Last Account Activity Impulse

“_________________”

encouraged birds flock themselves

& you realize: they know exactly how they look

black holes in gray sky, granting permission

to look straight through to what terribleness lies behind.

the narrow threat of ledges is also invitation

we all want to eke out a purchase in the trying times

& a limit necessarily makes use of fewer, of

lesser, of shorter duration, or an unwinding.

if cement understood how much time it took

to cure, if all those cartoon snowmen

survived the mirror-stage only to

contemplate Icarus & The Doors

they, just like you, would revert to syntacting everything

into sentences like Christmas presents, disappointed in the

dearth of design possibilities, the uniform aesthetic of acceptable

patterns that, in the end, form no pattern but predictive cycles.

and that’s only the first emergence of what blank slates.

that’s the first utterance of the grafted tissue’s tongue.

that’s the whole ballet, the folded swerve, the poison apple pie.

that’s the way the depths plumb and maps unfold.

white canvas film screen hung on iron hooks

empty pale blue public pool it’s winter 1987

in the ballroom chairs stacked piles of folded napkins

parking lot litter in meaningless gust orbits.

sold a car to the neighbor’s daughter leaving for Atlanta

tutor former student for med school entrance exam

read all the no news & notice the new headline ethic

leave out the one piece of information anyone needs.

there is money to be made in the identity redaction racket

there is no time left to get in on the bottom floor of gravity futures

there is an assertive type-A jist in the marketing of tomorrow

there is ink even in the kindle, smoke to pull the fire out.

daily firmament sifting

winter demands a more percussive technique to unburden the sighs of their catalyst.

fixing a self’s location by the subjective construction of constellar symbology.

rigging the mechanism to predict the wind against a sea’s carpet pulled out from under.

sluice is more sound than tactile conception, but the salt won’t wash from the woodgrain.

zoological thought process to bring the grunting stiffs their comeuppance.

it’s the navigator’s peril into which we throw all of our collective fate.

pocket watches, the Styrofoam that keeps the cargo silent, untethered memorabilia afloat.

just

Emptied out bones of the smoker’s corpse lie along what looked like a trail carved by the subconscious. Were really fissures formed in the slow dissolution of well of just everything.

From great heights everything looks designed stripped of the shit we scatter from windows & from mouths & adjust the recording devices because distance reduces us to silent pockets.

Cess pools, military architect’s installations & gravel farms & reflective dish arrays & rainwater collection basins & great walls & w/out specificity culture is just an invention.

Every building is a clock running toward ruin, an uncoiling perpetual motion machine made of string, tying a web of words to our memory of what we had just said, then to whom, & why.

When we’re gone, construction sites will burn with their own fuel, vines along the lines will pull the wires free, string adjusting the spring, extinguished damp ruins of heroes’ pyres.

Just once I’d like to come home to full-scale reduction of municipal inconveniences, like dead deer dragged to the shoulder, trailing their spilled guts between McDonald’s bags.

We can, of course, talk about agenda items, but in every window of every house in every city in every major metropolitan area of every continent save one is a reflection of longing.

These days you can’t just count on the pinch-hitter coming through for you. There are contingencies to be considered, weighed against what? Some thought it doesn’t matter?

pools

Heraclitus said what

is the point of transgression

in the age of temporary sublimation

though what is clear from the get-go

is nothing matters to the stake-holders

more than who it is pounding the stake.

The frozen fermata we struggle to sing.

Substantial disclaimers precede the roundabout

bloodying a fist on the fractured glass smashed

out of school windows, street lights, the eyewear

with which we’d read the crystalline signs before.

Pools of stagnant water in the packed path’s ruts.

Calamitous discursion. Synapse like snapped elastic.

We just remembered to remember where what we put

was put, and now it’s just a matter of blind retrieval, screaming

when the scream sign’s held aloft, when the light blinks on to tell us to.

All the kids in the library are doing what they’re doing because explicit threats

make it a necessity, but aside from scuttling each word as it forms behind our teeth,

there’s not much to be done about the future; just thinking its name calls it into becoming.

rongs

So what if there’s water.

It’s how you shuffle your cards.

What I call feathering the eagle.

A wrong I’d ply on island shores.

Believing in some things, other than it.

Michael’s music cannot attach.

It’s a more efficient use of drive-time.

A wrong pinned on a map of rights.

Exculpation encourages the petty thefting.

The way the music moves is it moves the relative density.

Did you ask him the picture?

A wrong revealed when the unbuttons.

When expect melts serendipity.

Concrete moltings render the bird hard.

Finial cones the mahogany hollows, décor’s a horror.

A wrong attributed to the meddling class.

The low balance alert’s perpetuity.

Uncertain of the next dime, let alone dollar.

Well blinker keeps the sandstorm’s damage down.

A wrong betrothed to a worry or concern.

In fracturing my ankle, I add value to my dearer joints.

Halfing the halfs is proving a point.

If the box exists or not’s the question.

A wrong engraved upon the surface of calm.

Inscribed in a desert for only the satellite’s sight.

I think it was what had never happened that held us back.

Their animals will precede their parade.

A wrong reified in the night by electrical means.

A wrong we’d rather repress in the clay of unconscious.

A wrong alluded to by the progenitor of my malaise.

A wrong we’d reaped in the waning days of The Madness.

A wrong throttled by the thought of having had had her.

rulers

Mute the transients against the echo’s decay, it’s as if: All the sounds in the room feel out the walls of another.

Test the voice to throw against the thin metal membranes: We’ll curry favor & retune the sounds of former selves.

The engineer sits in a chair above the boards, folding. Hands around each of our open heaving chest cavities.

What products’re assembled w/ such delicate refinement? We are the slippery slopes of unabashed animal urges.

When in winter the hunger grows from pang to gnaw: Chart such similar seasons in one’s devotion to th’others.

I know, outside this office there exist roads, villages; Feel the effects of all those fingers pulling meat loose.

I know on the other side of paint, drywall, & clapboard: Arteries of distilled luxuries constrict the truest trades.

But he says again, sing into this microphone as if to say: What we celebrate tonight is just the passing through.

scripts

The stitch in my side since the great decision

wants its will to be known: while I skirt

the periphery, the center emptiness echoes

my footfalls. I eat a morning’s grey air.

These forms we sculpt with too-tender hands

or small infections fought off with just too little

a dose (so recede but not far) or hairline fracture

and their bare porcelain imperceptible pains.

The faint dopplering of an earbud’s leak

light as a bird’s talontracks in riverbank clay

hint at someone else’s interior world while

I sit & stitch & am stitched & sculpt, am sculpted.

The cardinal directions you asked about don’t exist

without the attracted particles and the shape they

want the world to be. The proper nouns to name

something made, but fabric tears, the clay pots crack

and the river floods only because we want to map

its riverbanks, build cities there, as if the particular

as if the wave as if the tempest as if the sun

could fix the moment, say it was finally done.

spines

I do not intend to tell tales out of school but in darkness one sees what one wants to see. Too many times we’ve been down this road, encouraged by the promises made by words.

In troubled times the bottom rises up to us & a river runs against another kind of current. Too many heads have rolled in the service of blind dogs barking up what once were trees.

The wars waged against sin exact a price but not until the corpses outweigh the munitions. If you listen to the radio, you’re only hearing the sound air makes when all the dust settles.

For once let the voices define what you are. Let the weatherman make your day’s shape. Let the filigree determine the wood’s grain. And let the data describe our histories for us.

It isn’t worth fighting to establish this fortress. When the morning mist clears, it’s just bodies and the papers that fill up their pockets with cheatcodes that make the game worth losing.

Underneath the patterns lies a changeling whose syntax parrots some external stimuli too ancient for you to even begin to translate. After all, no action can ever be spoken, really.

Sitting in brightly-lit rooms lined with books whose hand-tooled spines shine in gold leaf we don’t need to recount the hero’s epic tale of returning. He didn’t change. The book did.

Retrograde amnesia can affect every journey no matter how metaphorical or how spiritual. Looking back, we watch our salt statues form poems built from all these unproductive days.

steubenville (for Troy Surloff)

There is also this thing where

the summer before I was born

in a field just northwest of the junction

of routes 22 and 7, the sunlight fell

with an audible hiss on the fallow

reeds and hollow stalks of straw.

Inconclusive tools round out the nut,

strip the screws and crossthread the bolts

that hold us suspended in our own time.

I dropped out, felt the pleasure of a vacuum

in a gap where the world once pressed

heavily down on creaking bones that bore

its cankered and pus-wet weight.

The dog licks the bowl, the Ohio River

a runt, backwashes into road ditch and

septic field where the dead won’t lie long

enough to rot. We talk more, and hear

voices from the field through the dark,

walk toward them on soft-tipped fingers

but know the history, have tripped the traces

& finally lie back down, to wait for dawn again.

suture

To be just as one is

without a downward spiral

or the false muscle’s tightened serif

but to eloquently ferret

the brain, no, flush my eyes

on the horizon’s plane, and report back

without adjective, without subjective

without the walls of a conscious reflexive.

To be just as one is

is to be light enough to claw

an ascent up the glass walls

pour the tea to the cup’s rim

blip the throttle once or twice

but still the moans in the boughs above

sing no invented notes, but cartoons of notes

with a voice unwrapped of swaddling,

released from suture.

To be just as one is

in the clovered concrete day-to-day

splicing breakfast regrets with

the fog of quitting everything

again and rebuilding the same habits from scratch

so the sink stains crumple against the

squawking gutter pipes, the bones retain

the shape of the clothes I shrunk

in my haste to remove the traces

of what blood I spilled when I was another.

trapeze, as is

recall to mind a misheard good-bye,

recouping what losses end up costing

in the end almost nothing, unless you

value the time you wasted, balancing

on siding rails, waiting for trains that

never came, waiting even for winter.

say the words with mouth muscles ‘til

memory’s become a physical thing, a

well-practiced and deft flick of some

synapse, quicker reactions now even

at your advanced age, even with the

injuries scarred over with flat-press’d

creases in the manuscript, ink staining

what should’ve been histories, instead

are tweets, yelps, coughs into elbows.

practice accents & rehearse dialogue

to reconstruct that tremor’s unfolding,

to study the mechanism with which we

wear the stage thin, are bleached out

by houselights, peel off the mask then

the skin then the script, then the score

which’s a number, but it’s also a map.

probably you saw this coming, as you

waited, balanced, finding equilibrium,

vibrations rising through yr shoesoles

telegraphing what’s about to happen

to us, to this, to anything still as time’s

millwheel turns, etc., like a panoramic

background forever scrolling the life-

like life, the same tree reappears just

when you thought, finally, you’d made

it out, were getting somewhere, could

make it clean, no name & no script, no

accustomed silence to fill with signifier.

wind sculpts these ravenous territories.

smoke baffles the horizon’s definition.

on highways their painted lines’ll fade.

squalls of blips, pixilated drywall dust.

clear-eyed and tufted, the birds gripe.

an intrusion in a space-time continuum.

the solid waste management exercise.

that hold we’d had before losing grip.

the chalice, a dog bowl, rusted knives.

called to testify before the brokerage.

twining

There are some things

arranged against a wall

painted red in some setting’s

sun. There are some songs

sung along with by four or

more yellow birds blinded

by the nests they built too tall.

There are certain phrases which

in the uttering thereof prescribe

a new path, new trajectory

unknown heretofore. There are

instruments too delicate to measure

anything but their own design.

There are ripples, but still, that circle

their origin. There are traffic signals

forever marshalling the empty night’s

intersections. There are some suns.

There are creaks in this house caused

only by the pressure of time’s passage.

There are scrimmaging histories in

the veiny leaves. There are bits of food

stuck between teeth that can provide

nourishment and stave off hunger until

the crops come in. There is electricity

stored deep within the roots of ghosts.

There are headaches buried beneath

the pages, waiting to be read aloud.

There are babies inside the babies.

There are twinings, lopings, elongated

sutures that stitch our sleep to a leaking

memory. There are knots in the focus.

There are bloats in the bloodstream.

There are smokes in the backwash.

There are snows in the filmstrips.

There are fuses in the smolder.

There are lips that bleed curses.

There are groves of cheering news.

There are slogs within the frequency.

There are fortunes in porcelain.

There are ready bulls in the glass.

There are traces trailing the dustroads.

There are hollows in the graveyards.

There are lots of balloons below the glow.

There are solenoids in the shallow homes.

There are tourniquets in the breadcrumbs.

There are heaves in the ovens.

There are slatternly dresses in the chasms.

There are droves of hopes in the clearing.

There are withers in the ailing treeboughs.

There are clutches in the serpentine belt.

There are manumissions burning the stagecoach.

There are calliopes engrossed in statuary gardens.

There are roasts collapsing the ductwork.

There are arrogant rainbows bloated with tact.

There are foraging vowels blissed out on mood.

There are complex networks of concern on your skintone.

There are still buds blinking the winter’s weight.

There are blankets that broker this firestorm.

There are mucus webs where a spider skulks.

There are pillowglues.

There are Stratocaster rasps.

There are suicide spokes.

There are gratuity forecasts.

There are annealing pasture hasps.

There are slothful pulse meters.

There are roans in calico plaster.

There are housegoats.

There are chosen coughs.

There are slotted notches.

There are grailhooks.

There are builts.

There are props.

There are excepts.

There are losts.

There are closets.

There are quiets.

There are shafts.

There are drains.

There are ones.

writing to you

It is a stump that we’d shorn from the silentest tree. It is that coil of rope that lassoed our exhaled breath. It is the shadow beneath the clothes that lie beside the bed. It is the yawning doorway, the sound of unworried air rushing in.

It is the calendar of flesh in the days before we’d met. It is those meaningless rivers that bridges wish to span. It is the distant sound the clipped birdwings make. It is how sleep fills even a well-lighted room & blinds what sights.

It is the distortion of sun through a high windowpane. It is the memory of reading when the paper has burned. It is the shape of a movement unfolded over millennia. It is the place a car once parked, its emptiness inside-out.

It is the time it takes a joist to creak, or all the locks to click. It is the temperature of recently-worn winter coats. It is a sipped cup, a stirred spoon, crumb on the counter. It is the vacuous drag a body makes in its moving away.

It is the animals we feed that then live within the body. It is the words we’d imagine except for the fear of speaking. It is the nail clippings, the hair that sticks in the drainstop. It is the way the wood curls in the humidity of summers.

It is the rails & ties & the gullywashed gravel. It is the clock against the sun that creeps across the floor. It is the faucet dripping out a time that cannot ever be spent. It is the garbage & the refrigerator & the wet load of laundry.

It is the consonants that emerge from the vowels’ gaping spaces. It is the loss of high frequency comprehension in time. It is the difference between a rattle and a chatter. It is where a sigh becomes an audible admission of frailty.

It is here again but without being exactly the same as it was. It is now but with a history of calculation & strategy. It is a death that completes what’d lived without diminishing. It is beginning to seem even after I knew what I’d known.

wyandotte

It’s winter now and it’s cold, grilling opposites on the burner

to satisfy old cravings I just remembered from my childhood.

This house is whittled from elegant dust, which tumbles from

crevice to corner. Some howls and hums always grace my waking.

I remember bible stories from the cartoons, and anatomy

lessons I learned at the carnival, aiming darts at Farah Fawcett.

The griddle spits. Somewhere Lee Majors remembers his own version of things,

the pining vacuous stretch of teenage summers, of wandering his dead town.

He has a lot of questions:

What ghosts become when they die, and how to learn to walk again.

Affluent quarterbacks smile when the camera flash asks, but

the defensive back must at some point question his role in how things play out.

The long term, beyond the lighted clock that eventually empties the seats

of even the most devoted aficionados, requires a more expansive huddle.

But the questions remain, dog him at night, crease his sheets and spoil his breath.

Playing God only makes the earth flatten, forces the horizon to stretch out forever ahead.

your seat is hard

All of you are in front of this wall. You can see through it from where you sit. Do you feel the itch? It is the skin of your shin. The sock has made your shin itch. A man behind you coughed. You are worried that a germ flew into the air you just inhaled. You see me now speaking the things you are thinking. Listen to the hum of the lights. No matter how quiet the a/c is, you can always hear the air moving. You listen to the poets read from their papers all the time. Their voice, my voice, changes the feelings the words cause in you. Think of tour father’s voice. Then think of your mother’s. The sound of the NPR commentator whose name you forgot. But you can only hear my voice. Listen to the words you think I am saying. If you wanted to read a novel, you shouldn’t have come. You should be reading. Imagination is the process of thinking up sensations. Your seat is hard. Your nose has hairs inside that can sense the dryness of the air. Your ears turn red when people notice you. Your stomach growls. Your pulse is visible beating in your neck. You sweat, and your skin shines. People can hear you swallow. You blinked again. You weren’t listening. The microphone transmits sound by electricity. Your mind can’t follow the words but thinks of related things. It thinks of sex. It thinks of expectations. Thinks of: I’m going to stand up and walk, put one foot in front of the other, ask people to pull in their knees so I can get to the aisle. I’m going to walk to the back and not meet anyone’s eyes. I will put my hand on the door and push. Or maybe pull. There will be a sign. The difference between the air inside and the air outside. The air outside is fresh. There is sun/moon light. There is the sound of ______________. There are faint guts of clouds moving slowly beyond the tree branches. But your seat is hard. Your socks itch. Your nose hair shifts, and you want to pick it. And there you all are, behind the wall. I can see you from where I stand. I know some of you, but most of you are new people. New to me. You might come up to me later, and I will not know what to say to you. Then you’ll go away, and there will no longer be this wall.

the bronze age

Every day absorbed in tupperware plastic grows satisfactorily along cellular strata, trees sniffing a wind’s trace, the boat’s bob on specific ripples peeled off distant undersea indecisions. This is what we

came for, excused from our tasks by some emergent tumult, a lazy earth

not willing to meet the word “morning,” not knowing what to do about birdsong, not compliant with a calendar’s grammar, and not for nothing, but not for everything save a sentence to dig a root to. Scissors

we made from a flag’s colorway, cave painting the sitcoms while we take a data hit

straight into the mainline. Should all of this

be recorded in a faithful fashion, today is the sliver you jimmy from under the nail, pus flowing

to fill the vacuous cavity of how much I miss the scent or your skin, or the scope of another unspoken nest of silent strands, hopeless knots, the eye pressed against the microscope’s glass.

titled

I’m trying to remember the sense of forgetful ambivalence that what you were always saying you recalled mentally about that time, that one time when things had happened or’d been happening for probably maybe a lot longer than

any of us had realized they had or were, and even wasn’t exactly quite true, that something about those events of that part of our lives when all those issues still felt unresolved, and even then that whatever we’d been

working out — those long foggy mornings at the place just on the edge of what town there could be said to have existed in that country — was as yet still unrecognizable as anything vaguely shaped like even a compro-

mise, something about those events held the most ill- defined form of finality, but also with some hint that we were already well into the very first moments of some new beginning, like people from some far-off country

boarding some kind of vessel, or not even, just entering the station, or not even that but just opening a suitcase and wondering what to put into it, what to take out of the storage, what to do next and what had been done all

that time we were already there and so ensconced and yet also about ready to begin believing we could start planning the eventual steps we’d need to take in order to leave but without, certainly, knowing where or what lay ahead. In all that fog.

the company at the tree-line

Tired of monotonous, sloping skies, we turn our eyes to the ground and notice finally the footprints. Curved arches relieve the earth’s pressure, broken stems leaking the night’s dew. Heeled terrain scars us as we walk it. Irradiant phlox among the choked sewage spill. A body at rest remains at rest, a body as a series of forms affiliated with time. A body in motion is a body stilled by cloaked agency. He went this way, in some manner hounded. We turn our eyes to the dome above and mistake the canopy for something more distant, don’t notice the latticed girders and I-beams lacing our fate. There becomes relative. Distant gunfire beckoning the bored who’ve grown weary among the flowers. We track him through the night. Other clues describe his perambles. Circumnavigating the hillocks, pausing atop a knoll. What you want from those you know. What you got from a history of relatives. What you talk yourself out of in the midst of pious commitment. What you put in the pot to substitute for herbs you’ve invented in your head. A dremel to notch the tree trunk. Tie a ribbon around theology. The skirmishing leaves devoted to the breeze. The muddy footfalls we read through shadows and fernbeds, gently parting the underbrush so’s not to disturb the disturbances that mark the path forward we must follow. When we catch him I will slit his throat so help me god. Tired of what low-slung branches take the measure of how ill-fit we are for this terrain. Buttercup, mountain laurel, blackberry bushes, briar and nettle clog the company’s progress, swishing into thigh flesh as the mumbling shushes the doves above. Tired of birds we shoot them. Tired of sighs we slough them. Tired of typing we will disappear, the scent of a burnt powder the only reminder we were, once, near.

meanweight

Help hold I mean prop I mean

help sell I mean cough I mean help will I mean push I mean help calm I mean ease I mean help us I mean them I mean

help this gentle I mean this soft I mean help us glean I mean us dream I mean

help us to forget I mean we grow dazed I mean

help spectacle I mean intangible I mean help roach I mean crib I mean

help her and help him I mean

help them to fall through I mean true I mean

help swallow some dew I mean blue moon’s glow I

mean

help shallow’s the lake I mean wallow’s the swamp

I mean

help compass the range I mean sound the ground I

mean

help me locate my I mean echo the sky I mean

help I’ve lost my I mean where the fuck did I mean help is on the way I mean soft what light I mean help a down-on-his-luck I mean mean times is hard I mean

help cement to cure I mean stick in the mud I

mean help promise the premise I mean argue the

negative I mean

help we’ve all been there I mean no one gets out I

mean

help the wool winter I mean silk is the summer I

mean

help sketch I mean shade I mean help drill I mean dowel I mean

help jet the carb I mean pull the piston I mean

help cinch the stretch I mean pinch hit the slouch I

mean

help rout the roots I mean help ream the scene I

mean

help cut the carp I mean help shop the crap I

mean

help blow help lick I mean help cloy help scalp I

mean

help broil help blister help mean the flayed skin I’m in I mean

help meme the joke help pull the poke help plumage help vestments

help drivel help null set help flaut help molt help poultice help suture

I mean help hep help hark help hassle help hedge I

mean help help.

wait I feel train I mean I want glass I mean

wait I sent help I mean I get gone mean

wait it was def I mean he answered yes I mean

wait what gives I mean what hopes have you I

mean

wait will it burn I mean will nothing undo I mean wait gross I mean I hate the tough truck I mean

wait the bloke’s mad I mean gone mental innit I

mean

wait you haven’t heard I mean what’s to know I

mean

wait gloss the frame I mean freeze the flames I

mean

wait what I mean who the fuck I mean

wait the tables’re bussed I mean your hair’s a mess

I mean

wait the clap will come I mean the crowd’s a cloud

I mean

wait the laugh is cough I mean the brass is scuffed

I mean

wait we’ll go the route I mean we’ve sewn it up I

mean

wait she’s buttoned up I mean the jig is up I mean wait damn the bag popped I mean the rag top I mean

wait we got the crop I mean the bag’s a dope I

mean

wait for just a sec I mean the slacks’re soft I mean wait to stop the bridle I mean the top of her girdle I mean

the link in the middle I mean the foam finger dangle I mean

wait her clasp is caught I mean the fingers pop I

mean

wait we sing to sup and I mean clang the cup I

mean

wait in barstool slouch I mean the kettle’s perc I

mean

wait in the sitting room I mean I am a patient I

mean

wait I watch and wait for what and wait the scales I

mean

wait the heart and wait a day and weigh the dead I

mean

wait I mean fellate I mean to comb the cock I

mean

wait the barn’s a burn the rooster roasts the pig is poked

I mean wait with what, we wait with wit, but wait to go

too long I mean too late to make the train we mean wait

for your whole life for that big break but wait I

mean

wait the wasted days with waiting, let them succumb

to the wait we wait mean and meridian, the average wait

which breaks the back the will the bones and the rank

slotted wait shoveled under by the wait of graves where the ones we loved wait a while longer for us to

wait and then think weight.

wording

I don’t know what words you

I do not know what words you are

I can’t tell what words we

I wasn’t telling you words are

I want to know what words you

I was wearing words but you but you are the words I wore

but you wore the words we were

I don’t know what words me

I do not know what words I am

I can’t tell what words me

I wasn’t telling you what feeling is

I want to know what it feels in me

I was feeling words but I

but I was not the words, you were but you were what worded me

you were what worded us you wore the words down until we didn’t need to say what we were, and so are.

ode (for T. B. & B. C.)

Always the radio in someone’s story is suspect. Is it the same radio that played in my story? Did the same songs — Comfortably Numb, (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction, Sweet Jane, etc. — play at the same moment in the other’s story?

I mean this as a compliment, that I really enjoy

that what once was the loneliest moment

I’d known was shared by someone else also very lonely

probably thinking he was the loneliest person

ever in the history of the world, in fact sure of it.

And then, years later, to be united by the cliché of a simple origin-tale trope, like two birds

both blown off course by the same jet stream

but six states apart, and so small and light-boned and easy to lose in the glare of the sun.

Always the words in my head, like the radio, conscious that I’m tuning in, annoyed by the static to some common broadcast, thinking instead it’s narrow, and meant just for me, when it isn’t, it’s meant for us, broadly, and it is only our lives

that narrow the circumstance as we get older. But we are not birds and it’s no use pretending.

Can you make some mountains, or pretend to?

If I have a facility with words, it’s because the bulwarks against social anxiety were not well- built in my youth.

I have words, but none of them has me.

In the furthest reaches of intent, any connection I’d like to have been making is simply an occasion for convenience. We’ll still do exactly what we want to do, and remember what we want to remember about what we’d thought we’d been building between us, shifting in our seats as we whispered away the language we’d agreed to speak.

Still birds on wires or — you want me to say flit? — flocks that flit willy-nilly in the negative space of an October morning sky, it’s 8:09 AM,

and all I know I’ve folded into a note that I stuck under your windshield wiper on a similar morning in 2009, when lawyers spoke my name into machines, the capstans whirred, and slowly I rose to greet the clouds.

A new ending process wants its will to be known.

if it will have you

Chance will have you

put down the remote and

will have you linger a moment longer at the rest stop exit.

Luck will have you spend all day diving for

the gallant necessities of a solitary life through the singing rain.

Circumstance will have you place specific pressure on

those wounds that bleed most fervently right when you thought not.

I self-reflect a lot lately

a moon’s glow not the moon’s at all

just the misdirection of a gift meant for someone who could put it to use.

This is why hotels exist

in the space between towns.

This is why tailors reseam the shirts we buy at a discount, knowing someone else’s passion had ripped them in love or hate.

Conversation will have you state the obvious smilingly

will have you reach out an imaginary hand to part the curtain gap.

Writing poems will have you examine the electrical cords to invent a less-unsightly routing solution & end up hanging yrself.

Complimentary breath mints at the diner cashier station absorb the scent of desperate human need to redistribute it among the populace.

Footfalls and the radiant beauty of falling asleep in public grease the gears that turn the turbines sweep the streets of collective memory.

Closure will have you

recapitulate among acquaintances

learning when to stop reciprocal bowing gestures and get on with the fucking-over.

Performing those songs will have you

become again anew for another flock of acolytes whose definition gains another nuance in the already muddy stream of prescription.

Blowing the wad will have you empty sense from a syringe into the arm of market analysis speculators will supply crumbs to tongues.

Slipping a mickey will have you regain some high ground

from which the advancing decay of nation-building becomes increasingly beautiful.

Adjusting the control pots on the equalization circuit

will have you if you want it to adopting the voices of the listeners. I have half a mind to

make paintings of skyscapes

sand the floors to erase the stains of footfalls, blood, shirtsleeve buttons.

I have no confidence that what I hope will stay will stay in its original shade of vague shadow, a remembered scent

But a page is just paper and will turn again back or forward in the wind. It

doesn’t even need the hand or the eye, or the constant pressure of a letter unpeeled from the page.

numb frame/empty set

The emptiness of our South extends as far as we’re willing to let it. Spool out the tether, fields to be filled with personal financial information lie fallow in the low gray cloud-covered predawn quiet. Distant huffing of unhappy combustion. The blows come in quick succession, each one concussing a different brittle bone. A tightening in the brachial plexus numbs some nerves, preventing any coordinated defense. In theory, this vacuum should make my head explode. I have mislaid by helmet, my water-cooled underwear. In theory, your letters would reinvigorate my campaign, the words resounding in my head even as I hunker down for the next exacting volley, the chinks in my armor prolapsed, that raw and timeless invitation. Blood beckons the predators, and they understandably can’t help themselves. It began in the thumb, index finder, wrist then forearm, the slow syrup of forgetful nerves, until the ratio of sent signal to received perception tips definitively toward the former. Eventually everything I feel I create, and soon all I know will be ancient, will be the remnants of innate predisposition, muscle memory, genetically-directed programming incapable of learning what the new world needs, what a well-fortified foe invents on the fly. I’m reduced to strategy, when what the world requires is tactical adaptation. It’s important to stay hydrated. It’s incumbent on the subject to record his experience both during and after the procedure in order to provide practical data for the technicians to analyze. It’s crucial to the legitimacy of the test to maintain exacting conditions. It hurts to breath. Now I cannot feel my shoulder. The events recorded by the observers must be held at arm’s length until the data nexus can be examined by the specialists. Your co-pay has increased dramatically in light of the government shut-down. Non-essential procedures are not covered by the plan. Listen for their armor in the underbrush. The East is ideal for massing the platoon. My fingernails grow long, but I cannot cut them without discomfort. Atrophied callouses, a yellow tinge as the blood succumbs. I can no longer open your letters, the pages too smooth, dexterity replaced with frantic fumbling. Desperate to send a signal, I incant ghost limbs, but it’s no use. My inventions glimmer in the moon-light, but evaporate with each morning’s sunrise. The cock crew. The bloodflow. The clink just behind the forest’s dark curtain. The South we knew grown over, kudzu and the thin crinkling of aluminum beer cans. I fumble to sign another form, then realize it requires a notary. I cannot click the pen, cannot cock the rifle, cannot feel the trigger. Without consent of a close family member, I cannot leave the operating theater. Look West, imagine reinforcements, what uniformed squadron might provide air support, but all there is is what there always already was, just the tingling of these porous bones, latticework of decaying frame whittled away in administered apathy, the unmaking of a body proper. I have an imaginary head, I said, and the flow kept on flowing it out.

compression check

The hard write is the writing of the despised, the turning of the brush back toward the hand, the gaze of the eye directed convexly in, replicating endlessly the sensing of the sensor. Apathy requires a new verb tense, as does despair, its queer shape against the body in a bed. What’s broke will fix it. I mean, keep it fixed, pinned to the felt under gazing glass canopy, cool objective eye the new sun around which sadness orbits in mechanical reverence. I need to do the dishes, and the dishes need done. I need to scale the day’s wake, waves fanning out behind the slow hour’s plowing past, the shadowy creep we’d all rather sleep through. Fold the pants. A winter garden grows only deaf. A callous hand breaks everything it tries to touch. Severed nerve endings equal some new unfelt beginning, the absorption of the other, waking with one’s own hand’s touch, wondering who completes the feeling. What happens to an impulse detoured? Inscrutable bird shit spelling the window frame’s portrait of what a day looks like wasted. Plugging bullet holes with conjecture. Scrapping the junk to purge me of the clap. What dope dust flies when I collapse a couch posture. What chronic bought reveals about the tee-shirt militia’s inventory crisis. Despair reflects poorly. The despised person exists solely for the act, the transgression, the artifice of unfulfilled conspiracy. Despair absorbs not only the particular, but it cannot filter out the general. There is no abstracting hate — fertile soil denied a sun, an occasional shower, nitrogen, the tunnels of blind worms that endlessly nose for the rotting bodies — when hate has no center to hold. Despair blooms and blunts in the same gesture, the compulsive unbuttoning of shirtsleeves, say, or the tolling of bells, painting of paintings, signing of signatures. We can always ask questions, can always cock ears or poise our pencil tips a few centimeters above the ruled paper, or get stumbledown drunk and piss our khakis. One thing remains. Surface tension stills its descent. A circulation from one to what. From word to would. I can ask anything I want, and somehow I always start with did. Letting the verbs go’s my first suggestion. And blowing holes in the bellows is my second.

the sketched boat

Reading the connection is connection in the imaginary head. Spelling with fingers for the spoked of the mind. Felling what are logs floated down the pike. I conceal my intent with a jersey stride. In the well of the pause the conversation dries up. Only if statements will spell an end to this predetermined syntax. Exhaled smoke emptied of its potent truck. A house is a home for inert land-grab tactics. Twill swish against the gabardine rustle under the corduroy susurrus. A component of ferocity is feigned historicity. Hanged and dangled from the interstitial bridgework in a dead dude’s mouth. He’d got the clap at the close of the curtain, which was thanks enough. A pillow, a hangnail, a fro-yo, a car park, a kid’s skit, and a blow dart. Drowning out the sound with inverted flippancy. Worn-away wood where once the hull defied a sketched boat. Rerouting the speaker to play the microphone. Perception is a heresy against the sentient repose. Clacking in the typewritten alley, the detective ruins the ribbon. These dozen prisons generate enough revenue to hire another nanny state. Energize your capital with a burst of chin-up stomatism. However, duty might be another man’s pill-addicted negligence. Well worth gratuity equation to suffocate anti-rapture posi-traction. Thus everything’s a fiction nowadays.

mouthfuls defile the previous position

The driven mind sucks the sleep from stones curled all fetal under inadequate quilts

& afraid of what’s to think, gnaws instead

on the mechanics of how to speak, how to bleat,

how to bark and caw a muzzled jaw’s manifest of cautionary tales, archetype tragedies, cartoon plots that in the reduction boil away the distortion.

I’m leaving out the coughing fits, impulsive verbal tics, clenched blurts, retches and gags that double

one over. In the morning, before the sun’s come, residual traces of yesterday’s being coat the tongue

in a temporary tattoo of ruined glyphs, unreadable except for their broken ascenders, a litter of serifs forming new punctuation marks to halt

all subsequent speech. In this way, the dreaming tongue silences itself, denies new iterations forming

in the ruined web of whatever beings we’d been.

reverse engineered #1

when you do not know how to enter a room you pluck at strings instead of speak

when you grow a new row of teeth behind your teeth you leak from the ceiling and pool on the floor

when you bleed like light in the space of the sill

you precisely balance a thought between hope and dread when you combine a memory with what’s dreamt

you split a word into meaningless syllables when you cut but don’t bleed

you fuck but can’t cum when you blink but still see

you drive through the mirror’s view

when you bathe your body in rust and flecking paint you build a home out of your own shed skin

when you pull the string that pulls the tendon from the joint you do not know where the smoke goes,

it goes to the heart where it papers the walls where limbs grow lithe and fall away to flail,

it caves a roof with the weight of your past,

where skin absorbs the chemical color, to dry and slough away, it feels for the curb, the median, its own way home,

where the eye is the factory that builds the world’s façade, it desires the other & consumes the self,

where flesh gapes so the air can enter,

it trips the tongue, tricks the ear into some state of faith, where thought thinks ideas for once to follow,

it wages war for what could’ve been,

where a room becomes itself a plane, refracted into its various strata, it floors a porous host no good for holding you for long,

where mouth’s a maw that consumes its hunger, it harps a ghost with some older song,

where the room’s a cell where nothing goes.

last account activity impulse

if I asked what when

to search the sentences’

interstices for a silence

& if when what I said wastes of white space cordoned off a notion, blow by blow the prolonged light

marks each division with a hair’s breadth with a gnat wing, with a moment

when the shadow’s creep finally finds

the far wall, these most personal sunsets our own vocabulary of a life’s equating.

days spent are days lost

the balance of something half unspoken another word in its saying goes, a sentence an unwound string the bookshelf a sentence

the traffic a sentence

the scar on the hand a sentence medical history, cancelled checks, matted hair and foam pulled

from the constricted drain, archaeology of wasted selves we knew had other names before

if I asked how where

the city sky bleeds the stars out

the same way poems about poems slow the world in its modulation the stanza collapse reminds us what went where the white space now was.

italic will

I learned that the body is not my body, the blood through it not with it & not mine to poison dilute or spill, it wills its own poisons, secretes pollution into the brain and spills the tainted blood recursively, whenever, into whatever air I’d found to force it through. I learned self-mendicantion.

I learned the body thinks against what I’d have thought, resists the muddy language of the subject, makes itself master and exerts a will invisible and implacable. I’ve invented songs to sing in protest, have occupied its center, have thrown stones at what I thought was my body, and have learned that in turning against it, the body hardens, instantiates its being, reduces all pleasure to pain, all delicacy to shit, every victory to its own tactics, all battlefields to bloodbaths.

I learned to read in spite of its brute ignorance before I understood that everything I read it read over my shoulder, tapped the lines, steamed the seals open and turned the pages of my diary hunting for leverage against me. I would speak to it only to hear my own echo in its empty rooms, every sharp syllable dulled by its mute walls of flesh. I broke its back with words, but the words made it my back and added a burden for me to carry, a crushing load of senseless sounds.

There is no crossing the curved plain but the gradual chase of the unending, retreating horizon. There is no rowing against the confused tumult of current and eddy. There’s no quieting the mechanics of heartbeat, bloodflow, synaptic click. There’s only this hunting season, hunkered in the pre-dawn air, sights set and fingers too frozen to feel the trigger. There’s metaphor as quarry.

There’s a split in a life where the unwinding begins. There must be a name to imagine the line between where one color starts and the last has ended. There is always the body, carrying on its interminable task, and my head’s the parasite that at best annoys, will be shaken off, will suck the blood for temporary sustenance and then wither, be forgotten or not even known to be remembered, not even have a name but the fleeting word I tried to tie it to, only to know all this:

I learned the signs seemed like constellations from afar, I drew imaginary lines to paint pretty pictures in a vast sky that moves forever away from the fixed perspective of the minute and brief terminal point, the body the larger body that cannot be fixed, that has no time, was only thought.