When someone experiences
terror their body &
mind may react
in a number of (un)acceptable
ways such as:
increased
heart
rate
trembling
& strong
desire to
escape or
protect oneself
from perceived
threat
Terror/their body/increased trembling/
Terror/ their mind/ increased/ desire to/
Terror/ their heart/ various/ways protect/
Terror their/threat/escape desire/from/
Terror/their threat/various mind/
Terror their/strong song/increased desire to/
Trembling increased body their terror
To desire increased mind their terror
Protect ways various heart their terror
From desire escape threat their terror
Mind various threat their terror
To desire increased song strong their terror
Category: Uncategorized
Tone poem
I didn’t know what you meant until I heard you say it
Then the cloud in your lungs cleared to blue
Sky of the hollow earth
To make the miracle mundane
Or mundane miracles
It sounds profound, quotidian quotation
But it’s only the t-shirt under the sweatshirt
With the mock collar
I had some plan for
Davy Jones’s Locker
What I’d keep in it
And how I’d keep it dry underwater
How long it would stay sturdy and strong
Undergoing “inspiration”
There’s not only breath there
But the smell of breakfast, saliva spray, kiss memory
Germinal demiurge
Hugs from a giant
Not drenched, but fairly damp utopias
You never overhear podcasts or books on tape
When I used to ride the subway
Ten minutes and the thought returned
In swim trunks
Optional
The brazenness of history!
What is your life about?
The Purpose of A System is What it Does {5}
evening reeks of wisteria
& dog shit city springtime heeds
that dragonfly wing imprinted
in concrete a toddler screams her
run bliss sidewalk dislodged by rouge
roots each inhale peril each exhale
time being progress & repeat
profess an oasis - instead -
of faith old men in the choir
belt belief brinks of weeping who'll
meet up at the wrack line where
we'll sort out possession/need
debts of grief & that great garbage drift
housing blue neustons & shame were
other kin inevitables
awaiting their momentous
only to shed common as weeds
blood wads on the wand when she said
or rather didn't - discover
a silence so stupid the home
where she's soil & sunflower
revised just like dark energy
just like tides take back their insistence
every day made redundant & of
it these bones will become those
Hail
April in Ohio and it’s hailing
as if to remind me how much I do not know.
Hail Mary, I can’t believe that dread
is what I was put on this Earth for
but it bleeds through me and stains my
sheets like blood through a cheap tampon.
Forgive me, mother, if I’m humorless:
the scholars say hope is a discipline
and the world, God, this world
is so damn unserious.
Fine. I’ll cary an umbrella.
I’ll count my blessings.
I’ll greet the dawn with open hands.
diary 5
[ w/ bright green large format dot grid & black ink ]
in june of the same year we waded into pushaw lake in our clothes. some memories
pull cut fruit from the cooler. anticipating loss was a strand tied at the wrist, one strand
for each day of distance. tying was about naming colors, and then it was about
sending the present somehow forward & backward at the same time, and then about
anticipating the ritual of removal without understanding what would be removed.
we did not plan what happened next.
some memories are made of what we wished we were doing. heaven help the strand
to change the rules. over time, the strands would begin to weave together because days
become weeks, because we didn’t account for how distance multiplies. i said
let’s always begin with what we can put our hands on
there on the same page where i instructed myself to wait. i forbade myself to enter
the houses of others. i was not the object in question.
//
here’s an object to house the questions temporarily:
have you forbidden yourself instruction? have you ever seen true devotion?
can we let’s always begin?
where on the page, if anywhere, would you wait? how does distance multiply?
what are the rules? what strands are created by the rules? what weaves that also
discloses? who accounts for what’s heavenly? what remembers us?
what will have happened after?
Allure
All the words for ignore and willful. What I can obstinately
pass over without notice and pay no attention to, proximate
but not without reason. Birds everywhere. Sometimes you snore.
I swore I’d never have children, but I never swore the opposite.
And now I’m not even sure if I swore. The allure of solitude
and self-sufficiency, of death in the wilderness. Construe what
you ignore then don’t ignore it. Unless it’s your job. If it’s your
job consider overlooking it. Consider rejection. Wrecked shoreline.
CATHY + HEATHCLIFF = TINNITUS
Learning to type on a typewriter is joining the army of loud
My first hospital job sounded like hammers
Do you write big or small I do both
Write down or write up
Do you read over shoulders
Long ago he gave up most paper for screens
For the I’m doing anything thing
Most people I see writing in journals are on the first page
When I sit behind you I want to rip off your big ears
and replace them with my own
Yours wobble to and fro yours seem so healthy and alive
Two children eating bell peppers
hearing the toaster chime which I can no longer
Do you know why I am not crying all the time
I am not new to despair
Tinnitus is my friend
piano with a stuck key
and I want your job
A Gust, A Guest, A Feeling
Sometimes things get stuck was yesterday’s line that didn’t stick.
This morning I find it here at the head of the class mucho gusto.
This isn’t a treatise on tabula rasa, obvs, I’m a mom, for emphasis:
she planted her palms on the table and the greeny flowers quaked.
I know you, I once thought, but in thinking the risk of dwelling
in dwelling the risk of rent, in rent the risk of great emotional pain
and feudal society, royals, nobles, feline supremes. With alarming
efficiency the cats in chase clear my desk of last year’s receipts
Carma Coffee Highway Toll Administration The Future Holiday Station
Reverie May Day The Red Queen Anne Boleyn as the Green Knight
A gust a series of grays early spring’s ugly and unsettled
what doesn’t root flies away–a finch, a guest, a feeling
like the one that’s sustained me for so long. I give it a black canoe
for the fluid accumulation of days and their mists of dissolution
Luff sewn
Ars gratis artis
Sounds like art for free
Or at least some small gratuity
In a country where tipping is optional
My limits objectively assessed
Sort me from my passions
With a silver sieve
It would have been better to use cheesecloth
Sift obsessively the beetle larvae
The junior versions don’t have demons
Only soul devourers
Outraged when you say what you want
The pendulum that swings back down
Arcs dispassionately on
It can’t care less
About language let alone throat
Only neck for a soul transplant to drip down into
The sky vessel
Deep enough to make an exploding heart
Then explode
Your hope is my broken promise
A duration in which I pass
Between one eye and the other
While these gestures go unseen
They are their own reward
I collect experience in scallop shells
Hold the umbrella
Over the upward facing open mouth
Do my efforts exist
For how they make me feel
Or how they will make me remember feeling?
Usually I write until I ask a question
And decide what sort of grammar it demands
If I am as patient as a melody
The elevator free-falls so I buckle myself to the floor
Depending on the giant spring at the bottom
While a seagull stalls on the wind
Part time carnivore
I am already staggering out among you
Inventorying my skeleton
Getting a haircut
Moon music
Hex Triplet
— an odd sonnet / cleansing spell
Have you nourished a friend into a predator?
Has that friend become your disapproving mother
standing with arms akimbo atop a ladder?
And has that friend plundered your sullen thunder
and replaced it with her pumpkin-colored Mother Hubbard
stuffed with underworld uncles and bucket truckers?
If so, throw a sand dollar into the waves of the Sacred Acre;
barter your young lover — the star-struck cattle rancher,
still daubing ancient red ochre on the cave walls of summer —
for an older, melancholy share-holder;
lie down with the Owl Father for an afternoon slumber,
and awake to find a worm larva clinging to your finger.
That larva is the friend you nourished into a predator.
If you’re reluctant to kill her, get Owl Father to smother her
and let the beneficent planetary transits begin.
Terror as an Emotion
In a psychological &
emotional context terror
is an intense &
overwhelming
feeling
of fear
or dread
dread fear: feeling of/or feeling as/intense terror/
overwhelm/overwhelming/overwhelmed/
or dread feeling/fear or/of intense terror/
overwhelmed/overwhelming/overwhelm/
In a as an emotion
In a as a nonphysical
In a as a context
In a as a terror
In a as an intense
Terror is often
characterized by
sense of
imminent danger
or a threat
that is perceived
as extremely frightening
It is often sense of
It is often sense of danger
It is often sense of imminent danger
It is often sense of frightening
It is often perceived sense of extremity
It is often terror’s extremity perceived
senseoffrightneningoftensenseofdangerperceivedasanimminentdangeritisoft
-enfrighteningsenseofextremityperceivedterrorsenseofdangerasanintenseof
*fucking around/disrupting some ChatGPT language here.
Must Be
Must be the stars
Must be the weather
Must be this time of year
Must be hard
Must be nice
Must be love
Must be the end
Must be a way
Must be time
Must be shroud
Must be veil
Must be fate
Must be lips
Must be hands
Must be honest
Must be good
Must be true
Must be present
Must be bolder
Must be brighter
Must be in there somewhere
Must be the coriander
Must be skimpflation
Must be my turn
Must be something special
Must be forgotten
Must be loosed
Must be the train
Must be the birds
Must be the wind
NATASHA
What did your family do during history
Where are they on the timeline of voter suppression
We’re in the age of the kind no one knows about
You might call this a cold call
because I’m calling you and working on not being cold as you
Her father was reading War and Peace when he named her
My father was reading Playboy when he named me
The only language my father would listen
How many people do you know died in Vietnam
Two of her boyfriends died
and her brother was on a boat running supplies
Three bones are remains enough
and a sketchbook no one opened
This is how you plant cinnamon
Even the documentary had normal swearing
Do you swear curse or cuss
I don’t know anymore
I stare at the sunrise only when it is most red
as though if I looked hard enough
I could change something
Delirium of Negation
Life was easier when I didn’t eat. I could push myself to a fog
and nothing made sense. It explained my misery. Starvation
was my objective correlative, acid in my throat a means to say
the unsaid. How silly. Miles Davis plays and I take a bite, the bile
remains deep inside, a disarmed metaphor. Pain is the thing
that shifts with context, adapts and waits like a whistle around
a neck. I’m thinking of Cotard delusion again, a syndrome in which
someone believes they have already died and must be buried at once.
Was it Michelangelo who said the effect of death defends nature
from all human passions? In the earliest account of Cotard,
a woman senses a light wind on her side, grows paralyzed,
and asks for a shroud. Another patient believed she lacked
intestines, stopped eating and did die. A psychologist tells me
the power antidepressants can have on chronic pain, a redirection
the way a bullet in the arm isn’t pain in an act of war. How easy
the body bends to belief. How funny it is to be cured.
4
Given only time
and two cracks at it
she groused
among the silver scales of morning
I don’t see her around much anymore you?
Well that’s alright
Some mountains cannot be moved
The bounced sounds turn up green
or turn up nowhere
Whose voice is that
across the way
down the ridge
I want to forget what it said
I’m troubling the path but only in a halfassed way
I’m sure not pitching any smoke
Sourland a former hearsay a heardsay
a clarification or a scar
Its streams dry up or trickle on rotation
every three days
On the first warmish night
after a good rain
we’ll meet at the quarry road to count them
Back home I’ll drop my pines
the minute I get to the core
Whale
banal blazer
dumb latte treat
active shooter
preschool training
growing up scares me
as much as it used to
though I wanted it badly
my cousin is dead but
it’s April 4 so I remember
her fiftieth birthday
she would insist I sing
papa don’t preach
garbage pail kids
on her fridge taught me
the horror is baked in
the bath / sela demands
the whale make more bubbles
but it’s time to say goodnight
Sonnet for my Kindom
King of 2:43 half marathons.
Viscount of arriving early. Baron
of taking my meds every day even
when I don’t have water and it burns on
the way down. Call me a duke just so I
can have a duchy doesn’t matter what
it’s of. Prince of explaining beef between
women’s soccer teams & federations.
Blue ribbon in remembering birthdays
Bronze in knowing what to say when you’re sad,
just happy to be on the podium.
Top 0.5% percent of CRJ fans.
If I were a betting man, I’d like those
odds. I’d roll the dice. I’d lay down my life.
diary 4
[ w/ well worn large format spiral bound graph & messy black ballpoint ]
and what animal. and what a burning
wait. soon climb to roof’s high point
to set a low point. who am versus what
am. everyone brings a weapon to the
hair salon.
burned the next envelope alone
on the fire escape having been told
to step back and watch the fingers
that strike the match but how one
gets far enough from one’s own
hands to see everything instead of
feel everything. but i’ve had fingers
for centuries, and fire is so often
just a thing on a hill.
//
the plow we didn’t
hire comes to take the slush and
spins faux stuck or real stuck until
the lie resolves itself. is that ghost
or is it line, that flicker? our trees
seem to hold so our fingers go
along with it but all the managers
have a headache and all the
procedures start with a letter,
ruining language as we know it.
sandpaper bathtub
has just enough grit for outflux. this is
dream scenario lite. all this fluff is eaten
by all this slush. sliced my thumb in a
vision, it was enough to get the job done.
An Open Source
Green jags on the black screen of night. The cloud is gone but the snow’s thicker than ever, prickly zeroes collecting on downed limbs and downed wires. Three bearded ladies arrive in Club Forres’s amphitheater, two with their arms linked, one dragging her train which snags on a root or a cable. She tugs. She tugs harder, and sequins take off into the snow, primmer zeroes, no less likely to cut a bitch. The first giggles, the second clucks impatience. The third sighs, shakes out her curls.
The first asks, sister, where have you been?
Pulling pork, she says.
The second pinches her, hush, little piggy. For real. Where?
She looks around and finds the stage suitably deserted, suitably howling, suitably black and green with rank yellow smoke still trickling through. She reports: the goths have been dumpster diving over at Duck’s palace. They’ve got chestnuts, agave nectar, goji berries, fair trade chocolate tree-to-bar harvested by hands no younger than twenty-five but no older than sixty-two. Half a bottle of local crème cassis, a case of burnt ends, cream. So much cream, coconut, cashew, macadamia—
Almond? Interrupts the second.
She continues: you know what almond farms do to the water supply. Lots of water, though, the boxed sort. All infused with butterfly tea and hibiscus, of course.
And you didn’t bring us any? The first slumps, pushes her belly forward, my biological clock is ticking! Time for this cat mom to get knocked up with a food baby.
The second says, c’mon, We’ll take it all, we’ll starve them out. I’ll walk you back, I’ll boost you up over the wall, I’ll let you climb me with those rough and ready hooves. I’ll pop my cork and over you’ll go.
Too kind, sweet pea, says the third.
No need. The first lady’s grin rings green in the cascade, Cheshire style, look what I have.
They want to know.
She unzips a neon pink fanny pack in whose front pocket she’s stitched two old world wired Dolby speakers that play, depending on her mood, a ballad, a dirge, or a series of solfeggio tuning fork tones. Ladies two and three lean closer, and she tugs her pouch away, wags a finger. Then, with a flourish, pulls out a velvet box. Voila, she goes. The interior of the box is lined in vegan vellum and a thin layer of cooling cells. It holds a human thumb. The thumb has been shrink-wrapped to preserve its print. The architect’s, she hisses.
A high hat topples with a crash, tinnier than thunder, crankier than bells.
Cheese it, says the second, I hear that rat with no tail and his pet sieve, drumming their way home from the show.
Mayks, hisses the first, as she slams the box shut and tucks it back in her bag.
And that cutie Q, trills the third.
Mayks and Q have their headlamps switched on, for what little good it does them, and Mayks stops short when the thin beams catch the glitter of the first Lady’s cat eye. He’s got an arm out crossing Q’s gut. What’s up, ladies? He asks.
Weird timing for a show, Q gestures to a searchlight that no longer searches, a spotlight that no longer spots. Q’s jaw, the envy of even goths and bots, blooms purple, exaggerating the hollow of their cheek, contrasting their baby soft brow.
All our shows are weird, QT, but there’s no magic here, tonight. Not that kind of magic, says the third, tugging on her beard.
Magic Mayks, giggles the first.
Magic and might might’ve gotten him promoted, but it’s something else altogether that’s going to make him king of the realm, boss of the boots, top dog, top duck, argues the second.
Mayks goes stony, flips open his phone, flips it closed, flips it open. Q points the beam of their headlamp full in Mayks’ face, abrasions on his cheek, a split lip, a countenance like a god, or so Q might not be caught dead saying aloud. That’s good news, isn’t it? Duck’ll have Mick’s hide now. He set every one of these fires, and without you, we’d still be putting them out, chasing data, none the wiser. Mick’s out, Mayk’s in. Righthand man.
Mayks looks greenest of all in the streams of light coming down from above.
Mini-Mayks is right, says the second.
You leave them be, says the third. If Mayks is a right hand, Q’s the left, and there ain’t no shame in that.
True. Q won’t get rich quick, but they’ll buy a lot more happiness, concedes the second. Not king themselves, but rub those hands together and we’ll see a whole litter of baby kings.
Q turns more red in the face than green.
Don’t forget us little ladies, says the first.
Mayks finds his voice and coughs out, I’ve been running sectors and vectors since Mama died, and that’s plenty. Not getting ahead of myself. Mayks flips closed his phone, flips it open, closed. Something buzzes in the pocket of Q’s recycled vegan leather moto.
Duck’s calling his silly gooses home, says the first. If you don’t get that promotion tonight, I’ll kiss you. If you do, you kiss me.
Don’t say we didn’t warn you, says the second.
Weird out, says the third, and all three disappear behind heavy velvet curtains.
Trippy end to a trippy day, says Q.
Your children will be kings, scoffs Mayks.
Q hides a second blush. You’ll be king. Their voice catches on the k. The two of them face the empty audience while Q’s pocket buzzes and Mayks flips his phone, open, closed, open, closed.
A gust of static swells up behind them, an alarm, but not that alarm. A screeching, like an owl with a warning. Rilly. Pupils dilated so that they reflect gobs of great green light. Angelix slashes in behind, freezes, buffers, slides under Rilly’s arm. Remember the poking, Rill asks, remember the bouquets? Remember the bannings and poking the banned and the ban lifting? Remember—
Angelix puts three long fingers over Rilly’s mouth. Chartreuse nails tapping matte black lip stain. Duck says you’re the new Micky, Mayks.
What happened to Mick, Mayks asks. I mean, after we…after he…
Angelix shrugs. Rilly grinds, lets out a series of rough breaths, laughing. Angelix slaps his lips firmly, but not roughly.
Q puts their hand in their pocket where the beeper keeps buzzing. We’ll be there in a minute. Now scoot.
Rilly and Angelix exchange a sneer, slink back the way they came.
Mayks flips his phone open, closed. Big shoes to fill, he mumbles.
Not so big, Q laughs and cuffs Mayks on the shoulder. Big hair to fill?
Mayks melts a little. Such big hair, he agrees, runs his hand over his neat shaved head. Both of them remember the blood running from Mick’s hairline, mixing in to his carefully tended home perm. Mick with his hairspray—sugar, water, wheat flour when he could get it. Mick licking his teeth whenever Daisy Fleabane walked down the glass staircase. Mick embezzling data, setting fires, washing his hands, showing up as if to fight alongside Mal and Cate and all the other kids. Mick tricking the goths.
We’d better go, says Q. If you ever want to be king, can’t keep Duck waiting.
I got this far letting Duck wait, Mayks points out, and Q has to nod. Mayks pulls a face and strokes a pretend beard, your children will be kings! He laughs, says quieter, our children could be kings. Would we wish it on them?
In the green, Q pinkens, and they set off for Duck’s.
Earnestly
I mean it. I’m not earnest. I pledge
nothing, I plight, earnestly, with meaning,
I note the vining hairy vetch climbing the fence,
not yet blooming, but I am un-solemn,
I am endangered. Cut wilted daffodil blossoms.
Cathy asked me how I am and I said, “I’m not in
immediate danger.” What I meant was I’m not easily
suicidal. I can stroll the sidewalks peacefully
without thinking of accidentally falling off the curb
when a bus goes by too close. I tried to photograph
the sun-glint, unevenly traced among generations
of defunct cable and internet wires. The sinking land
around the tidal basin. On occasion I go down to see
the cherry trees. Our house is on a hill, so the sea
would really have to rise. It will.