Look at you
Look how you look
On that hilltop
By that meadow
Spatulating the exchange rate
With bees
Saved-up salisbury steak grease
And fried chicken gristle
From the ‘70s

Just look at you
Steve of Queens
Doompollening the lagoon 
Where the boys are
But the girls aren’t
Where shit happens in the real
And everybody’s dragging their spinning rims
Uphill for no good reason
So mouthy
A lout 
All chinos and cake
All boots on the ground
Trippin’ balls
And shit outta lunch

headless box turtle is in fidelity

with the spring ephemerals    rib cage 

of a water bird is in fidelity 

with the actualized understory   

congressional movement of the meat

body   least attractive stretch

of neck    violets creating 

a permeable membrane  (redundant but

necessary)   a developing 

flush of golden

oysters   who else has tried 

to clock what the hour was 

withholding    I will eventually

stop refracting but for all 

you know this

is diamond class 

the hairs stand 

even in 

full sunlight   

the blood 

loss is

all mine

no fight right no fight at all.
flagging. falling further from
any feeling. all of them. if
I fracture, is it fatal? if I freeze–
fetal? all these figments. these
finepoints, fragments, fists
of memory. I had fight once.
I had fervor, fury, the force
of my faith. I had belief, held
it firm. I felt I could fix things.
that my findings were full
and fair. friends were fast,
life would follow. all fine, all
fully formed, nothing forked
nothing freakish. this was
false. foolish. I failed to fear
default. fire fading, fields
fallowing. I should have
feared the fog. the flattening
of all affect. fecklessness is
our profoundest failing. not
fame, not filth, not ferocity–
indifference. fucking drift.

Everything changes         Deeper woods    To find wild        More secrets

Parties      In abandoned train cars           Drugs          Exotic birds        Extroverts      Bad tattoos

You left me       on the side of the road          I’m misremembering        I’m lying        A fight

You ditched the motorcycle           You ran       into the woods      We’re not       Kids anymore

I didn’t     Follow you       Asshole sometimes      Black leather jacket 

Me and an acoustic guitar          Can’t you tell I’m sensitive           When it’s convenient

Over-narration and disappearance       Word fumbles       Inarticulate sky inside out blue

Moss stained        with blood drops          Body dragged to       Edge of road      Almost dead

Haunted through and through          Reverential owls         Why owls         Owls      Always watching

Hooting ill-music       You shouldn’t remember      Let it go      It’s gone        Donna we need to talk

Does your shape
have little legs sticking out

appendages going nowhere
a goggled eye or crooked fin

a comb-shaped hairdo
or a bit of a saggy muddle

around the middle
or what?

Let that shape express
itself and relate

to the other shapes
on the canvas 

You can construct the shape
sharpen up its boundaries

build a little bridge
from one shape to another

• 

Thinking in mineral tones
& earth pigments

Yellow ochre dreams of
burning all the others

with her golden eyes
& her milky voice

Unlongingly she puddles
on a plate    She’s just 

sunning

blast it all. blast bruisers
and bullies. blast blighters.
before the bend in the road
blueskies were boring, but
I beg for blue now. I’d barter
my boy to be able to breathe.
my firstborn. it’s a baffling
badness. not mine–but I’ve be-
held the abandoned, all bicker
and bite. Botched babies who
burble in bassinets, bright
bulbs of blank, brimming with
barbarism. It’s rank. Who will
bring up these brawlers? Before
they grow bigger than a bread-
box, they’re brutal.
                                        Birds ebbed
first, then butterflies. Bacteria
bloomed, buckets of bitter, 
barrels of bile. I’m beyond
believing in better. Beauty
is broken. The boys–
bellwethers, beasts. 

Spin swerve       Gone summer        Dragging bikes  uphill       Downhill     so fast

Legs unable     To keep revolution   Spread out      Rims spinning       The accident

Don’t talk about     Soil becomes      blood         Was that the first time

Death      wasn’t vocabulary    Dumbfounded in dim light       Extended days

You held     My hand       Tears and snot     On your shoulder      Remember how

We hated adults    You and me against         What was it     We were against   

Growing up         Looking stupid     No Faker    Underneath     the Douglas fir   

Skirt of moss      Distant sounds   of swimmers      in the pond    Wasn’t it a lake 

Cold birth        Summer weather     sweating in autumn sweater       leather satchels 

Divided dreams   decoded diary entries    lily stains    Something what   This way comes    

Used to be all forest      Flannel shirts and duck boots       Fancy cafes     Recommended photo spot   

What happen    To our days       off-filter fun        Erased landmarks       You changed

now I wish I’d gone even more pedestrian

photo-flash of morning lightning
their “no, you go” at intersections
my jaywalking on diagonals
hopscotching twigs and worms
movie-set rain (wind through wet trees)
black folding chair facing frat house
gas leak? pervasive petrichor again
ROAD CLOSED sign that lies

instead of always wandering around looking for

the sound behind the sound
the taste behind the taste
the touch under the touch
the sight beyond the vision
the smell beyond the scent
the glow beyond the hill
the face beyond the crescent
the bend beyond the break

Roused out of my swoon
hollow & absent
how could I fight?

I had been carrying
something that looks like a knot
in the wood

It was not a knot
in the wood   It was a thought
but wasn’t no good

Fresh lettuce & oxygenated air
have skinned me terribly    A sunset leans 
exactly in the opposite direction

If I were a moviemaker
I’d set about hunting for 
a bouquet of daisies in the waiting room

*Bibliomanced from random phrases of Julio Cortázar’s A Certain Lucas + one pronoun change (her to my).