Unacceded

Seemingly as simple as
finding you in the forest
full of apple blossoms.
You are a nude bitch
there ruining the white
petals.

Having you then, were I
to put an Ambien down
your gullet, it being
the only damn way to keep
you euphoric and me placid
I'd be

unacceded.

Salt

Despite no lack of salt,
residueless; and there are
basically millions of salts.
Cars kicking up white clouds
of the stuff, and is so not
wet. We could be salinous,

me chemical, you uncontained.
And if the thing were not
porous dispersion would not
be an issue as it has been:
just you gone, me dun
caking the beakers bottom.

Motility

Shin splints
from awaying
so fast as
to use all
muscles
of the legs.

Even it is
over the long
days hence
invariably.
If boot-strapping
is what they say

is what was
here always?
A complex
system of
locks holds
the boat only

with water.
A million
cillia feet
would but push
and would strain
for the bottom.

Pre-dawn

And I too am tremblin'
out the vintages of morning
stiffness like a cold and
anticipatory horse would be.

They will call us both steam
nose as we jangle to the
party green, not knowing it
is still early morning.

If night is a reveler, pre
dawn.

Sleep-motion

If I were a Lincoln scholar
and you a research assistant
working on somnambulism; and
suffering from it! you would
call for a damn beer of what
-ever variety and deserve sand.

"Oh my," one may say, "your
lips, mighty soft." This corpus
corpses, lips soft from
too much fluid. The trick
of sleep-motion is more
figment for the wishing.

Embetterment

I am hunched over
in my garage-bedroom,
shirtless, knowing
that if I had a television
show starring Cole Mohr
I would be further
than halfway there.

a Very Large Urn

Fairer for the distance
the sea's face. He
hates you very much, grows
distant, rounds the square
peg, eventually.

Scribbling old pen
nubs up to your face,
loves as much as sea
in going hates; bites
the metal back in kissing
in indifference, ink; cheek.

This is some cold tattoo. When
you are a dead bitch bloated
in the water, a very large
urn would seem wonderful.

Bad Photography

Articles of clothing
scattered on the hardwood
would seem novel
if everything were novel.
It seems a shame that
silver particles and knowledge
of cameras from Maplethorpe
to Terry Richardson
should coincide with lack of thought.

Age disregards this.
Our rooms disregard this.
Painting here surpasses.
Things on the carpet and concepts.
Wishing that misanthropy
were lovers, wanting
to walk the dark streets
and being tired of the night
and scattered articles of clothing.

Salt

Encroaching
on where dreams die in sawdust.
It is a real place. Saw
dust is absorbent, life
wet. In barn
a bloody nose would be
analogous, if you were
packed in salt and were anemic.

How could finally
losing the limb and repatriation
be better than this? Does
each limb not need
an artery for bringing oxygen
and taking out the lactic acid?
Every barn day people seem
more eager for the salt.

the Intention

Ingredients broccoli
artichoke hearts
I bought
with the intention
of making
a pizza
but was
so tired.
Ate green
curry and
rice from
a box.
Went to
bed at
ten o'clock.

My Breakdown

And for my breakdown
none not.
Fear
of the severely steepled
roof and what to do with it.
Mome
nts in collection, less.
Things getting out of hand.
Is this mark evidence
of cleaning or of trying
to frantically force
dirty fingers through
the white wall?

News

Thank you
for pointing out the shortcomings in my reportage.
I knew how yellow the tears were
and went on with them anyway,
turned the tears on and cried right through anyway.

If the girl were my girl—
no. Any of the blood-curdled bandage-holding.
I worry of razor-burn. On my genitals! How frivolous is this?!
I worry about making a good pizza, and
about giving my friends the pieces of it
and how all the gifts I could give
my mother would never be enough

or father, for teaching me to shave.


The small widget of this audio
clip, not even a whole news
story, but part of a news story,
so discrete; disposable
if in disposing left the hard disc,
doesn't; but is integral. I think
it is integral.

Still Early Days

Is to ask tantamount to
wringing the kids' necks?

What is over the next ridge
is also before it, apparently.
A scattering of dead kids'
parts and ridge things.
And we in this, trudging,

are trying to make a small
concerted statement
in honesty like: "I loved you,
once," or "Even through
everything is dead, we

last," but comes out
as "Always," or "I
am still very sad
about this after
a long time."

There are so many of you. Things seem to have changed. I'm waiting.

I am waiting for you, holding two coats, this is stupid.

I see you, I think. And there again I see you, I am certain. THERE ARE TWO PEOPLE IN THE LOBBY WHO LOOK EXACTLY LIKE YOU!

You are getting closer and closer to me; standing against a wall; nearer, inspecting a blood-sugar meter and insulin pump? (I don't recall you diabetes); sitting on a bench and stealing the odd glance at me and then not, drinking a bottle of Evian, who never drank your water flat.

You are both circling the information desk waiting for the free hours to begin (are you not still flush from selling your majority shares of the Corporation at, presumably, the exact right moment?).

THREE! You also have just come from the gift shop. You are on the bench, eyes and lips as pouty as the time I kissed your wrists at your grandfather's funeral. Right in front of everyone.

Now you are all gone.

Is that you holding the green Panda Express cup? No it's not.

I have received a small grant for the inability to let things go

There are many things that I should have studied during my tenure at art college. Architecture, color theory, the imbibing of smoke, grant-writing, rationalizing the decision to attend art college to my parents and not least of all myself, contemporary photography history, how to lance a clotted bruise under the skin of my left thigh, how to make and eat pho from any of my many new vietnamese friends. Altogether, the detritus of these things, or of the things learned accumulated into the corners of my bedroom (the Norton Anthology of Aesthetics vol.s 1 and 2 of the Third Edition that I cannot, for the life of me, resell; packaging materials that before the advent of my near-constant drinking of red wine that ensued post-graduation may have been valuable, if not for creation then at least for the increasing rarity of brown corrugated paper). And I can recall a time before John said that he could never imagine having sex with me in the bed in my bedroom (which he eventually did with the selfsame truncated aplomb with which he did all things; sex, acting); in those days I imagined a small public arts organization that focused on marginalized populations and targeted arts-advocacy to verite difficulties in the lives of people, and then I realized that this would not actually be an arts organization but a non-governmental organization and that art was a wholly secondary means to the end of embetterment and that it would balm the wounds, maybe, of discrimination or distract poor black people. And then I realized that neither art nor poor black people were very important to me at all.

Their Domain

Birds in the dark knew
by a spotlight lit, that
one, two, three aums
an hour is enough.

Or three ohms, that
the flashlight slew
over the deciduous
mayhem of night

in upstate New York.
In springtime! Doors
made of wire screen
between their domain

and the inner one
still alit with larger
bulbs; still alit and
growing brighter

from the aviary, dimmer
from the kitchen.

Tyler David Sherman is Still Grinding It

Ashleigh delivered me some platitude sincerely about not necessarily being better off without Patrick but deserving something better than grinding my face into a brick wall, not finding a fleshen one, and still grinding it.

Eventually any leftover happenstance looses it's flavor, fades into white threads holding the most distant corner together. Dust settles. There is a blurry, furred hatching of this happenstance; a somnambulist serendipity that's stopped paying attention to the brisk touch (shiver-inducing by thought) and focused instead on the objects in his house. One can only be killed in poetry so often.

And this, too implies a sequence. 1. Falling in love from a distance, 2. Shortening that distance, 3. Sublimating that distance and looking back with as much as looking forward did.

Wyatt

While it was slow at work I took up a pen and made a list of what I want; all of them were men and you were not on this list. I was feeling lissome and had sore spots on my face and the list went like this: 1. Aaron, 2. Brent, 3. Rahul, 4. Kennedy, and there were a few other names on this list too. This list was composed in descending order of want.

Often times I will return to the pastime of writing Roman numerals. This becomes mechanical. You wanted me to write them out of order and I am smart but not smart enough for that.

"This is all a fad!" you shouted at me at the H+M flagship store on Michigan Avenue. You needed new shirts and new pants, new everything, I may have convinced you to go. I abhorred the black and white too, and thought that the colors were pallid or sallow, but that was not the time to tell you, indeed I knew it was no time to tell you anything at all. Now, had I brought a book along and stayed up in a corner reading it would have been 'the Virgin Suicides,' because I'm am now reading first novels. Then, I would have brought Umberto Eco.

Why has my penis become erect? I'd need a servile wire or a cattle prod to tame this thing. It is eager to become a parent for the reasons that a penis would; I would reconsider Wyatt.

Doctor Stabs Note

1. Life is simple. I develop all of these desires and am (I know how formulaic this is) disappointed. But how conflicting ideologies of each as this: all of the drugs, all sweaty lasciviousness in; and out, all food and disdain for the body and acceptance of polite differals and again food. We would've become an ascetic together, all fronts and mouth-holes, no eating.

2. Everyone is wearing the boots that hurt my feelings because you wore them and then dumped me, which at first seemed totally gnostic because however appropriate they may be, not for this snow. I increasingly galosh.

3. I am now making unleavened bread from cram flour and key lime juice. I am reading Anna Karenena and her wants seem reasonable. I am listening to a new disc of Gregorian chant covers of Black Sabbath.

4. And they pants in the boots! I could try this or equally I could go after a brick wall. I could make the little concessions and be your Japanese girl.

the Summer Project

My, how the butt resembles your butt. You, admittedly being of little consequence, but, come back here or are left here initially and are not carried away by the years.

Why was it your project for the summer to have me hate you? When my sister sent me a large box of ripe citrus you ate all of it? How did you eat all of it? Or threw the box away. Or gave the oranges to orphans, the limes to a superfluity of nuns and ate the lonely grapefruit. Or confused the box with something lethal and set it aflame with the zippo lighter we purchased togeether. Or, hating my sister (or was it I, yours) marked the damned thing 'Return to Sender' and kicked it to the curb.

If Edward Gorey were sitting in his house in Worchester at a desk and illustrating the HMS something, would love be in it? What, with the commonness of romance in films and on television, one should be immune to them. These years hence are conspicuous, the moments. Could these be years or are they moments?

We went to the Amy Adams one with Steve Zahn. You thought that he was attractive. "Baby girl," whoever would say, and then like the first real date—in middle school—when going for the hand the elbow comes first.

One Died

The sum of my own tears
has come to this, laying
prostrate over your casket,
the things pool up in the
satiny lace, having come
to your funeral to make
peace with the death of you;
the life I still live, though—

At no age could our
relationship codify relation.
Discrepencies, all, and,
like gravity holding the
distant planets in...what?,
still. Your parents are
crying. My parents are no
longer married, one died.