Cavalcade of Want

Filled life left great swaths.
Like how vapidity in sex lift'd
a rich inner life of mornings
and familiar problems avoided, return.

During the long shameful walk in
what would have been a new night
slumped into the shoes, slumpt into
too tight pants and large leather bag
of stolen artefacts lifted from most recent
cavalcade of want

Where Dead Does

Severe as a specter's ghost was—
his face, or else another autoimmune
disorder, the vaporous vaporous
hunger to just condense around.

The velvet cart's track that
leads not where one dead wants
but just back in on itself. The beauty
stretch of long, haute, dead nose;

hair thats discouraged and flat
over said dead face. The sweat
-shirt that fulfilled him not
in life or still in death does.

Worst hill in death. Doves
mockingly flit over it.

Foal

Dreaming, a dead foal represents so much that is lost.
And an even smaller foal beside it may be dead or not
but stands on all four legs, proportionally smaller
than his dead brother laying in the growing grasses,
nuzzling his downy ankles that so tenuously hold up
the whole girth of the little horse.

What in this world does the foal ride? What promise
does birth bear and the death fail to give? Who is
the field for? Where're the keepers of foals that're
living or dead? Where is the sex that was eventually
promised them? Where are the equine lovers and
equine-lovers; bleating the fell foal and toll of the bell.

Dad

Bury it in the documents. Dad will have been glad
to have his papers fattened. And I too! You know
how I love the notion of manilla. About how I love
the casters of an old grey Hon filing cabinet.

What did Dad do, essentially, in work, or in life too?
Why do I think that it's possible to find what I think
is implausible to find in my own life—know that it is.
Know that the small strife of getting to work, thinking

of calling a friend, regretting something, is what life is.

Tattoo

(for David)

had a friend once who got a tattoo on his elbow;
drunk! The guy daubed quick at the bone
and said that "it seems to be bleeding a lot," and
Mark grinned. It really's just an economy of want.
But what's not? And that hand was numb
for a month or so—like a funny bone—and Mark
was afraid that it'd never feel right again, and it did.

the Haunting

The haunting wouldn't give it up
and loves the apoplectic pleasures
that dealing with blows and near misses
gives; in the being a vessel
of endings and of continuances too.

Maybe this new veteran who's young
and whose long sinews hadn't had
a chance to relax, yet; is dead.
Maybe his bestubbled grinning visage
is what carries the scent and dismisses it.

Continuing

If just one thing should let me be, let it be this.
That unruly mop of dark strands that top
your head remain on the heads of everyone;
and mine too, is halfway between you and this
and never has been or will be enough.

The makeover's broken; madeover nothing
but the travails that change by themselves. Sing
they will or have in discontentment and alertion
that "he is wearing the same exact shoes that X wore;
this doesn't mean anything. Pay closer attention!"

In the wind, I was caught up in the downturn. A
microburst of a life that really had no idea what it was
but lived often. Lived fantastically even.

Fashion Model

What kills is that what replaced is more ambiguous,
what commonality feigned, what legibility lessened
by the method of expression. Two tits, tantalizing.
And one old scrotum laced with healed lacerations,
crinkled as a brain is, and (if ever wasn't) the pubis.

Even what is desirable derides us. Even the three
expressions, expressed here in concert, "how is the same
face thrice differently?" What is not being paid attention to?
The nipples, are perfect. Acting exactly the ways
that two nipples should & you're jaunty, fashion model.

When He Finally Resigns to My Loving Him. And to the Family We'll Have

Wide legged pants, however disconcerting. His face
when it comes to me, the zombie movie thats still
playing, (why is this movie always playing? who're
the zombies?) is alit from one lamp, shade of rice
paper, oblique shape and white cord running.
"Let's go away, tonight," nothing, "Let's go away."
The period is all I need and begin in on logistics.
Where is the plane? where is the duffel? love too.

Lollapalooza

Please God let Lollapalooza be over. I've absorbed
so much residue from my past revisited. The seizing
in chorus that left nothing but more ulcers
and a worse smoking habit.

I was certain that these people could or had
been compatriot: people who'd taken the Pixies far
too seriously, people who'd pressed their girlfriends who
were too drunk to stand against train car walls.

People composed imperceptibly as the Tom
Sawyers of my childhood, and the full moon too
and all that iridescence and disapperation
that goes along with things like the full moon.

And then that night, during an especially loud set,
(and only the bass crosses Columbus from Grant Park)
a dark swirling came over the cross walk or up out
of a drain grate. And it was not liquor and sweat,

or any confluence of bootlegged substances
—or men! and I couldn't discern it. I spelt Lollapalooza
backward and found no alchemical meaning.
I considered a werewolf as dark swirling

but couldn't find a precedent for that anywhere
—and looked! And then at work the whole park
raised, spun it's darkened liquid face toward mine and
spoke.

And he spoke and I tried very hard and succeeded
at finding something with which to distract myself.
I failed to make my peace and fell under the censure.
Where the President had stood! had come to this;

my ignoring something as hard as I could, and that what
looked lovely from afar had looked lovelier.

You are my shining star

What comes from far away goes also.
The residue of glitter-blood on the deck
as domesticity fought to reassert itself.

You are alien and I am preoccupied.
You were here and left and came from afar.
And I came from afar and go too distantly.

I am Ellen Ripley and you are my shining star.

the Art of the Unfortunate

What is left over in the practice of the Art of the Unfortunate?
The gorgeous and nearly imperceptible vein in the marble.
Honestly, nothing has so suggested itself to me in any or so
subtle a way, or weighed in on it even so clearly as David, stuck
between boyhood and the age of majority in stone.

Lithely

Cars are driving in every direction
and back in on themselves.
The tenuous concrete pylons
that hold up these overpasses,
the queer marriage of granite
limestone, iron that outclasses
the natural stone, the grasses
on all sides and in crevices, however
scrub, that grow still. That decant
still from their liquid forebears
and thin the way the moving looks.

And the self is a thing projected
in a sweatshirt. The zipper made
from metal too that holds both sides
together hangs as languidly
as if connected. As ingratiating
moving things on roads or us too.