(with some phrases by you alls)


The verklempt wilderness
doesn’t love you back.
It just sits and spins
in beluga leviathan whorls.

You put your face to the ground,
you want to write a poem,
but its palooka voice whispers,
“You should become a plumber.”

The verklempt wilderness
reeks of fried Zippo lighter,
and stale child-self drool perfume.
It sings its own meh mindsong — loud.

It cuts a buck-and-wing sideways, 
struts off down the fork,
but before it disappears, it says,
“Never a plumber, Mr. Bungle, always just

a chud.”

doordoordoordoordoordoordoordoor go

this one gets yesno this one knows that lie keep

talking eyes closed memorized the next word’s

the closer one of these soandsos youknowwhos

knows who took it it’s like taxes: eyemam

a divorced widow on my taxes then you sign it

this game is harder than bridge much [cry] you ever

play? you can’t blab everyonetoeverything

them? there? they can’t hear me

they’re a wall not family

I understand that this place is called Iowa City.
Greenwich Village isn’t a village, either.

It is definitely more fun to be in your 20s in the 70s
than in your 70s in the 20s.

Here’s what you learn by looking at yourself:
nothing.

I don’t even know what forgiveness means.
The 1% that didn’t go with Jesus—those are my people.

A family is a factory
for the manufacture of insanity.

People told me: You don’t understand this country
because you don’t watch reality television.

The most important job in a democracy is school librarian.
This country is insane.

I can’t remember the name of the book, but it should have
been called Nothing I Ever Did Was My Fault.

Most people who say they love to write
are terrible writers.

Except Toni. Toni loved to write.
People would ask her: Why do you like to write?

And she’d say:
Because otherwise you’re stuck with life.

In the 1950s, all children were raised the same:
Children are wild animals. They need to be tamed.

There’s three ways to look: young, old,
or surgical.

If you die young, people think you’re good looking forever.
But you don’t know it. Because you’re dead.

I didn’t even know I had knees.
What’s that? That’s the knee you didn’t know you had.

I smoke Marlboro Lights because they’re like the slut
you can always have. Maybe not the best, but available.

He had a tattoo of barbed wire across his throat
which I know not to be the sign of a Buddhist monk.

You should all be angry with your parents.
There’s no air, no water, now there’s going to be no jobs.

The only job that’s going to be left is plumber.
What was the first thing to break on the space shuttle?

After you graduate from this school,
you should all become plumbers.

Can you imagine a level of moral squalor
when real estate developers look down on you?

Do you have any metal parts in your body?
You afraid of those little mouses?

For days on end we use only
black and white
I see what I want to see
& you see the opposite

Days standing on end?
Lying end to end?
How many times do they wrap
the earth or reach to Saturn

As many days as bees
in the goldenrod    as keys
on pianos lying end to end
to the hull of the Titanic

Wherever that is     If Jean-Michel
Basquiat could do it so could
Jean-Michel Basquiat
Don’t play around    I mean it

Punch his chest when he chokes
& don’t take the pink scarf
like a charm reversed
like a talon in the eye or heart

When a language has only two words
for colors they are those

Type it once for yes
Type it twice for all of it
to come flooding pouring
brimming back

9/11 Belle & Sebastian     played Portland   Some idiots     in the crowd    Kept requesting 

“I Fought in a War”    Song   politely declined    I went alone    Not sure where Joseph was    

Probably working  Always on the verge of war     If not already in a war    When’s the last time

 You felt violent?

Does a butcher knife     through tofu count?      Sometimes       A joke    falls flat  

There should be        Shame in that     When inner humor isn’t even funny to the self

Not exactly strategy    But a step Towards   survival    Did he love her?   At times he knew 

Love unbounded     Thought it was endless    Fool’s gold?    Or just foolish immaturity? 

Or just bad luck?     To fall Out of love   To wake up with different feelings

Cut-a-Bitch pulls up in a boxy burgundy sedan
down the block from The Burn Queen’s house
where it’s not too hard to step up on her desk,
pop the screen out, crank the window, hop down,
dart the motion-sensor light, and slide into the dark
where her friend sits idling, headlights off, radio on,
brass knuckles drumming on the wheel, calling out
to the feather-boa’d, tiara’d silhouette approaching:

Get in, loser: We’re going back to the future of our 40s
to find out if we can love our exiled parts. We’re gonna
cruise down to the east side, trawl the strip for our
child selves, and buckle them safely in the back seat
before our razor blades, Zippo lighters, spiky chokers,
and rusty-hooked barbs come to scoop them up.

She walked up there half the night
She hasn’t said a word
She leans her forehead against the windowpane 
 & looks out at the country

His face is sweating
He’d better not
He strikes off down the fork
 & has no qualms

It stays hot for too long
The room smells of food & stale smoke
Something that needs fixing
 & the moon is almost full

The moon leaps & shies sideways
like a spooked horse

*Bibliomancy: Constructed from random fragments from The Hunter by Tana French.

Some people came into the bookstore   Bought books  or didn’t buy books 

Left piles   of them on    the counter     Bookstore still fighting  union attempt     

But there was a time    It felt cool     Cultural cred   To stand behind    the register    

To walk the aisle     Shelving books   Joseph Erika & I    slipping out    

for lunch     Red and Green curries    Pad Kee Mao Sometimes 

I’d lag behind    So I could go to Jackpot Records   or Ozone Records  

Then they moved Then closed    Then reopened     It wasn’t the same    Was it? 

In Portland    Was this Before or after the car was stolen?   I can’t remember

I think Joseph drove a Subaru   A bunch of us From the bookstore      Drove  to Seattle

To see Belle & Sebastion     I can’t remember Where we stayed    I don’t think it was raining  

We talked About leaving The bookstore    Leaving Portland    Getting on with our lives    

We were young Feeling trapped Feeling bored Feeling impetuous      

To be explicit without confessing, this antipsychotic I’m on makes me shake,

this poem I’m in makes me shake. This poem does not support the dualist ontology

in which all finite beings are implausibly divided between people and everything

else. What does the ontology say about desire? Does desire pre-exist its activity 

rather than being created by it? I mean did our kiss exist before we kissed?

The limits of language are the limits of the body, the smell of jasmine, tree roots

pushing through sidewalk, a walking poem, walking ontology. Immaterialism,

not materialism. We have seen that desire often gains the upper hand over its

own constituent pieces, and can even abstain from any action at all. Failed objects,

but never failed desire—an object is better known by its proximate failures

than by its successes. Proximate desires that are not forgone conclusions,

but offer endless counterfactual speculation, not all of it worthless. I mean

the imminent desires that were not abjured presumptions, and by presumptions

I just mean kisses, the possible kisses that did not occur but still actually exist

as objects, and minor objects become, by slow subsumption, a theory of us.

But subsumed into what? I lit three candles and prayed, failed to visit the graves

of my ancestors but must have walked close to them on the tour. This mild

panic is one type of modal reasoning, all of it worthwhile for near-world imagining,

proximate-world thinking, dreams of the otherwise unrealized action. But the object

remains while also managing to leave the atmosphere, or maybe it was never here

exactly but somewhere in the imagined alternative I keep trying to talk about.

There is no poetics I can reclaim except the poetics of lying, maybe. “Yes

I did brush my teeth,” says Desmond, wanting it to be true, knowing it will be 

true in the future, a lyric of untruth. I’m sorry I lost you after the pool party. I’m

sorry I didn’t send more messages when I was away. I’m sorry we didn’t connect.

If this were a madrigal, fa la la, we’d have encountered a sheep instead of a rooster,

and the shepherd would have said something important. “Yes I did brush my teeth!”

said toward the future, until it holds. Forgive the missed crossings—the unsent, 

the unjoined—desire persists, persists—love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew

back, guilty of dust and sin and dualist ontology. Lorraine, you are a top candidate

for this creative content director position, and more. What if the object waits inside

desire? The job inside the application, the application inside the resume, the un-cohered

poem inside the book and the book inside the kiss—as if it were just one kiss—ha!

As if it weren’t part of an entire kissing repertoire: Un bise, un smack. Des baisers 

subsumés. As if my life were my life and all this exhaustion and misdirected energy

were already the poem, the kiss, the job, the partially drafted email, the scheduled 

social media post. Desmond’s teacher calls to say Desmond is distracted and bored,

doesn’t want to do his schoolwork, and I realize this poem is partly a way of avoiding 

the now, the now that is not a point but a field of intensities including distracted, bored 

offspring, kisses, springtime and work. The present tense is crowded with counterfactuals 

that do not disperse, with all the things that happened without expectation.

(I’m back from the New Orleans Poetry Festival, where I did a lot of poeting but not much writing)

Now what, Jesus?
Resurrection is hard work,
even though death is not the enemy —
the Chinese take-out menus,
car service cards and locksmith flyers
accumulating on my stoop are.
I’m too lazy to throw them away,
but I cry when I see them.
I think of your mom when I cry.
She always looked nice as the statue
I used to cry in front of,
in the church across the street
that I don’t go to anymore.
It’s a church everyone’s heard of,
but a church way past its glory,
although it might be some other church’s glory now,
maybe one that used to be a shipping container,
like a former assistant buyer in juniors’ activewear,
now making a mark in trailer home sales.
Did she pray to you for help making that change?
When I left the state to follow that lonely fixed star
shining long and low on the sanitary canal,
I was a redneck cygnet among savage drakes
fronting a Styx tribute band.
I prayed to you,
and I added some sax.
You must’ve liked that,
because when the tornado swept through the county
all the houses but mine were destroyed.
On the other hand, they haven’t hired me back
at Liquor Factory Outlet yet.
Honestly, I am not convinced you are or were
a prophet, let alone God, but when I talk to you
I sound like an oud.
Maybe that’s the miracle.

the sun sets too brightly
in the wall of windows
behind first bard
casting her in silhouette

cartoon voices
& gestures flatten
into puppetry

best part:

when she jumps
arms waving overhead

becomes the shadow
of the spout
of a whale

*

Three poets walk into a bar.
Second traveling bard
says to me:

“No, it’s not just here,
it’s everywhere—
no one’s interested in
possibility anymore.
No one hangs out
after the show
to drink & flirt.
Even in New York
it’s the same.
No one’s trying
to make a new world.
They just want
to go home to their
stroganoff.”

*

walking home
to my spicy tofu
noodle leftovers
cheshire crescent
moon dangling
between
printing press
co-op & gallery
whole sphere
lit faintly
like a bonus
full moon
I hadn’t seen her
all month
except through
the lenses
of astronauts
what with the storms
& the waning
I would’ve taken
an even smaller slice
is that scarcity
or stumbling upon
more than what
seemed possible
in the current phase

I wish my friend a happy spring
& he says Snow is falling
Yeah snow is always falling
generally & everywhere
if you’re in one of those scenes
under a dome with plastic trees
a plastic sled or wagon
a neat little house
& somebody shakes it

Later tonight I’m posting
myself as Jesus healing the sick
because he’s a doctor
& doctors glow like that
& wear robes as Gwar plays
in heaven but leaves open
the gates a crack so we
sickies below can all
rock out. Shake it!

We’ve been left out
again on the stoop next to the soggy
Chinese menus, the locksmith
cards & misdelivered letters
for neighbors who split
this dome a decade ago
for a country that will pay
you to move to it
up to 81 thousand dollars
Those dudes are never
coming back