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 compromise, something about those events held the most illdefined 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.
branches take the measure of how ill-fit we are for this terrain.
Tired of what low-slung
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.
Mean Weight Help hold I mean prop I mean
help promise the premise I mean argue the
help sell I mean cough I mean
negative I mean
help will I mean push I mean
help we’ve all been there I mean no one gets out I
help calm I mean ease I mean
mean
help us I mean them I mean
help the wool winter I mean silk is the summer I
help this gentle I mean this soft I mean
mean
help us glean I mean us dream I mean
help sketch I mean shade I mean
help us to forget I mean we grow dazed I mean
help drill I mean dowel I mean
help spectacle I mean intangible I mean
help jet the carb I mean pull the piston I mean
help roach I mean crib I mean
help cinch the stretch I mean pinch hit the slouch I
help her and help him I mean
mean
help them to fall through I mean true I mean
help rout the roots I mean help ream the scene I
help swallow some dew I mean blue moon’s glow I
mean
mean
help cut the carp I mean help shop the crap I
help shallow’s the lake I mean wallow’s the swamp
mean
I mean
help blow help lick I mean help cloy help scalp I
help compass the range I mean sound the ground I
mean
mean
help broil help blister help mean the flayed skin I’m
help me locate my I mean echo the sky I mean
in I mean
help I’ve lost my I mean where the fuck did I mean
help meme the joke help pull the poke help
help is on the way I mean soft what light I mean
plumage help vestments
help a down-on-his-luck I mean mean times is
help drivel help null set help flaut help molt help
hard I mean
poultice help suture
help cement to cure I mean stick in the mud I
I mean help hep help hark help hassle help hedge I
mean
mean
help
help.
wait I feel train I mean I want glass I mean
wait her clasp is caught I mean the fingers pop I
wait I sent help I mean I get gone mean
mean
wait it was def I mean he answered yes I mean
wait we sing to sup and I mean clang the cup I
wait what gives I mean what hopes have you I
mean
mean
wait in barstool slouch I mean the kettle’s perc I
wait will it burn I mean will nothing undo I mean
mean
wait gross I mean I hate the tough truck I mean
wait in the sitting room I mean I am a patient I
wait the bloke’s mad I mean gone mental innit I
mean
mean
wait I watch and wait for what and wait the scales I
wait you haven’t heard I mean what’s to know I
mean
mean
wait the heart and wait a day and weigh the dead I
wait gloss the frame I mean freeze the flames I
mean
mean
wait I mean fellate I mean to comb the cock I
wait what I mean who the fuck I mean
mean
wait the tables’re bussed I mean your hair’s a mess
wait the barn’s a burn the rooster roasts the pig is
I mean
poked
wait the clap will come I mean the crowd’s a cloud
I mean wait with what, we wait with wit, but wait to
I mean
go
wait the laugh is cough I mean the brass is scuffed
too long I mean too late to make the train we
I mean
mean wait
wait we’ll go the route I mean we’ve sewn it up I
for your whole life for that big break but wait I
mean
mean
wait she’s buttoned up I mean the jig is up I mean
wait the wasted days with waiting, let them
wait damn the bag popped I mean the rag top I
succumb
mean
to the wait we wait mean and meridian, the
wait we got the crop I mean the bag’s a dope I
average wait
mean
which breaks the back the will the bones and the
wait for just a sec I mean the slacks’re soft I mean
rank
wait to stop the bridle I mean the top of her girdle
slotted wait shoveled under by the wait of graves
I mean
where the ones we loved wait a while longer for us
the link in the middle I mean the foam finger
to
dangle I mean
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 wellbuilt 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 moonlight, 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. enough.
He’d got the clap at the close of the curtain, which was thanks
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.
Kitchen Wolves
for Greg Ames
What the noun does to the verb. What talking does to the notion that thought it. What the paper does to the plot it’s printed on. What a sign does to the one-day sale. What a sail does to the doldrums. What a camera does to the lengthening shadow of the weeping willow. What fucking does to the crush of longing. What the yelp does to one’s fear of wolves. What apology does to the impulse to hurt. What forgetfulness does to nostalgia. What melody does to the lyric. What the doing does to the will to do. What waking does to a dreamt-of death. What a fist does to the handshake. What a river does to the rain. What the skin does to the tattoo. What the road’s pavement does to the long-distance lovers. What the stage does to the players’ script. What poetry does to the keyboard keys. What the leaf does to the rake. What radio does to the ionosphere. What blood does to the murderer. What a font does to the typeface. What a bridge does to a river. What the planewing does to the vaportrail. What a windshield does to the winter frost. What a name does to the orphan. What a leash does to the birthday puppy. What a shit does to the breakfast burrito. What the trophy does to the race course. What a playing card does to the skillful shuffle. What the appositive does to the comma. What the smoke does to the fire. What the ear does to the shrill siren. What the goose does to the dark winter sky.
What the oxbow does to the creek. What the lung does to the cigarette. What the summer does to the sun. What the silence does to the thunderclap. What the brakelight does to the rubberneck. What the piston does to the sparkplug. What the slagheap does to the coalmine. What the grave does to the backhoe. What the highfive does to the touchdown. What the skull does to the bullet. What the root does to the sunsetted silhouette of a treetop canopy. What the sculpture does to the sculpture’s eye. What the vowel does to the fricative. What the hard-on does to the negligee. What the bruise does to the knuckle. What the song does to the plucked string. What the skin does to the pinch. What the wound does to the switchblade. What the ditch does to the shovel. What the ash does to the campfire’s crackle. What the wave does to the seabreeze. What the lunatic does to the moon. What the nose does to the rotten corpse. What the neck does to the necktie. What the drip does to the faucet washer. What the crease does to the iron. What wedding does to the priest. What the fault does to the quake. What the push does to the pull. What the black does to the white. What the tooth does to the gnawed bone. What the body does to the mind. What the nut does to the bolt. What the student does to the teacher. What the verb does to the noun.