_ _ . .

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.