the Compromise

Yes, this is a perfect life,
bubbling plasticene strife.

If immolation, it is a slow
one. "Maybe the hectare further,"

to "or at least mental absentia
turned to much sleep." in the interim.

The cul-de-sac is indignant, yes.
"Maybe there is a third side

of life." The reaffixed bonnet's
bundled under. It is quite cold.

Met you when I'd come to on
the waning half. Picture this;

me, maybe fiveteen percent to
ineptitude with a nosegay of irises.

Let's compromise: you can have
the whole city if I can die.

Compartmentalize, obfuscate, lie
to yourself and everyone else. Skin

spate when there is a shortage
of flesh. Flash mate when

it is dark and we have strobing eyes.

Gliese

On Sunday we gnawed
blood and chokecherry.

The platelet bore
phosphorus to arsenic

and we ate nightshade.
On a colder heath than

one supposed.


Braised boulders in
wizened eye-corner skin,

metal, threadbare Lem.


And this is an anxiety thing,
too, flash of bright red hair;

talons of it. Then we
macerated galloping reams

of numbers ticking up.
What was ground dust

was not dust, but verdurous.
Cataloguing what chlorophyl

strobed back: "green/
green/green/green/green."


Evenings we foundered.
Having rounded some

inanity corner and
doe-faced the grins down,

feigning ignorance
of one another.

As though we were all
clean-shaven, irony gone too.

"Yes." "My, you have
a special that," "I think

you would really enjoy
this record," or, "track of land."

And it's reciprocal!

Earth

The paradigm is
life ended in parts;

no extraneous tree
pulp, increased

purview of machines
(for numerous reasons),

fewer trips
to the theater—

fewer theaters.
Children would say

“You are so old now,”
dividing things up like that.


You came back. Know
what cement set?

Quite flat. With horizontal
scrape marks on it.


This was us.
More dense, if

judging things like that
makes any sense. Blittery

rabbit cooked on speed
and crystal meth,

(That is a blatant attempt...
and all that) rhombus

or a parallelogram;
this was our house.

Transparent, platonic
line segments. Then

lifting the foot over
the bootland to fair

farther foothills and
flat land fractally

explosive with
things that grow.


Designs for cities in the Gulf.
The seagull joke,

neither we
were “aqueous” people.

the Long Haul

Stumbling out
done with the

existence
responsibility.

"I don't even know if this
is worth it anymore."

Bradley began blathering
after hibernation.

The good air
was either too hot

(jockey shorts) or
unmitigatedly frigid,

(the toggle wool coat
and leather duffle bag) but

it kept moving.
From the solar

north pole
into night.


Cruel crunch of
not putting the finger on it.

Something was not right,
yes.

If murderous,
the implication must oblique

into a late morning meal.
Everyone huffing eggs.

"I did not offer you the scarf
to be the boss!" the latrine is

a ways off south. Maybe
Div going there accidentally.

Maybe the social tree
grew deep roots in dust too fast.

And! between
twilight,

leaning left
if going west!

the sun will set
if you let it.

Less jouisance
than was talked about

because less vitamin D
from the ultraviolet light.

Brass fittings, the D-
ring opening. And

through a hard vacuum or
gravity, Div Bradely-Notworthit

faded into death. His desiccated
husk in the saltfields between

the great northward
rivers.

When They Evacuated the Louvre in Advance of Nazi Troops

You, barefooted beauty.
Winged Victory, you

descent fast.

Creeping past old embers
and broken glass back.

That that

happened years ago
was not immediately

apparent.

It seems to be
going on still.

Precipitous Drop

Broke, did not know
the handmade catamaran
was full of reedworm, not
in love, overriding the first
stanchions, little red book,
breathe deep when "what're
you doing now?" whether
the good IPO went south
and you couldn't get out
or did—with fungal aplomb
—and balls to the wall and
making "being very famous"
and "life easening" of cold
photographic chemicals and
and an old Helmut Newton
coffee table book.

David

The primary pulmonary embolism
started in the leg

and moved to the lung later,
after two weeks of bed rest.

Increasingly the healthy corpus
is not the healthy corpus one

remembered leaving
on the sofa (yellow leaves and

paisley orange, a little brown).
You fell down.


Irradiated you,
staying a long time,

as though Elijah had arrived.
You died.

A.

Malreedy,
time to out with it. Fan dance
will attract a holocaust on
businesses, raze a palsied
pox and germinate another
in forearm skin. Already a
desiccated supplicant again
to fill the same full paradigm
of haute bags of garbage,
trying to stuff pencil erasers
into the face or anything else
when leaving the house, piles
of dusty books, dusty shelf,
dusty pile of opened junk
mail.

If Zukofsky wanted the A.
for the aleph or 'change in,'
he would read a lot of news
for the perspective. Look:
coptic christians in a yurt,
(my feet hurt) when a free
course of vaccines for children
somewhere close, and they
all end up hacked to death
with large knives called urvids.
You wouldn't've know about
this otherwise.

Through the Noguchi Coffee Table

Denudeade, Junesea,
serfing extra life to
the jittering pinprick.

Baron Verisimilitude
-Thin, reconciling
your liniages, ask

the embarrassment
down from the rafter. It is
not a fun evening,

sitting in your strife
-house by myself.
Without boisterous

thrill and singleminded
doe-eyed watching.
Which was of glass

and blood; a real backyard
of Japanese modernism
and blight. Okay, blight.

Your Erudition

There is a part of life
half. The past few

having gotten far worse.
Furnaceine daliencier,

we three have an attache
each. Harbinger robot,

machine of flesh wrought
of serif'd em-dashes may

you have the good idea
and implement it, and

have the jeans come apart
in the crotch first,

(boyishness wearing scarily
from your face) and not take

anything not for granted when
they fall apart. You've swung

low, sweet one. You
anxioust in the drab

cotton jumpsuit. You've earned
your erudition.

Many Things Are Not Right

Many things are not right;
bearing the brunt of lifting

the light from light so that
spot lit dark 'till morning;

I put three types of drugs
into the head sack, that

was a hard way to make it
to lunch; that a pig-headed

Orpheus who knew the rules
did not care about the rules;

that is a lot of ring to fit
"under the white glove;"

that one-step-up Cabletown
was a scant improvement

yet contractual. (Yes, I could
have know it's fuller extent

if that is so right a thing. Yes,
the parallel lines slathered

in bright red paint. Yes, the
waste-chest compact 'till

white rind is 'exhausted,'
in the 'Shanti Shanti Shanti,'

that is the orient reoriented
to big ovular teeth, nearly

all of them, "very excited
to have made it here," "

Really, Very excited to have
made it all the way here.")

Your Father's House

Drowing in the Junesea,
immortalizing the dynamic
of stayed face, victuals of
the fresh flowers of Olmec,
choking, grass rubbings
on a white tee shirt of
the inscription on the
monumental obelisk, that
sustenance was made
from spiders and woolen
lepidoptera and
permafrost. Your father's
house smelt of faraway
smoking, pots of glue,
new divorce.

Desperating

Desperating placidity. How
coming to obesity and no one
said a thing; backdoor, sweaty
palms for liberty. Look, we
can do this in small parts.

Just for the whack at piece, I would
sully the rush with my surname,
bear the ineptitude of copy-cat
Aaron Sorkins with their kysh,
kysh, kysh of blown out audio.

"All of life has been preparatory,"
for depressing things to happen.

the Painstake

The shell permanents.
I live here. And hence
horror fins, coughing
up blood, apple pie,
making the terrible auspices
of milk solidified
that's bone caked open.

Coccoon of lead and
chocolate that is delicious
and very thick. If you
surreptitiously the coffers,
the coffers will detect
the entrance, fight back.
The favored aquifers resplendent

with liquid dignity, and
everything. Well of shadows
and a punch-clock. Diktat
of the lake in leather boots,
and freshwater scepter. If
You are gods created through
malfesence, Neil Gaiman

verisimilitude and
anxious lax sweat burnt,
there still is reciprocity
ascendant. Ossifier made
of water and of fire
you are as much
a game of 'wait for

something to happen' as
all else. What a shame for
the structuralizer.
Trading the faux fur in
and touching the steel dick.
The shell permanents,
your farcical chest-shape.

Experiment, see if
there is a finer painstake.

the Auspex

Adrenal Auspex, working
the ruddy hot from
the neck via collar back.

If water hadn't parted
it would part yet. Upon
entrance he desiccates

foliage, fauna is angry.
He anticipates excesses
and dearths of office.

He knows the
eternal nubbin,
catching often
on an edge, of
work for love. It
and he get on
well.

Strides cuttingly,
fissile frontis for
all that is visible.

Where You Live

Once you get your tenterhooks
into me, I'll relent and slither back
reptilian and wet, green and black,
through horror film night grasses,
down the berm, into the cold water
where you live.

Denim

Why did you love denim
in that way? The long
arm-finger that law abided
and you did not.

Needled itself into the cut
on Christ's chest: warm
inside, and moist,
but not wet. It was like

playing a few silent
hands of hearts and not
sex. Where sex is the
gash that was rent

there the day before.
Lamborghini-gun, how
most of your surfaces are
near parallel to the ground,

with a lupine bent
inclined forward. The basso
plays the main roll on this
one. Coming back:

the organs and soft
and dense and wet
inside that can be felt
through the plasticy casing.

It is scary to touch them.
The entrails are hot
indigo fiber and urea
sloshing about.

Denim stoking it.

a Century of Progress

A century of progress
and of losses. Was
the brass one; after
the gold, and the platinum.

A little return of
clockwork to the way
time went. Cog teeth,
anyway. Interlocking

parts. The coast
line kept moving into the lake.
We'd work harder
for it, and build a shallow

root system dense.
Throw the porcelain things
in crevasses with
a loud din. Report from

the mountains (forming
a wall) on the west horizon,
come back home now.
It isn't working out.

HVAC Indifference

You derisive mite,
I am not doing
what you wilst.
now.

Whatever. Blair was
very, very
drunk that night.
I bet

she wouldn't
remember saying she
didn't love me
either,

when she'd thought
about it. What
were we meant to do
then?

Apoplectic heat-vent,
if your mouth won't shut,
turn it away from
me.

If you are breathing
down my neck,
consult back.
I'm dead

now, but I'm
getting much better.
I'm dying to get
much better.

the Slagheap

A tumbling
slagheap. Briggflatts
if briggflatts meant nothing.
Sulphurous mud and
electrical wiring. Three
fourths the food needed.

Hiring the antecedents,
and then killing them
so matriculation comes
with attrition and slogs
deep.

And there is a ring there,
if it has not returned to
the earth yet (who knows
these days) as nutriment
for the dead soil. Nitrates
and iron.

Scarletina caked in with
where the grass is hard
packed into something
flammable.

Deflation ensued
the excess, for something
like twenty-five years. Yes
the casing seemed slack
over the cylindrical limbs
of boyhood flopping about.
(They were clothing to
keep the cold out and
animus in. That was a hard
fought thing!)

See, gnatsfluff and a can
of aerosolized water for
cleaning off, but leaving
left.

Wesh revenue, waning.
Lush avenue, raining,
virulent microbial growth
on the concrete pileons.
(Wouldn't've thought
they'd make it through
the wastelanding but
did, with fungal aplomb!)
Wish for a current in the dust.
Flash

of living in the dust.
Tidal pools of dust. And
wallow slower. Luddlow,
'till the stoking made of
somnolence was.
What would've insulated
now radiates, which is the
opposite.

Duff that, Cannery!
That there is a transparent
vein in the earth, of magicalness,
that was a nature once.
Cavernous marble amphitheater
carved of water, make nice.
The water underneath
this place is brackish, but
potable.

Nope: boy will too. You
bought a new pair of shoes
and then he bought one.
This jaunt across is fit
for way-early renaissance
heraldry. He indeed wears
a maroon blouse and a
dark velvet waistcoat.

Stark metal things
shining in rubble and ashes.
Mr. Darcy and Mr. Mister talking
art in the parlor that now is
dross—literal and ash camps.
I wish there was a holding
hands part, but there isn't.

Accidentally Going to Winnetka

Oh dross,
dappled with dew.
It is colder again
and you come
in rapid bursts.

Reciprocity until
the point of shaking.
Us trying to get in
the other through
blunt force

on the front. You
lay there limpid,
going about like a
tidal pool grass might.
And then you

did night
for a long time.
Imagine being a
schmuck, sitting
in the grass and gravel

on the side of a road
'cause you're lost.
Take out a cigarette
and smoke it, and
wait to go home.

Fuss over the
boy with the cellphone.
Mothering until
the point that mothering's
debated in small groups.

(It does not look alright)
I do not know if you're
lounging on
that bed of moss
with sex in the air,

or plastered there;
stricken with loss;
just making lists
in your head. Maybe
both is accurate.

for a Gimlet

The equity is
twitterpated,
I am too.

Which, in a weakness
returned to
what was easy,

adolescent fantasy.
Like Schiele
done up with full shading.

It was not funny how
you seemed as though
from your head

to the bottom of your spine
had been stretched out!
Luminosity of the

flesh, yes. Firm
nipples that seemed
inflated, young

boxer face; small features
and deep set eyes
and big ear lobes.

You had a smooth face
and eyes that were like
spheres of water, not

connected to you necessarily,
taking everything in and
putting it somewhere.

Remember your Marfan
Syndrome? And what it meant
to the Frank Herbert people?

That the spice floes
were growing thinner
meant something.

That the huffing of tea breath
was growing thinner,
though the mounds were growing

met our expectations.
Oh God! the whole kitchen
is a mess of pans boiling over,

an old gilt sacle,
sheaves of papyrus,
and the things for a gimlet.

wild

How much more
to drop a bomb on us?

Luring doubt
from the den,

which was an
affable sprite

who sought
the very nice

and only
just gave up.

Who owns the onus
of stuff like this:

that the stockpile
of drugs ran out

when the hurting
returned, that the

haircut was a result
of not cutting,

the green stripe that
got wider

on one side?
wild, did you

not drop the /e/
to camaflouge

your first footfalls
on Ellis Island?

In your havoc of
research, missed

the chorus and
two verses

that're everywhere?
It is all off.

The lines then
must meet,

refract past
one another

and show a red stripe
beneath.

You escort
doubt back

around
the old environs,

introducing him
the the Pashmina scarf

that was popularized
during his absence.

Worlds are like this:
a set of little wheels

and a slip, a jersey
plinth and spam boat,

a thunder
of recognition

and resounding
disappointment

when the legs
did not

go all the way up
but stopped at the crotch.

Coming back
down with a bout

of finding the
fine eyes

in some way
inhospitable

and the evidence
beer left.

And wild intoned:
"It's the over-forties

at one table. And
I'm on the bitch-stick."

And true enough!
Doubt went dumb,

didn't know
which one

to talk to less.
Both seemed

a mess. If
the whip hand

was the one that
one used to jerk off!

what a feat
that would be!

of life
reunited!

The lip cleft
on one,

the anglicizing
brother (wild)

would not raise
indifference

but'd talk about it,
in a mire,

to the extent that
other people would.

And in that mud,
ire was not

the comatose
counterpart,

raising a child
toward indifference

and eventual
submission.

Doubt has
a prehensile appendage

and it is
slender.

Unto, again
submersion.

Yes. He was a nice boy
unto ire

and aspersions!
How is that?

That a smile
incurred sickness

and drove
him under earth

where the glance
wasn't?

Yes. He drove
the simpleness

to scurvy
of another sort.

Yes. He dressed
his hair

with crushed rosemary
and clumps of marjoram.

The car would
not start, yet

when it
did start

the drive
to leave was gone.

the Mawkish

Those years we lived on blood
and bong water. Had things taken out
and replaced in a hospital.
If a fair amount of love was

ours by right it was
a time of fasting to preserve the feedstock.


Andrew, you were
born in 1972. We had many
dinner parties, then lived
the thin life.

We gnawed the platelet
of good strife, mocked patient zero
for the mawkishness because it
was a good time, had only just begun.

the Window

Not being here costs much,
going where he is not.
And having one clue left
but not using it. Austin was far off.


Churning the old truth:
the first autumn was hard enough,
having moved on, even!
Sex and being cold.


Zeroing out all thought
and blissed out on what's left
which is ash, beer-ends,
and having eaten too much;

like a dirge Thanksgiving.
You are unrightly cold,
indian summer notwithstanding,
full of old magic; deep earth;

videogame cartridges;
and the poster of Elvis Costello
drained of mirth,
looking toward the window.

Memorial Statue

This past quarter century:
you did a lot of aging,
who was seventeen,
didn't know what to do.

You quit changing a while ago
when the breathing
became difficult.
Vocational school seemed

not so good an option,
the space pool didn't exist yet.
Antediluvian footholds
in the cliff-face. High school

was wearing thin. You
climbed the flagpole, somehow,
hung out eye to eye with
William Henry Harrison.

Memorial statue, now I am
seventeen years your junior, again!
This is the blue-black nadir
of trying to love men.

Tenaciousness

I'll sing hosanas
to the skin
between the bottom
of your tee-shirt
and the top of your
underwear.

Bright William,
how is the pastel
polo shirt faring now;
the horizontal stripes,
the summer is over
and fall's ascendent?

Underneath
the muddy flannel?
I may need to be
ill for a while,
to enjoy citrus
in a new way

and be driven
to long form
reading by boredom
with video and
not anything outward.
It not being

you, King of kings,
necessarily meek,
spritely and very old.
Arsenic and deference,
more painful, somehow,
the less there is.

Bill; this'll not
go away, ever,
if you don't want it.
Hard to be so
hard pressed against
isn't it?

Dyspnea

You introduced me to
the wall/wall/floor: corner.
Nevertheless. Dyspnea
is shortness of breath.

Ukiyo-e: can you imagine
a surface so matte that
the pores come up off
the surface to meet you?

If you met jouissance over
water crackers and very
nice mustard (the bulbous
brown seeds broken jaggedly,

and bits of scallion clearly
visible in a tough of
amber oil) on the banks
of a salt marsh, that

would be an austere
and erudite way to meet.
Jouissance is cerebral
(and soaking wet! like

a maraschino cherry!)
You are more corporeal
than that harlot, if as
intransigent to meaning.

Universe B

Even the terrible garlic clove
and plump tomato are divined
by your hands and a knife.

Izmir is far and wide: this is
the second time it has come up.
There are helium lights,

it is like nine o'clock at night.
There are a series of squares
on the oceany vista; the sky is cyan.

Being difficult for the sake of
being difficult is an M.O. one
can write home to mum about.

Dov, we had a nice time;
for a decade. Patrick, the
ellipsis kept riding the horizon.


The lips kept swooping in from
Universe B.

Familiarity of the first pop radio
signal, to the moon, say,

gives way to flat waveform.
The lips are dry and dark,

like daubed with burnt cork!
who in the office would've done that?!


Remember the third verse?
that started with "You are
not so inviting / when I think about it."

Handful of Aspirin

If the very worst way to die
is drowning, or fire in the lungs,
or having taken poison that
you thought was medicine, or
anything; the very least bad
happening would still be very bad.

This is a fair assumption, Patrick.
You have red hair now in a quiff,
and a short beard that is neither
too bushy nor too neat. Like a man
into the aesthetics of a little hatchet
with pastel bands on the wood handle

and a wrought steel head honed
by a Japanese master.
Maybe you come from the west
now until Russia and then Alaskan
immegrants. I haven't asked you
about that yet, but I will.

How is the design career going?
When did you last make pressed tofu
on the barbecue fire escape? (That
was dangerous.) And gave me
a handful of aspirin and said
"Keep some of that for later?"

for Don Draper

By far the nicer
was not so dark
a secret, carried
the ravaged leg
back from Korea.

Erstwhile witness
lifted limbs from
the listless. Was
a water grass creature
issuing starch and

being the vertical
fibers of plant growth.
Going the way
the water went.
If still, stopping.

If krill, killing.
If ass in the
M.A.S.H. tent,
an affront to the vanquisht.
It is simple:

You have worked hard
your whole life
and your station was reduced
by some arbitrariness,
and you died, and you
gave up your life
to magnify the portcullis,
and you died, and you
made it back alive
but sustained some grave injuries.

Wight lift, that
Mila-Kunis-looking bitch
is made of life!
Justified the unit tattoo
with the new flesh.

Lifted the leg
over the temporal dike.
That one hurt.
Torn up flesh
was like dirt.

And how,
the desiccated beef sounds
and snifter of rye.
The arc lamp,
I love you very much.

the Best Part

Living was a poison,
I swear it.

Ted Danson existing,
the morning commute
for whatever that's worth
Antidote elipsis,
ravagers; elipsis!

Crowded mess, is
it just in discrepancies?
flicker,
ear death,
the headache or the happenstance

or's it
just easier to discern then?

8; 9; 10, fat hen
if you think this
doggerel's insincere
you're missing it.

The smoking wants
the smoking clef.
"Johnny?
Is that you
creeping in the dark
behind the corner
of the topmost stair?"

Loving wants what's left.
Tells itself
this is the best part.

an Allowance

We know hedonism but not
longevity. Who is to say, really,

that the smile metastasized
for sad happenstance

and not as sad evidence that
we were owed it.

Tetrahydrocannabinol

Not to be party to night, but
anguisht little mite, went
from quick lark (unpresumptive at first)
to the turnscrew happenstance
all too well known
there is a culvert of time there
of snowswirls
the thumbdrive that each iota
alive: he is a drugged boy
how could you have…but
you did not put there
but is there. Slack
sinew and elastic
the night
the ruddy cotton fluff
the half ruint pint of Newcastle Brown Ale
remonstrance,
the buckshot
-sized globules of solder,
some organic compound
compacted to an orange
-red striated pellet
of salt
ethanol concentrate
tetrahydrocannabinol
and tin-foil gone matte.
That one hurt.

On the Bus

When we are reduced
there will be even less
of us.

Justice; like there is one
mechanism for
getting it,
unbearable though
it may be.

Brutus, you sweet rube;
take it all on yourself

this life'll be ending soon regardless.

Trekked what Marathon'd
be like,
took the bus, preferred
taking the bus.

Unbearable is in the making,
the paper truss.

I am exhausted with the
buttresses.

I am getting so cold in here
are you not?

Benjamin

When you said to your
therapist, "idealism

and bunk," and deft jingoism
came in a six pack

labeled WEARING UNDERWEAR

AND A TANKTOP, JACQUES TATI,

HAIRY LEGS, ALL DAY LONG...
Fairy lights on your

bedroom window,
and outside: noir so black

that the femme fatale
could not abide to kiss your jawline

with the stones' razor-edgeful
of soporific. You smile.

It is not so bad a life;
shalom night.

Water Bug

Dead fish,

I am wearing all black.
You are wearing all black.
It is hot.

There is a whole nother
world. I think
full of the dead fish smell
and lubricant.
Sunlight when sunlight
is not what you want.

Malaise getting acuter. Does
make one want
to bleed blood
bring the damning
to a head
finally.
Be dead, even.
Or whatever
that would certainly be a terminus.
at least.

And the fish
though that
floundering,
macerating in it's own juice,
bearing down
in lieu of
staying up
if that at all helps
(it does not.)
trying to make his way
through "Rocko's
Modern Life"
in one go
there is an
enticing water bug
in it.

the Problem

If it were the end of this world
then the next would be ice.

Now, more violet around the edges of
the fingernails and nostrils
and transparent!

as if there is a capillary
action to the end.



Spastic as the colon
in the old joke is,
sputtering all around,
the result of some fast
or other in the presence
of deliciousness.

As if blood would
not be delicious
if you were thirsty
enough.
Of course
it would.

The idea was
"stay young forever,"
as a functional decision:
the age of majority
was aged, the pert
tummy was stale spittle

in the face of both hands
flat in the carpet—
and however the body was—
in a protestation
coming apart
in spiderwork,

which was less consolation.
That is the way
the world works
(in a blast of fission
then little
perturbances).

Heart, you lack half-clench.
If you are rising
higher in the ice bed
the floe is growing warmer.
If you are sinking water
then it no longer
is.

Whether that compression
over the years, layer
of skin on layer of skin,
and "Our selection of any
standards, was not zealotry"
but politicking.

And if depravity in hope
is in place of scholarship
and learning: I'm scholastic.
If drinking your fathers
potato spirits solvent: I'm
the mower machinery.

And going blinder!
the bootstrapping
which began
in the Finger Lakes
and ended up in smoggy
southern Appalachia
lifted the poor rube
from somnolence
of poverty
into it's quietude

—of mud! tar
bitumen, sealing wax,
the stuff that keeps
the coifed bangs up,
sugar, yeast, blood,
stuff like that.
to the point that Ezra
Koenig is indistinguishable
from Charlemagne.
Tesla is from Chachi,
Dev Patel: Aziz Ansari.

Each of them doing
what they can,
hand in the other's pocket.
Man, membranous
and luscious
verite, if anything is,
you are.



If it were just us
three at the end
of everything,
someone would be
there
unpresently.

If the ship's prow
were building
toward a head
in water
there
would be more water.

If the sunrise said
"fuck you," to the 'set
and stayed overhead
all day, It would be hot
for a long time,
shadows would hide away.

Hope is the way
of heaving.
Our breathing.
Sweat forming
on our brows.
Everybody!

join in with…
…
and giving up.
There is a universal
buzzword,
and it's a bacchanal

and has all
the promise of sex,
and of being huddled in the grasses,
away from Horlogium
that lunatic
watchman,

who was in a book once
where the constellations
were like men. Banal.
Really. Running errands
across the sky.
And then switched:

their silhouettes dissolved
and left
pinpricks
of light,
sometimes at a joint
and sometimes not.

It gave no further explanation
and people on the ground
got on—and most forgot!—
but, maybe, one kid
who misunderstood,
and kept talking to them.

Caveat rursus
scriptor: it is not worth it.
Leave the correspondence home
and don't be home.
Do not be tied to the telephone
however caressing

it is on the short hairs
on the back of your neck
and the bottom of you head.
There will be more hair later
but this hair
is here now.

Do not get the impression
that leaving the house
is different from
not leaving the house,
stop thinking about
it that way.

Back under the awning,
scorned as a scorned thing is.
You are this:
confusion of excellences,
loss preventioneer
in a land of lost things.



which does
by increments illicit
a love so bastardized
that mine could undo it.
Cousin of stupidity
is hope.

Ray,
align yourself
with the seraphim
that their
small
and luminous fingers

should pick up
the beat from
your breath
and do something useful with it.
And that the suspicious
angel

is always working himself up
will outlast.
Poor guy has got
a good feeling
about it. The rest will
envelop
him with platitudes.

So
buy them off
with a carafe of iced coffee,
a package
of sour straws;
and run in the opposite direction.

Alas,
the part of life
that was the fundament
of jokes has
taken precedence.

Lovely,
if love is
a pest tent
in the humid southwest
and you are fresh out of tinctures

of dopeful relief.
But if you remind me
that hope
is a thing deferred
over the mountains
of a fantasy novel

then you would do that.
If you were anticipation
concentrate
then your enaction
would dilute you all out
to a few scant parts
per billion.

And you would drink like water
and eventually
be gone. Unless!
the spectral realm
were a clarion
into the palm fat
for us

and thinking that that
that's emblematic.
And thinking that
things have
changed's
misunderstanding them.


If trying to learn something of love
from old British television;
then I'm the telecom;
the subject of bribery,
so much money is at stake
that a grandmum'd
walk over ground glass
so much money into
the pockets of an MP
for a seat on some Beeb
sub-board.

All of this not
to say that Dench is not
trying to say to one
"Love the old man with all of your heart,"
(despite the hurmph.)
But the Dame died.

Magnetic tape may not
combust with the ebulliency
of celluloid, but will
mewlingly melt
into little spheres
of black plastic.

(You may've seen 'Contact' or mayn't've
but) the notion that
electromagnetic radiation
in deep space goes
on and on
with only dust to interrupt it.
And that is much less
than terrestrial solar
interference.



It is a hard life,
stumbling around
the effect of some
proud parent
or other,
in the face
if disaffection.

There are all of these adapters
outside of the closed-off world
of propriety
that power the device,
effect a video-out
from the mini-mini jack
(if that's at all possible)
and whence

what came in
is going out…
…
I just want to tell you the truth:
I do not love you
Yet.
But give me twenty-five seconds.



Remember the condition
of this arrangement?
A curdy spume
of ghosts among them would.
of spray
searching the third third
in a realm of right angles.

And if that life'd just
stay the same way forever
it would be a way to judge standards
at least.
And if pride faltered
adjudication would be there
to pick up the pieces.

And if those pieces were indifferent
and fell where they may've
you could mark
the lack of surprise
in billions
of Annie Lennox songs.



All of this in service
of desperation
nothing not
in service of it
head and arms above it
legs above it,
this is not aesthetic
it is lonesomeness,
melancholia
has been assigned too soon.
despite the maudlin nature.
I am not drunk.
It was just a glass of sherry
while making the sauce.




If Ulliel,
or something in that vicinity,
were the originator
of the infamously
neutral dark phial
it would mean an

unorderly and riotous
exodus from heaven
there is so much blood
involved.
How is that
at changing opinions?
He might wear the black jeans
still. Of course he will.
Shut the fuck up,
he is a wreck
of tar and bones.
I do not know this.
The IAEA
has given up all hope

and the council's despairing of it.
His profile is not that high
in those circles.
they are concerned about him quietly.
I could penetrate him quickly
at a run
and forgo subtlety
but what would that prove?

That I am as cutthroat
in sexuality as vivisection?
That the nickel-plating
on the brass coming off
was only a matter of time?
That though when the video game was announced
it was 2007,

the pre-renderings
and new macro-model
of game testing both looked promising;
it is 2015 something.
There is a whole new paradigm
for things like that. No

we never had sex
(I said it was because
of his bastard origin
and he thought we had had!)
there was the hope of it.
O, there were great hand jobs,
and an orgasm that greeted
the headboard with a splat!
it began with a back rub
that meant
whatever it meant.

The caviler spirit was
a gay disaster, still is.
If there were a stalagmite of it
I would stop impaling myself
(no I wouldn't:
the spelunking expedition
pared the gearing up to the bone,
had no implements or vittles:
and though the bat carrion
on the way in
was plentiful,
potable water
was a problem.

What was all anticipation
for big crystals,
and wet dreams for
the anthropologist
tennis player that we
found down there—
he had made
a rattan net
out of the luminous flora
at the end
of a basalt cliff
and he played with himself—
led to knowledge
of the heath insurance policy
and it's benefits.

And that was that!

(Though his hair
was long and rippling
even when glistening
with sweat
the beard,
the forearms,
the eye twinkle,
the staid dedication
even after no fossil record was found
no fossil record was found.)
No I wouldn't. It is not
too big an imposition.

And still have the freedom
to make banal decisions,
the ponytail, the flat-front trousers;
without finding the hole
bored through, or
the bruised up legs.



If equity in love were a death game
like when the beach fell
in a torrent of astral blood
and sunlight were
antiseptic in that way,
it may be night, still,
all day long.

There would be
bellies cut off in
horizontal downward strokes
suggesting self-knife use
but no knives
or evidence of reason.

fought to the point
that even
the content
is contentious
for example:
"This one is
the hairy
small of a back.
There is
not much to it.

"This one is
a handful
of pubic hair clippings
scattered over and upturned
tray of flan!

"This one's
gravel and tears!

"This is
eviscera
and a splash
of milk!"

For sure
we are done being friends.
Feels so nice
to have finally
gotten out.
If the gun

put to the lank temples
was "Destiny for eternal larks?
no.
Maybe, but a rainy day
affection you can't shake
until your bones
are worn down to steel pins

and calcium bicarbonate.
You indeed have a podium,
from the northwest
and on it's middle shelf
(hidden from me)
may well be
lactaid, the valium
for which I've been pining,
a pound of gooseflesh
and just shy of a liter of my blood,

three pop-tarts, your student card,
I am so hungover,
and should never have supposed
that a red line on the sidewalk
was the result of petrified
angel heart

being held against it
on a walk;
and nothing else,
it was not
the raglan's fault
it was your fault.

And that Christendom
has a capillary action;
intimating; Christ is gone
and he is missed,
and he is penetrated and
the problem is that hope exists.

Christ talked
to everyone
about what to wear
to my wake
and decided
on the linen shorts.

I arrived late,
was having a hard time
acclimating to death.
The shorts were transparent.
Christ kept crossing
and uncrossing his legs
with fey action.
It was hot,
his shirt was open
to the third button.

Note on Date Titles

I've recently happened upon much old writing from my old Livejournal. I'll be editing some and re-posting them. As none of them have titles I will be using the dates they were originally posted for two reasons: 1) to avoid titling what are ostensibly "completed", and to denote that they are ostensibly "of a different period".

the Situation

"He was kind of cute!"

though sweaty as a beast

and lewd. Come-hither sweetness,

the race renewal,

anything nice.

Asymmetrically balanced curves

built on the notion

that the words meant

that one thing:

but of course they didn't.

Removing suspicion

from the situation

by replacing all doubt with certainty:

• The 'Texas Chainsaw Massacre happened.
• Time did what was done to Ozymandias.
• The virus propagated from the profligate.
• The signpost is confused, crying very loudly in the shower so the roommate's boyfriend won't hear.

Who could kindle putrid

demagogues of hope

toward this demonized dope

who's rightly livid?

Kabuki

Temperance,

if you are the prime virtue

in the grey heather raglan

tee shirt, thin from much good use;

small distances would still

seduce you from equanimity.

Small obtuseness then.

When one love breaks

and then another.

Chastity and her brothers

are juiced up and salivating

—is like Virgil in late summer.

If they could have coffee

in the cave of all temporal knowledge

then they could have coffee.

If they could rustle up some

white face paint

then kabuki.

This Ring

I am so old.

I don't even remember

what this ring means.

Quitidian and self-immolative,
wishing the right wish and
inefficacy.
Lesbian mentor and inefficacy.
Quietude, precision, death.

the Trapezoid

Whether you come or go
considering more coffee
or Excedrin with caffeine
as if alacrity is
what one needs
to get through this.

Whether you knew
of the secret virginity I bore
those times form Eden
to Baltimore; Eden to Baltimore.
Some were summery and the
glasses were obscured with sweat;

some laced with silicate dust
after the visit,
from the longspent
petulant volcano,
who would erupt for you
if that were what you wanted.

Stifled, lifted up;
if this is what you want,
then this is what you want.
If there is a fairer sex,
you aren't, holding your bicep
so your arms are the bottom of a trapezoid.

the Diatribe

If we were tan,
it would be last summer.
Reaction is unreliable
go with feeling.
Feeling is a palsied bitch
go with current.
If we were alive still
we'd be swimming in the lake;
we never did that before.

The outside is so real,
like the moving leaves
and times the sounds
of the train far off come
as in the metric system.

As if the three dimensional
coordinate difference
between one vector, vision,
and another is represented
by numbers.
And we understand the numbers.

Exploring the caves under the ground,
Falling from a very high point
to the ground, or into a fissure in it.
Skimming along where water
meets the air and all lateral movement
is under the purview of some sadistic fucker
from William Henry Harrison Junior High School.
You were this fucker,
I would discover later.
Your name was changed
by some arbitrariness
but you did not offer up
that information
without being asked.
(Who would as you of it?)
And there are severe politics involved
with this: someone has made a pact
with the aliens, though they seem mostly vacant.
This part is about a videogame called Halflife
that came out—some time ago, actually—
though I have just happened upon it.
Joesph Campbell does not know what is going on.
People who advocate linearity,
if you are miffed about this diatribe
you can sit on it.

盛世

Our fat years

were a disappointment,

excess was banal

before exciting.

It is when

the patch in your bangs

went stark white.

For no reason.

Things were alright then,

much money, yes;

sublimating the self

for the us.

There is not a finite

amount of this.

Though that would

be easier.

Remember how your jobs

at the gas stations

afforded you time for

reading?

I Lady Macbeth'd,

you said don't mess this

up. I didn't. But

how did we get to

"you are so bitch,"

and indifference.

the Lovely

is on a diet.

Nothing but films

and television

that keep the motivation up

and entropy at bay.

Cumin-like soft core

pornography; anise

and black peppercorns

defining the lovely

from what is not lovely.

Need an analogue

in the hopeful media;

an abdomen raita,

if there is one,

actically cool and rippling.

Psalms of earthly delight

but like dirt that

is important to the fruit's taste.

A good set of pins will,

but more will do it:

shorts and the right sunrise

will do it, derisiveness,

the quotidian

If there is an art

to those sorts of things

you'd know it, say

there were an enormous

circle neck Lanvin tee-shirt

and strategy that needed

to be implemented.

There is a cold beachhead,

Sierpinski has arrived too soon,

"Where in the fuck did you get that expired film stock?"

the Foundry

Reciprocity is bunk.
I've just done a whole thing
by myself.

You are an unctuous brat
however much your
lacerated junk…

Moving from this place to that,
geezering foisted upon you
and the

digest says this:
Take a deep breath.
The police

were not right even
after the indictment.
The doors are

still wide open
and steam is
coming out.

the Opportunity

Never being titular but in lust,
to throwing down some sunlight
on that: coming up in black letter
on white "If This Were Only Lust…"

Amory like this is a fits and starts
thing, obviously.
Never having had sex in the morning
and then gone to work

because the opportunity hadn't presented itself.

the Plum

Like crystalline
almost, on the top bough,
astringent tart
and wet.

Coming out of season
in the summer
simpler aspect
growing wider

and wider.

August

There is no respite
from what hid himself.

I know this; it
is not August

though it
intimates it.

Morning

Eyes closed, sun

rising through milk

this is

a morning poem.

Buckminster

had a billion triangles

and we

iteration.

Imagine the operations for a good life

are a large machine around you and

everywhere would

need to be reinforced.

Something

Trust this: do not
follow the one who
looks dead inside.

Honesty, I feel spurned,
un-self-confident,
confused and fatter
and scared—I said it!
Back to the axiom:
"follow" was "fall for."
Just something to consider.

Living

A hands width

from the chest

but the hands width.

•

Why do I feel

sopping wet?

Is it the lung fluid

coming back?

Is it that

no dry thing exists?

•

If that wish

were a death

sentence then

we would live.

Love

Even the very fat

seem to find it,

aspect of the Orient,

Bond villainess

who can't do

normal eye contact

it is too intense and

she averts her eyes.

Patrick

You walk

but not how they want you to walk.

Half the work is not 'showing up,'

it's the first part.

There are a lot of subsequent parts

And not subtly, even.

You were the cask of Zinfandel

too saccharine to drink

but too lovely a wood case to give up

all ways. Stumbling around like a drunk

or the big brother from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre

(it was totally fictional) but this is not fictional.

Happening like happenstance did not happen.

You are a year and three months older,

is all.

The jeans are overlarge, you are somehow

too thin and too fat at the same time,

you still fall in love with things —like

a book—so intensely, like a child would

and it becomes about learning, and

where everything is about that love.

And yet I'm not building a case

for your being a child,

your complicated life

was adult.

Earth Heart

And that fun day

when elephantiasis

finally subsided.

The foot was

the right size,

then, so was I.

Summertime when

the sky is grey

and the beach and

the water are denuned

of any aspect, but

it is hot,

cannot tell if high chroma

ices are when one wants

or deep recesses

where the sunlight

had not reached yet

that day

and the damp of night

and cold of earth

heart awaited.

Trenches

If long suffering nascent wounds

really effected your decision

I think we could both live by that.

Old domesticity where being acerbic

was meant to affect affection, or

contentment turned to anxiety over time

then to comfort in being their own

horrible selves with each other

and not worrying about it.

I was stupid for saying

to see what was actually there

and then not see the lack of a root cause

to everything bad

that had happened.

That if there was water in the old trenches

those trenches were prone to holding water.

the Same Patrick

Then appearing to see how children see.

You are an infantilizing monster

though the chest is good. How

all of the properties you were embarrassed about

I reveled in. The countless tent-

pole pores and skin slung between them.

How is this gizzard flesh not repellant?

But even if not wizening under the clothes this:

say you are a totally average kid who

through literally nothing but inaction

fell into intramural football in your

freshman year of college

and got huge. But not quite like that.

Say, you, muscular and pert

though not at serendipity's sake

but hard work. You were a not

unpopular camp counselor all summer

(you never did this, my loving was contingent upon it)

and suffered Exodus-like bug-bites

and sun burn, but grew long sinewy muscles

and your forearm hair went from black

through tawny to golden. Ebullient;

verdurous; less knowledge but for res verum.

Decorous deltoids, whether you slay the eye

or string the soul up from the willowy

tendrils of an old Yew and all the arils fall off

the thrushes will know what to do.

I'm Feeling Sleepy

Remember when somnolence

was a way of life?

and awaking on the train

but somnolent happened?

Damien, I love you.

I don't know if I love you.

You are a luciferous bitch,

persistent as faerie lights

—and those pins

to keep the attention span long.

The lake house was underwater,

required so much maintenance

was the only place where

temperature-appropriate shorts

could be worn, in the summer.

The obstinate ponce

would not get out from under it.

Ever. Strongly considered

moving everything out at night

and leaving the soporific shell

for the bank. But didn't.

To the border of noteworthiness,

it was Michigan, after all.

Manipulating the old dials

with your fingers. I could not

lift myself from the couch.

As if I had a Giger count,

had already given in,

given over many of the

properties of life

to a series of machines inside me

that were

themselves ariot with malignant growth.

The insertion of plea,

if impassioning could be raised:

Do you have any idea

what old vellum is like?

Pount

if the blunt mallet could be raised.

Anaphylaxis

What do the high-chroma accessories do?

Wristwatch that is so much powder blue.

Bristolian, it seems; though that is late

and late is late is late.

Festooning where what bends breaks;

after repetition, you understand.

And missing a week is missing a lot;

constancy of love is nearly exhausting;

hard to handle, desperation

for nutriment because man cannot

life on a single sustenance for much longer

and being that one food;

delectable and chlorophylic though it may be

now nearing it brings anaphylaxis.

You and I are like two articulated

figures just posed like this

—and not thinking about an external

authority that may've have posed us like this—

and our arms are not moving.

Ball joint impacted, whatever corroded

orbit maybe mossy, and the moss

gets into the housing. You are like one thing

and I am like the other.

Summer, 2010

Pretty sure constancy,

lifting up fingers.

Discovering how long

the nails are

when they leave half moon grooves

in the left palm again.

You are an old friend, nausea,

moving backward real slowly

searching with your flat ass

for the horizon of a chair on the horizon.

You are increasingly young

or I old.

The chest is where it all is.

Nostalgia turned

to a fissile beam

of concussive force.

Someone

from a group of kids

in the public housing playground

threw a rock at my head.

Which is fair;

it's been a very hard, short, life.

What the open-toed shoe knew.

What the littler disparity meant

(not much, in the long run).

What the sun-ride disappointed

in the sickly arc that not so much rose

but skirted the horizon all day

and then dipped back below

at night.

Gay Bashing

Just wishing that the dead kid were okay,

as if survivalism were a sufficient way of life

and not the beating not

the living. Rot;

figurative moral decomposition

but thats not legislatable.

•

Age mellows;

makes one less willing to change

but less affectable.

Makes one say

"This is my boy," and

"Away or do not;

it makes little difference;

just do less,"

and less is done.

Maybe there is a new disease involved;

maybe one has been watching Lynch's Dune

from a bed all day.

Falling in Love

"Reciprocity!" as much

as "Sanctuary!" ever was.

In A Warning Bob

Creeley is saying

"All that I need to keep this going

is for you to conjure a little desire;

or I'll conjure it for you!"

•

The hug, in which indigo rubbed off

a little bit,

that urea mess

is a hard nut to crack.

Summer, 2010

Bricks radiate heat

at night

•

Winter,

now as much as blight.

Acumen

as much as not.

•

Livery lifted

from the affect

and plastered on the side of a boat

twice, once

and then once again

as it is falling off.

•

Thor's Day, you

are a mythical disappointment;

florid in the motions though

stumbly with words.

I am a broken man;

you must know this.

Your Boyfriend

Your boyfriend took Jethro Cave

very, very seriously.

He may still be sixteen; seventeen?

Apperances; a rip in the jeans.

This is not a poem

about your boyfriend.

Shakespeare

Some hundred Earls' of Sandwich

new requisite: sestinas of devotion;

though stoically delivered by a

squire—in the squire's own hand.

That new UO sundress

is insufficient

bitch.

the Closet

If when just seeing you,

saw a flash of light by your chin

the size of a tangerine,

that was bright, but not

blown out, transparent;

does the light lilt?

You were a seventeen year old

and like belt and suspenders

doubled up

on hands in the pockets,

light blue jeans and a white tee-shirt

with the sleeves rolled up a little bit

to show where the bicep

comes in and goes back

out again.

Hats had to sit jauntily

on your head. However

dead to light you were,

insensate to facial expressions,

fictional; even.

Dancing up the woodwork

to the eaves,

everything is encrusted with

hand-chiseled scrollwork

of celtic knots,

labyrinthine braids,

parallel lines and abrupt stops.

And then looking into the closet.

Some places are thick with clothes

like in Wardrobe; but some are bare wall—

flash.

All of the things are behind it,

because it is maybe not

actually there, or

actually there by being in the head

and not the closet.

I am feeling faint,

however the flash feels.

This is not a metaphorical closet.

Watercolor

If the art of watercolor

were not a cenobitical

performance art, like

gauche; but not quite.

Restricting in the formal

purview like a haiku poem.

Do the best that you can.

Copperplate Etching

Copperplate etching,

you were never a

"photographic method,"

at all; being limited

by the minute imperfections

and their accrued effect

on pixelation.

Weft Thread

Weft thread,

you are the bane of my existence;

ruiner of my selvedges.

The art of turning modern

to the hand,

and all it's

imperfections.

Photography

Photography, you

are a moving target bitch.

Analog or digital, does it matter?

Does it's mattering matter?

Always second runner up

to painting, but wasn't worse,

just did less with less.

Black Wave

IF ACTUALITY WERE LIKE VIRTUALITY THEN IT WOULD BE A LOT EASIER TO GET FROM ONE PLACE TO ANOTHER

You are telling me that the internet is not real, and that we are real, as people, with physical bodies, on the actual Earth, which is made of mud and rocks and twigs and not just numbers being calculated however efficiently and however effectively translated to something approximating of the real thing-thing, which is not true.

SEABIRD :big dumb pelican.

There you are, plodding along the beach like something weighted at the bottom, but you are not a bird, you're a man who is known for being "unconsciously sexy," in a way that "transcends gender, really," really often. Really often. You pick at things like scraps of garbage, which is sad, at first, because it seems like you're really hungry, but you're not, you're just bored and it is very hot along the beach, and your jaw seems to be twitching, or something.

the Demise of Herrick

Last month

when you tore Herrick's throat out

I supposed that you crossed a line,

may've had to leave Windsor Terrace

stay with your cousin in Blighty

until the heat cooled off.

But then not, and then one

took Siegfried's sanguine life

from two throat holes and so revealed that

he'd been dead for a long time,

since 1800 something some said

and though fabulously well-connected

not well loved. But a philanthropist

who took a gay lover

and loved him better

into penury, threadbare, for the ages.

Embarrassing Moments of Realization and then Trying to Reconcile That New Knowledge

Small bottle of Svedka, empty;

talismanic of it's consumption

out of reasonable proportion.

Lifting up the internet in one clean and jerk

as if it were something illicit

and needed to be moved quickly

to a place of camouflage

where a complex architecture of objects

is an accidental mess

of film canisters,

resumes,

sketches of the legacy tattoo,

red yarn

affixed to pushpins,

charred metallic debris,

pomade,

bits of fur

*

How when the treehouse fell out

of the nook in the low-slung branch

you teetered on leaving the children

to fend for themselves,

but didn't

for pragmatism

and whatever'd gone on before.

J. Stineman

If aesthetics would visit violence on men, then
it would be a moral imperative.

If sweetness were just a matter
of enough roushing and appliqué.

If the wrists that the vivisectionist
worked over with scalpel and elastic

in the pattern of vined-growth;
a filigree of one thread crocheted.

A ruffled bodice, and the white
forearms and fingertips.

Incidence of the New House

Locus of all these boxes
striated with what energy
would look like.

Bathroom is still sepulchral,
front gate a porticulous of white hot rage
and disappointment.

Being on the edge of something
moving backwards slowly
which was a container ship

of inborn possibility
wrought with gilt rivets
and platinum D-ring tie-downs.

The bedroom is like being inside of a mouth;
Felucian and probiotic. What,
seriously

has happened in the past two days?
The well pen that always overran,
left

the fingers slick and black,
Rorschached about the page;
is drying up.

The alcoholic teenage daughter
is a fictional character and
lives in a new house;

lightning divines its way to the roof.
Electricity elicits the dead
to wake up.


*

You are not the center of a devastating microburst
though it is eclipse dark out.

The primacy of the internet
bottlenecked through the long weekend

and into the next week.
Seems like the world is ending

or, really, did end recently
and all expectations

for what life may have been
adjusted notification

to come less frequently
if at all:

it had ended.
Even the most altruistic desires

juxtaposed against blackness?
against an undifferentiated field?


*

Infection rate of the new spouse jouisance
is around 100%

until the limit of friends friends
who received you warmly

with waiting, cavernous spaces
and hard wood floors.

the Itch

However much back and forth play it had
the plague ravished both of us.

You, wife and kids, presumably,
and through crossfire at school

or strife on the grain bus over
a few hands of cereal meal

they die. She grows full of ennui
in the black felt tent in the backyard

for grieving, or something like that.
Me, everything virulent with blight;

say, mother dies, grandmother dies,
house burns to ash and melted plastic by roving meth heads (no reason to avoid the ice now!)

Snow can fall on the ashes,
night can fall on the ashes.

The whole fucking thing can be
perforated! Lets not talk about it!


*

So photogenic that it's the point.
Having read Broodthayers, knows that

superimposed time-stamp takes precedence.
Is it possible that clemency was a big Judas?

loved Christ, really loved Christ, but
couldn't reconcile the worry for everyone else.


Not taking the right thing night after night;
best friend material: works at a gay pub,

has a Yashica T4, lives on
cigarettes and tall gins and regret.

Watched Quadrophonia and he
read from "the Perks of Being a Wallflower" aloud.

Ended the friendship when the fun ran out.
Cut the hair myself and put the neat clumps

into a brown paper bag, because
was so scared of making a mess.


If we cut all of this out I would say "There's useless compositional space on the right." You'd say "That's where the ads go."


*

"Something I can get behind
every four years," as long as not Man. U.

Department blighted, denuded
of people the whole week.

Carrying 'round the cricket bat,
dropping it into the palm and picking it up

while the hair grew out.


*

Like what St. Scott's knave would be like
if the Anglian friar had been canonized.

Tree squirrels and the common vole
would vomit up his drain spouts.


However persistent the rain may be
(and Calvinizing) if an explosion

of calm face, and all the children
in the vicinity died,

or would not have enough to eat
and would surely die later

Cathlio-Anglicans would be like:
"uh," and would think "Prince Valiant"


*

There is only a year left.
What had been a Colossus of flesh

flailed in the night, because of the dark!
bit the nails to the quick, dyed the increasingly transparent hair

bright blue, died it black,
bleached the damn thing out overnight

then died it back. Believed
in science-fictional socialism,

believed in real love, stopped.


*

There is a door that is never open.
Your exotic German boyfriend

bought you a banana stand and fruit bowl.
Took the train into London on the weekend, or flew there.

Then he was all "Sprockets," black
cigarette jeans and french cigarettes.

Increasingly dug the dark arts
and bad Kraftwerk. Hung an ax

over the bed. Moved to London,
fell into the wrong crowd of Giger enthusiasts.

Ended up kissing pigs blood into your mouth,
thought he'd try out being a redhead;

thought there was hope of pulling it out.
He got into crochet and it ended.


*

Sunset, after the sun rises after the last day.
I'm apocalypticisim tonight.

"And death will be their girlfriend."


I have a new tattoo of a melting treble clef
on my calf. It's like a cross of Times New Roman and demi-bold Bondi,

fat didone finials like teardrops


I'm wondering where the dead guy
in the mint green jeans bought them.

There is a lot of blood and I am indifferent to it.


*

These boys,
openly homoerotic,

being penetrated twice
in the same orifice

which is less stoic giggle
into a white lace handkerchief,

less strong silent type in the back of the bar
watching the watchers,

less equivocation when asked
what the wife does.

Any chief officer
would do this

over drinks with the Chinese
venture capitalists

because "what do
the Chinese think?"


If this were 1942
you would have rickets

would not be allowed
to enlist in the U.S.,

get a tip from the recruiter about Canada
and not go there.


*

Putting the thing to sleep
for the umpteenth time,

getting it all wrong: drink
is not tonic that makes

the future happen farther out.
Bingeing on television

is not the Universal Soporific.


Speaking of death,
when the whole house

is covered in white sheets
and only is penetrated by thoughts

something animated is projected
onto the living room couch

from the outside;
like Akira

or All Dogs Go to Heaven.


*

Tells himself "this will be a whole lot of fun
if you can just shut up and enjoy it,"

thinking that friction
caused friction initially.

Remembered everything wrong,
found new evidence to support it.

That blood trace led far and wide,
consumed his many twilight afternoons

in blog posts. Confirmed his greatest fear
that life was worse and hand't changed;

he still loved him, maybe. Though
that in that world of all things

a defect began. The streaming
video feed often went out.

Justin.tv support was no help.
"No account with that name exists,"

or is listed.


*

Sucralose,
your pound for pound dynasty,

often,
almost every single day

would demonstrate thinness
and be less saccharine than saccharine.

I promise that I will lose
one hundred and sixty-five pounds

by beach time.
My love, I want to be tender with you

but will trick you for the sugar.
I will put you into the batter with bad eggs

and throw the whole lot out
until theres nothing left of you.

I will call the house so you
cannot see the number and avoid it.

You will answer the phone and feign static
when you hear my voice.

I believe in static.
I believe in Conan,

who said "If you work hard
and are nice good things will happen."


*

This choreography
of finery cascaded

like
the first time I fucked John Brooks Lycanthrope

silently
then with murmured protestations.

And he feyly watched Guffman
over a shoulder,

covered in that sweaty lubricant, sated
the itch.

What Damon Albarn would be like
malnourished.

Chain smoked cigarettes
with the pout-lips of an affected fish.

Moved quick
from the contraposto pose

to the lilting, hurried gait as though
betterness were a block further.

If Damon were taller, thinner,
with hair always plastered to the increasingly overlarge forehead.


Have confidence, young John, your way is wrong but not your body.



*


Nut
into the vacuum's tube attachment.

And he, who like that spunk will
just away.

Just. No further action required.
Belaboring the point misses it.

Labeling the joint "Cherry Bomb,"
or "Three Hundred Thousand and Twenty Koosh,"

is like childhood, all over again,
meandering from here to here:

the cursory preparations for scaling K2,
getting the acrylic paint tubes out

to find that the caps are all paint-glued shut;
cutting the bottoms; wasting most;

eating a little cobalt blue (by accident)
when covering the whole face.


*

Me vivisectionist
you jew.

Someone else
as little Roma girl.

I took Bakis to heart
and harvested haunches

from a toy poodle
to affix to your forearms,

(like the ancient Sumerians before me
dreamed of doing with their flinty knives,

or the ancient Romans
with their brass ones)

all the better for watching
you flail in the water.

I have prepared the Proust questionnaire
and an array of eye-changing dyes

to use on your childhood
—not all in errantly farcical bouts,

not as some capricious lark
for a childhood dream

coming down the mountain!
but nosology;

seeing if I can make me better
—if two hearts are better than one for the running,

if the condition of your tribal race
can be weeded out post-partumly,

if there is a way of making an awake boy
into some sort of man-automobile

with wheels for feet, who
does not run but rolls,

to find the gene that I have
and strongly suspect that you lack;

even unto your ruination;
even if they call me "vivisectionist."


*

Finally, to have stripped you
down to the dhoti,

to liken likening
to a new and final introduction:

"Hello," maybe "My name is Tyler and
from the first time I saw you on the opposite train platform

I loved you. Or did not love
but noticed the 'Queen's Own' boots."

"Hello back. I'm intrigued by what your love
of me says of me."

"Love was the wrong word."
"The noticing, then."

"Noticing." Then a proud people;
then fear; then it does not matter anyway.


Though, on the other hand life was alright.
ATMs did not put the tellers into breadlines

just lessened them in number, gave them
a paperback book of sudoku to do—

even in the downtown branch of a large bank
on a Tuesday afternoon, like two'o'clock

when the afternoon is wearing thin,
when one is jonsing for a Diet Coke with lime

and the other conversation. One is reading a book
and one is wishing that they had a boyfriend.


Wonder, that.


Open the door and push him back out.


Standing, so, erecter though the gait is borrowed,
moving deftly through the ever-growing crowd of people quickly.

Sucking in what is left of the gut
so hard the back hurts.


Remembering the beige boy
who lived across the street in dungarees

when you were young. It was 1974 then,
your mother had a green crystal bowl

on the buffet, an ashtray of the coffee table,
an ex-husband grifting through the southwest.


*

How to move up subtly
from death over the Rhine

and a stainless steel bowlful of ham brains?
It is some dangerous but necessary WWII.


I have hidden an old tin of peaches
to surprise myself with

and when the agony is not scurvy or gout
but gas and the blood flows,

the olfactory begins and cologne goes:
indignant happenstance, pangs,

a trifle, noteworthy, not noteworthy.


*

Your tee-shirt
has a line drawing

that's a thin man
from the waist down

in his underwear
with hairy legs.

I do not know
how or why what that dregs up

is the second beige coat
of paint on the penis.

When it's used it flakes off
and more beige paint

is underneath.


*

"I think I am still depressed."
Not even enough to break a sweat.

Like, say you are doing your pushups
and squat thrusts because you are still twelve.

That you, maybe, have a gym membership
but are afraid of going to the gym for whatever reason,

maybe you over-intellectualize everything
and people get exhausted and concede the point,

or maybe you are too quiet, or whatever.
So, sweating into the threadbare gold couch,

dedication to the point of loveliness.
Long striated cliff face to the point of loveliness,

because it is a stoic bitch,
has watched over New Hampshire for these long millennia

(even before he was recognizable and thus cognizant
in the minds of those cunts).

Held himself up through inertia
(he never moved).

Just grew smaller all the time
in the x-axis.

Grew down for want of staying up,
fell off, on account his own weight.

Died in a quarry.


*

And then doing grand romantic gestures
is a thing again.

In the open field,
where dedication to the point of loveliness

means kids are off the table,
you not running a theme night at Miss Demeanor's

is out of the question,
anyone can buy anyone anything:

you have had a long day at work and Rick
who speaks for the sales staff

has been in or around your office each day for a week
with his stale coffee breath, his promising anything

to the posh pricks from Merill Lynch,
and his overlong tie tucked into the brushed stainless steel Target beltbuckle,

a trait you found endearing and fashionable
when the Dos Equis man from the Sartorialist tried it

but is now passable for treason.
I could arrive home from my long day with two Volcano tacos

in a paper bag.
You, reflexively inside your head could do the same thing

and when I got home equally tired (though this is not a competition)
and saw the Taco Bell on the kitchen table

heard you undressing in the bedroom,
the Empire Strikes Back playing in sync

from all the screens in the house,
could say "Of course I bought you the tacos I love

and you are so so on. What more important
could I give to you." Or something like that.

I could buy out the whole girl scout
of cookies, could construct a large fort with the boxes

over the concrete bowl where your keys go
so that you could not miss them when you got home.

I could, upon meeting you for the first time after a long absence
say something like: "It has been a long time.

You look well," and could smile.
You could be "…nice. I look nice."

And I could refrain from saying something like
"No. I mean you look as though you are well. Like, you are in good health."


*

There is an organic pinwheel
that is almost like a nautilus shell

cut in half; intricate spiraling white
like bone: like flesh in the way that

light's dispersed inside it, all inside
a delicate encircling O ribbon.

Some things are engineered to catch the wind
and turn despite their windsock/weathervane appearance.

Like the pinwheel thing which seems like
air would pass right through it but

instead turns.


*

How could luck've
coincided with me so much?

First having the most desirable thing
to steal; so much that hiding from the friends

was like second nature, (so much
jealous anger: a surfboard

with two wet papayas on it
glinting off the Junesea to some

southerner Pacific, while one
is mired in beach sand

in a less fashionable area of La Jolla)
to giving up on second nature out of hunger.

To being in the gunnel
where something newer's more desirable

but not better.


It'll all go away soon though
accounting for the poorness makes the riches.


They are making a new Mac store
conditionally contingent

upon improving
public services.


*

Recreating Felix Felicis
as if it were a real sauce;

good times in a little crystal phial
like golden syrup in ample portions.

cowling the ice away by thought


*

Not at all difficult to distinguish:
one too thin, and

suffering distention of the belly.
One robust chest

and arms like the twin
barrels of a large gun

in a tank top;
in the sun,

virulent as ground cover,
prancing as playfully

as though those photons
were made of everclear,

overdone and genuine.
One awful with hard work

though maybe stumbly
with words.

One diffident toward motion,
though an accomplished sophist

in a mire
where the essence of youth is all that is left

but gone sour
and turned to affectation.


*

Chintzy furniture of thought
that the mind made up.


*

How when the treehouse fell out
of the nook in the low-slung branch

you tended the weeping children,
laid with them in the grasses

and in a hushed voice
pointed out Horlogium,

Camelopardalis, and the Lupus Majorum.
The inverted dark and flinty dish

was disastrous
even beyond what as small kid can imagine—

but made tumbling
tolerable.


And that harlequin appearance
where each bit shows a different depth

as if McGinley lanked in
and did an infectious patchwork of youth.