply what we are 

seeing.  This is my charge.

I am an easy sucker for the girl 

in the plaid dress, though when 

pressed I prefer the plain T.

In the rustle of removal, 

already lying down, there 

is the generation of static.

There is the laying naked, 

with little.  And undressed, 

its interest is duress.  It is 

the formulaic gesture, often as 

conspicuous in its aims as never 

it seems to be in its manner.

Where were we really, those times 

our teeth clipped.  We awoke 

with our heads approximate. There 

was the naked laying truth.  And then

there we were, white as flour.  

Appropriate as the night is long.

Ready for weather and noses

cold from some impossible draft,

such as is this some days, I seem

to remember one faint, dark thread

come up from the sheet.  It was

nothing against your hair.

Boring Little Creatures

I would rather see the hand clasp a bottle than

a weapon, though sometimes a bottle has been

known to make a weapon.  I am too young for

peace, and this I know is a fault.  But it won’t be,

I think.  Only, I mean, don’t think of me as those

banners.  Ads and tools of information.  Weapons,

damn it, they hardly kill but say, there is nothing

left to say.  A bottle, though, as you drink, catches

spitty lips in level action.  To put it down is to pull,

ever slightly, a small vacuum for the mouth, all

the while you may have some things to say.

A song has ended

I can hear this place thinking.  Coughing 

and creaking.  There is nothing spectacular.  

Just drapes and a table arrangement, 

which seeps after the edges and grows wild 

against its pattern.  But I am letting the coins, 

papers, bottles spill, so if this is encroachment, 

it has gone beyond me—it is part of me.

And indeed I am the only hollow thought

about this room.  I am the least likely to fill.  

Not to say I am empty.  Only that my eyes are 

two narrow bulbs, which scatter and ruminate 

and then, apt to automatic, scatter again.  

Somewhere, from another room, a phone is humming.  

Fist fighting nights of shepherd clarity.  Separating 

flimsy flings and clumsy knuckles.  A crooked neck, 

a growling belly.  The only difference between 

children and all those blues singers is that all 

those blues singers have forgotten what it was 

to simply sink their questions.  To will up 

their leviathan.  But to wail that greater beast.

Say One Thing

I must, to tell my fellow men.  But I know better.  All we need is someone who is seeing the same things, convinced of the same version.  Who trips at similar twists.  It’s a million different vestibules, each word for this.  It’s the ones who say nothing who have got nowhere to hide.  

There are the things we do, all for the thing we are.  But it’s repetition that latches on with pit-bull grip, shakes us out from sleep where we invisibly picture the reciprocal question who dreams just there beside us.  Our fingers sometimes pinch in the cold composite chain-link.  

But we are kids swinging tandem, leaning backwards, after all.  So over, slides our closely skimming playground, upside is down.  Under, glides our feet, and for a time we’re merely chasing that flick that strums our spine.  It's when we first get up, we really think we see.

Soothe child, say it

Yes you are going to cut yourself, but under the dull of an old blade.  Dumb.  Arriving almost at that sleight of sound.  Imagined nuzzle of an other.

I surely simply take to the things that are set right there in front of me.

And I find that I’m making memories of angles that couldn’t have been.  And although I know, is what a liar does?  Is his image better?  Is it worth the weight?

This is less a question than a gesture.  Of course, as the wayward would have it.

It has taken a great deal of being taught to finally listen to the ways in which Logic should be heard.  Like God I guess.  Useful fictions for the O.G. desperado guys and gals who are all somehow doubtless out there.

Weary travels what they are, that lay in lingering ills before we got here.  Have lain.  Will lie as we learn their each separating ways.  But we live particulate, even linearly.

Cut the bullshit, dog.  Look it.  You’ll soon have your own pups to muzzle and lead.

And mouths to feed before you eat,

And mouths to feed before you eat.

Sterile Pencil

Who put me up to it is who put a clinical touch to music.  But I apologize.  Even if the birds were asking for it.  Even if the dogs were all either growling mutts or pups tracking mud.  I’m dragging a pencil, rushing the timber, as if I knew what I did and didn’t need to breathe.  The state of things is a brush of loose eyelashes, single follicles stuck nothing.  Each page I write, I’m sorry for the littering letters and the fact that I wash my hands.

Measuring matters

The mind is many things, a river is a thread, and a journal is a way of leaving so that it isn’t just the weaving string that withers when the seam pulls up and its somehow strangely pieces come apart.  How to go from one to another, to organize the brains and such, and then how to count.  Translators, revelry, bells broken and tongues expunged.

The whale’s song is only beautiful because we do not hear its words.  Its momentum kills us literally.  I’ve nailed it: momentum kills the conscientious, batters it against the rocks of agnostic.  The stretch starts with a nail and ends with a tearing in all places.  Our heads are not so limber.  To live is to lumber from one such room to another, whistling it away.

Ballets are only inches

concentric eager pitches

simple pictures eaten whole

poison berries, amber grout

things in ears and funneled

love as in a flailing elbow

the heart, a ruddy bone

squashed and scrubbed so

it can infiltrate the eye

the all saving grace in the hole

pay me no mind, sticky stuff

reciting, sleep deprived

circles, dirges, sunk lustrous

each a spinning top

upon another flaccid face

just a gentle reminder, I know

you know what’s good for you

Song of my other

My brother is a turning tongue that rides along the day.  Below the single cloud, among the every breath, even between skin.  My brother is an image here, though none that we can feel.  It is my understanding that all else is the matter.  That the single problem of poetry is not the integral mercy of its meter (injustice it diseases), but that it is enacted nearly motionless, always at that distance, from a chair.

How do you touch anything, but with a hand.  A hand that eats the keys in your pocket.  Grabs the pen and scribbles.  Yes this is a muddy state.  But hands are apt engulfers.  Each other is a symmetry of space, a delving in divine.  With hands like these what could we posit to need that isn’t there for the taking, within reach.

That words don’t come from our minds is the very cerebral impulse.  Look at the offerings.  Minds are merely manners, itching the length of day, dusting off soberly at night—or what replaces night when the mind’s made up and light’s out.  Rhythm is not a ghostly saint.  It is not a snake.  It is a blind master, full of dumb and carrying luck.

My brother is a ghostly saint (though not a snake).  He exists in perfect squalor, a bum in an encompassing chair, without legs or, for that, without a head.  He is the golden shrine that hides—two hands and no mind.  My brother is a ghastly impasse.  He touches, never touched.  He sings a sunken lullaby and weds this pleasant trap.

Spoon

I am already dreaming.  Sneaking extra chances, worlds less collided than conspiring.  I know you naked.  It feels like theft.  I only know you naked.  So late, my words are bleeding paper, meaning you can’t follow one from another without leading into the rest.  

So ok.  If the crescent is the universal symbol for sleep, we’ve totally got this thing.  But if circles are the shape of a day, I wish you’d close those eyes.  I imagine the what was sometimes space and now is just spilled limbs.  The spell is your long face.  

The farness of its lips.  And the fuzz of its former shape.  The eyes are slipping and it might be clear, sharply seen, if it weren’t so even.  Even so

I only know this 

you 

I am dreaming.

My bed is mine; my mind is bad 

and slowly still forgetting.

The Devil and The Sea

Then there are all the endless poems I can never write.  What is it, this the needle points?  A complex tool, what that god screws us under pile drivers.  A mud, such that sticks our skin with cling.  A knot or a tangle, is it purposeful attrition or is it simple and devoid?

A poem is a hunger in a breath.  It is the swallowing of shallows.  It is the shallowing of swallows.  Enactment of the divine possibility.  Here let’s swing it: “Life is yes or no.”  What can we do but sing our brothers and lovers?  Each our wreck and, written, rectified.