Congress

Congress of ill health.
Where some sinuses convene
to wreak a death inside the face.

And real lethargy. The likes
of which strum kitten death
on the harpsichord heartstrings

buried in your Marfan chest.
See that you can lift —Stop.
You are not the derisive object

of this poem, I am. With some good luck
the amalgam of these symptoms
will prove useful through brute force.

Sometime in the future, if not
before
I expire.

Anna Howard Shaw Day

Not even that all of this is all fake,
Anna Howard Shaw Day is a real thing.

If perhaps a polyglot collapsed. A
chest choked up with phlogiston,

once pink bronchioles all
barnacled with oily green-black miasmata.


So, February has not changed place
with any other month —dates

having an indifference, but seeming to
came up fast. Like emancipated youth

living the pastoral life, taking to
teetotaling to see if it had any benefit.

What was a winter wore thin. For good. Yet
each time seemed to. Snatch of invisible

breath there. Ice showing lassitude.
Ample mud where paths of connivence

would cross the depression that
a sidewalk made in dirt. As if life were not

a series of untenable decisions, and
we participants only.


Even if you are an altruistic glutton for
owed favors, no surfeit will stop March

coming. The warm threadbare
domicile of your hoard is hurtling forward!

Vindicated, yes,
but dirtied by handwork.

Chicago

Chicago you jew bitch. Do I like you or not? Nonesuch but lake smear, sprawling and marked by parts of blacks, Thais, Puerto Ricans and people from eastern Europe. Warehouse galleries abut the meat district, there are okay restaurants. Sometimes I feel like you can only be known by night, devoid of people; your stone busts laid out in stark, the black and white of a high, perspectival, lit window. Like when leaves' concerted motion becomes a a discrete organism. And then there is my local canyon filling with hot steam from a drain by the second story tennis court by the church. And seemingly all stone buildings are having the grout replaced?! As a function of Dremels and hatchets? Stop this! You have masoned enough for one 10 o'clock. I’m sure of it. Puffy clots of water or dust across a sidewalk, alright. In Lakeview a common worker is in daycare, food service, or labor, is having a cigarette on a side street; or else coming home from downtown work. We are not so different, with the wind knocked all out of our suffrage and egregiousness. We must both have once gotten a head rush from standing up too quick after being prone for a long time. Must have had to think that old frictions were perennial. Mucked through the thick of anxiety that the Green Mill was the Apollo all over again. What is life if not justifying it too much. Maybe it gets different later on but maybe not! Just more hurry loosed. Nineteenth and twentieth century façades held-up with a latticework of scaffolding while everything else is taken away. It seems that eventually all of us would have to come out at once, some stymied, some unable to compose themselves. And so in that to not amount to much. What had been nature losing out for keeps to capability and vastness. Counting out gun deaths in matchsticks. Meddling with things on the coasts was a big mistake; welding led to naught. Scrub brush and cast concrete, living it up and having enough to eat.

Complicated Knee Joint

Complicated knee joint,
playing more to the left

and right than I would like.
A quiet movement sound now

a long way off; just vibrations
of aluminum cans going

through clockwork. As if
thigh and calf

were threaded with one
thin ligament affixed

to each bony end.
Of course now

having to be somewhere else;
the hospital, the supermarket,

with only "having walked
it a different way once,"

via your advice, abler and,
though being argumentative

and hesitant I, made it there.
To gravel-scraped up jar lids

on the sidewalk and
perfectly intact plain doughnuts

that looked paler, like they too might
smart against dropping pressure.

Is This Glastonbury

Alight sound of bending branch and caramel

light, auspicious or anticipation of auspice.

Last night we slept in a handicapped bathroom

with; where might we have gone off track,

did Carolyn return and leave in the night (it was a well

worn notion), things like this. What amounted

to breath between us, and our thinking is this

Glastonbury?

Still several large piles of stuff battening down

the sluice choice of attendants. Struggling

goodheaded asceticism and attendant on

what amounted to saltpeter of ground outstretched,

brutalist of civic amphitheater construction, sugar

plums of all-weather maroon seats extruded and

bolted into cement steppes; that this should be

lauded amongst us? with a clearview of life ascendant?!

The mexican stoneware giving way to porcelain?

Slush to glacial ice? This to Glastonbury?

·

By advantage of some years hence, the week

bested us. Neither apparent risk of sleeping rough

or going seeming the good choice, now is dross,

gravel, soporific, it is hard to now work up.

Or an absence amongst the returned us.

Yet, whomever we then lost. Glastonbury, it was.

to the Ocean

in defense of easternizing west, west east. Stone sewn
until accidental scraping-over incites—on flat ground! even
sanguinity of gold and rust on a hill side, sloping down
to the city—on one side—and ocean on the other.

You ruddy maximalist. Wearing a toggle navy blue pea coat
and combing the beach, cigarette smudging the blush
of your pate. It is never easy making self-sustaining
diets of disparate threads undulating like fissile seagrass.

And then you are even in love! with the jewess daughter
of a wharfman. And as distant as the tribe now felt; old
maiding, perhaps, but willing to do it up in a cigarette dress
of starched black cotton. Brother-in-law to the butcher,

to the ocean.

Scrub

Scrub, eked out
in a tableau, thus

as if Morricone had
given up the ghost.

So, back. 'Way two
conveyances playingly

race-draft. One
in front for some time

then curtailing back.

To the point that pupil
indistinguishes from iris,

shirtsleeves give way
to a bit of calf?

and what next?

Eagles mating with silt?
Pinecones and foals frolicking?

I am getting drunk.

Right. Could've thought
it would be $750,000

from here on out, that
the disturbance was

evidence of a human path,
not the confused starling

failing to launch around
in underbrush for some time?

Even this 4x6 color printout,
garish with it's back and white

affixed with color blush,

an old photograph grainily
reproduced us. And

how the way we were
then; affecting a buffont,

cleaning under fingernails
with the emory board hook

from a set of clippers,

gesticulating uncomfortably
in the snow, just

having sullied something.

This was hard fought; we
wrought a sculptural mountain

of it, Tatlinly; babbling. He

was not so much a scrub
as lacking in some capitals

as we all are.

Black Hellespontus

Black Hellespontus
to the west,
splash of scree
in a moire
so that an impossible
carbon fiber exists,
shifting.

Scrumbrush aloft
on an updraft
where isobars coming down
shift from still-lit side to
ruddy twilight. As if
an aftereffect
of broken institutions

newly, freshly
broke them. Not
that, say, the mix had not been right;
that the nitrogen economy
was a dangerous external force;
that we bought
upheaval cheaply.

Of course
this.
Until nostalgia for
homesteading is
all there is. The
turned aside
earth,

warm milk.
And the carrion call
which is this: not
only had we brought it all
with us, but
made it up.

Midwestern Life

That which a midwestern life wrought;
unclaimed dignity of a hard fought living yet

not bloody-handed slaughterhouse work,
what failing a third coast left is that surety

that the blood forthcomes.

Flu

The flu short-shrift of kindling.
For as a fever goes
the body follows, straining
after the healthy ineptitude we all know.

Wading, thinking always
of the pant leg.
Is this the hairsbreadth
to threadbare? Clearly

each use diminishes
the usefulness. Rack
of greenware
having gotten wet; wick

drowning itself in wax
and is extinguished.
Once mendicant
in a sea of other mendicants

until possession breadth
comes back up.