SLENDERER
HYSTERICAL BOOKS
HYSTERICAL BOOKS TALLAHASSEE, FL 32301
SLENDERER POEMS Jay Snodgrass
Copyright © Jay Snodgrass 2014 All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without the written permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in connection with a review for a magazine or newspaper. Cover art: Design, production, and cover design: Jay Snodgrass Type Styles: titles and text set in Minion Pro Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Slenderer by Jay Snodgrass— First Edition ISBN — 978-1495276477
Hysterical Books is dedicated wholly to the publication and appreciation of fine art, poetry and other literary genres. For personal orders, catalogs, and information, write to: HYSTERICAL BOOKS 1506 Wekewa Nene Tallahassee, Florida 32301 Published in the United States by Hysterical Books Tallahassee, Florida • First Edition, 2014
Contents Rocks Bones 13 Slenderer 16 Double Wide 17 Evil Spirits 20 Arise ye Bestiary 22 Arise ye Perps 24 Rail Road 26 Arise ye Ribon-cutters 28 Apple 31 Pounce 32 Alcohol 34 Birds, Whatever 38 Flutter 41 Courtship 43 Apalachicola 46 Eternal 47 Canary 50 Spent 52 Sunrise 54 Brocade 56 Arise ye Clackers 58 Deluge 60 Clementines 62
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Memorabilia 64 Drink 66 Elegy with the Sound of Hammering 70 Springtime Along the River 74 Empirical 76 Mockingbird 77 Arise ye Calvers 78 Joint 80 Arise ye Smithys 81 Stone 82 Arise ye Astronomers 84 Spine 85 A Game of Stone 87 Arise ye Concavers 88 Fracture 91 Strike 92 Arise Ye Loomers 94 Investigations 96 Arise ye Antiquers 97 Reservations 98 Internal Combustion 100 Arise Ye Clockers 102 Walrus Manifesto 104 Fruits Manifesto 105 9
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Rocks Bones This is all about the time I threw rocks This is all about how the bones in the back don’t work after a while. This is about the time I threw rocks. This is about how people get old and die (boring). This is about the time I felt bad for hitting a girl in the head with a rock that I threw. This is about feeling sad about nice weather. This is about not being able to play baseball because I was afraid of being hit in the head. This is about being hit in the head with a rock. This is about being hit with a head. This is about how when you love something really cute it dies and then it’s not cute anymore. This is about how people tell me things because I’m a “listener” and how listening to everyone complain about their lives is like being hit in the head with a rock. This is about how when people get sick and they complain but don’t listen that is like being a rock. This is about how a rock that is thrown listens to where it is going. This is about how the ear can be filled with water. This is about how rocks lie along the bottom of a river and can hit you without even moving. This is about jumping in to the water to not have to listen to your complaining anymore and hitting my head on a rock. This is about how blood slips away along the current and doesn’t really seem to change anything. This is about splitting open and letting the rocks fall out. This is about falling open. 13
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Slenderer
Where are your hands, nimble thumbed, cordite blue? Where are the starlings, sky-wrung, stretched to do? What softest trees can beg, barely breathing out? What churns in the horizon, selfish, boiling spout of braided water? What steady, knuckled-threaded glowering shimmer shook down from your head to praise and paradise and be entwined in wood and wire?
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Double Wide
Arise ye back stompers, ham stretchers, rollers of heel, jack lifters, double widers and such like. Stick a thousand needles in your backside. Post nausea, nurse me through your uniform. I’m a broom you’re a mop, together we pick years from the beard of seeds, from the prickly pears and cotton fields a-simmer with scratched hands, bent backs and heavy breathing; from the long sigh pullers in the pecan grove, hot for what the electric shaker didn’t net. Arise ye field gulls, take hold of your tubers, burrow and root through to your reality T.V.
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Evil Spirits I have had so much bad luck lately. I need to shake it off. My star sign says it follows me. I read that evil spirits cannot travel in a straight line. So in order to shake off bad luck, I cross the street randomly, swerve around trees and circle parked cars sometimes two or three times to be sure that no unsettled ghosts or wronged spirits are following me the way I am certain they always are. Veterans returning from the war say they unconsciously disrupt their daily patterns to throw the enemy off. But I am no hero, only the victim of chronic bad luck. And so it is I believe there is someone following me, watching. I am a video image on a bank security camera, a movement of grass setting off the motion sensor in your yard. I recognize that It is important not to fall in to patterns the way one falls into a lake or into the dress you wore to the hotel on South Beach, fluttering like crepe myrtles in moonlight, dizzy uncertainty of animal prints moving like grass in a wind. I am avoiding further loss, so I never take the same left turn on my bike, never ride up the same side of the street on a weekday, instead I go through the neighbor’s yard unexpectedly, tumbling in to a bush as though by accident.
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I am performing the ritual of deflection confusing the evil spirits by pulling a three point turn, bumping gently up the curb, frightening the old woman who is spraying the dust from her store front which lifts into the smell of ozone and sky, obscuring screen of gray, masquerading in the wig of gray telephone wires that seem somehow to follow me everywhere.
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Arise ye Bestiary
Be like the wasp and keep wood pulp handy in your molecules, for fomenting. Also, resist the urge to fancy sport, such as with racquets and formal netting. Keep the circle of steamed breath upon the window clear of all impediment, write there the documents you need to remember, wait for the secret rain. Adhere to the season of birds carrying on about the volume and quality of insects. Feast on the incidents you claim. Be obscure like the alligator, toothy and submerged, gloriously blanketed in moss.  
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Arise ye Perps
You do-nothings investing in hallways, you are perfecting a lurk, a lumping of shadows to a menace. You are drawn up hereby, to desist in ne’er-do-well-ing, in order to wrap these here Christmas presents, ‘tis time. And you, chemical inducers, gowned in plastic wearing half that double wide instead of high school, you are also relieved of your beer mind/beer hearts. It’s time to start knitting sweaters to the elderly. Go on, cheaters and connivers, concupiscent cohorts, withdraw from the mangled Aporia of your childhoods and study, once, for goodness sake. All you perps are hereby served these cookies, so you may therefore collapse into light and be sweet. Go ahead, shave. Be no more distracted and hairy. Let the days of indolence end out and be merry.
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Rail Road
When the television goes to commercial my daughter sets off a wailing as though what pressure is involved in keeping her sane is suddenly hit a critical level. My face goes red like a cartoon, the containment valve inside my noggin tipping down to red ticks, wobbling some final seconds of warning, my eyelid twitches as a fog screens what concentration I had, blurring out the titles of books, the reflection on the windows, the trees outside into one interminable haze, until I am locomotived, a chug of wheels lurching me toward a new America, I take one step, exhale, then another, to the wall where I yank the plug and collect the tv in my arms cradled silently, imploring. I bustle it out to the shed where it malingers still, rotting among the buffalo carcasses of a happy homelife.  
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Arise ye Ribon-cutters
Hold back no more those rivers of stuffed toucans. The mileage readers will out the halos to a puff from the A/C compressor’s boost. Those hot hands may hold up the ribbon of smog, echoing over interstate; hold down the throb of energy drink’s empty canister, the heat seeking Lego to the drum of propane. Hit that with one well-placed slug, millimeter, nanosecond, other tiny rations, guests of honor, and kabloom, fountains of profanity, I divest, toys embedded in my foot fall falling. So you cutters, swing your arm into the narcotic combine, have the first responder read you a composition on last causes, no more chances, pay your dues, be made fat like a bale and bound to a landscape. Polish the parking lot to a fine pumice, cut the ribbon, set the miniature world to brilliant burn.  
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Apple I gave up all the bad feelings too so I could be free again. I bit an apple and put all the black fingers I have into its wet seeds. I put all of my Aprils in there, too and my wallet, and the sticky habit of helping you out: moving your couch, moving your cabinets, filling the empty fields with all apples that the ground can eat. I hang my coat on. I grow and walk out of the portrait. It’s been a long time and I forgive myself In the morning I am ok, I may be a stranger to myself but that is ok. The stranger let me in to my house and it was the sky and you were there if you wanted to be and if you weren’t that was ok too I had a coke and looked at the sky. Inside, a window pane shifted a little and I waited a long while through the ok and it was still there.  
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Pounce
Come to the table so we can talk about how we died. Then make a little room for some other body. Then, after a while, it’ll be a whole town and so on. I didn’t find a way, but I left out needing to and it was ok, or it was a great shallow ocean I could walk in and not see where I stepped or where I was going When you sit down, the folding chair creeks its noise in the dark, a jungle warning that announces the pattern of living. Let it pounce. The edge of everything is acceptance.
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Alcohol
Fly, fly, I never thought I’d be able to get out of myself. I believed in animals, pure and unable, but that faith made me a prisoner too, and I became a believer in prisons, obligations, kneelings, temptations to emptiness. I road my bike so many miles to meet with other kids, then I left early to come back to mutant, serpent, dressed in tiny clothes I wanted to erase myself, become a cloud unseen I walked and walked until I was empty and too far to come back to bones in the sand, sun-blessed, becoming, elemental.
 
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Birds, Whatever
Here on the beach, the garbage is all spruced up, holy crap look at those crocodiles! We ate pizza from a box, whittled cheeses pulled hot and long. Hey! I am eating my skin, whatever. I was in with the flies while, carrying a docket of chairs, you did everything you could to complicate. What? Nothing. Whatever. To the left, others impressed with my t-shirt which, dude-bound, fell in to the sea. I menace them, having wrestled a goose down to its pillow once. Whatever. I think of my neighbors in the apartment building, they may be a family of goats. 38
Will they take the room downstairs. Shut the hell up wont you? Look at those sexy people and their cooler. Hey, you’re cardboard cutouts are divine? Whatever. There is nothing in those hats, only sun-poisoning and laughter whatever you are disposed to. I can barely fit into my mind’s bikini. The Greeks taught me to wax my brain hairs, whatever. I’ll trim my clothes-lines down with a battalion of shavers. All this spastic geography, pro forma beach, my body’s little hairs, crumbling gulls and whatnot, whatever. Give it up, gulls, there is no pizza-box! The peoples don’t want. Whatever. 39
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Flutter
Like leaves inside a tree limb, before there is even ever anything like paper, no one knows what paper is yet, the shadows of trees on the ground, the notes taken in a season where the creatures of teeth and bones foster each other, climbing high to avoid the hunter who knocks them down with a stone attached to the end of a stick. I am like that, the quarry of a love letter you wrote, the hewing of a sentiment you wrought upwards from dust and sweat, the chisel of a little animal brought down for a few slivers of meat roasted over a fire of twigs. The proper prelude to flutter. I give you, blood, warm, the covered sprouting gaze, the grave and the shroud.  
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Courtship
I am happy to meet your worry though I am new to its country. I admit I have had a few cups at disappointment’s café where the mountains provide much shadow and the stones crunch underfoot. I admit that the sound I make crunching stones underfoot alerts bad spirits. When I am in the clouds, I may look around for a stone to throw, something to defend myself when I am tormented by the glitz of mall shopping, polished marble and imitation brass. So much carpet cleaner in my nostrils, so many partitions in my head. When I come down after a few hours, I find my stone has struck a woman whom I take as my wife.
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Apalachicola So much is rotten by the sea, pits of the mollusk, mounds of shell beneath a cotton of seagulls. The scent is a wallop of sea bed, regurgitated round husk of rock stomach beside the restaurant’s gullet. A diving helmet reflects the parade of tourists. Cats weave handouts from the benzene parking lot. So much plight, a bobbing carcass of mullet in the march grass. A veteran fishes from the pier, harassing girls for sport. Crease of sunlight in his forehead nicotine and fish stain, nictitating eyelid, a gaze predatory and hollow, he hands out lollipops to little girls. There is a bridge and a bank and not much else of pride. The sea-wash etches calligraphy into the seawall, barnacle punctuated. Beneath this line oysters bed the difference.  
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Eternal I am confident to begin again. Confident to give up, to return to you Your bottles, cans errata Icthya, Moonlight, I witness looks like all the thousands of us laying across the blazing canyons. Then, I’m happy again, in the magician’s cloud of joy.
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Canary I’m riding my tricycle down to the park, I don’t worry about traffic because I evaporate before each taxi, then puddle under pick-ups, and reconstitute like a powder of milk. It was the end of the month, the trees were shaking down their garments, palsy limbs and branch fingers dancing to unearth. What lies beneath, makes rubbish of cars, so many fires, so many submerged tunnels. There is Gabriel fearsomely blowing his trumpet, cheeks so red from effort. We set before him a little deaf girl designed to alert us to the sound. She makes mud pies, and her red rain boots, up to the tops, will never fill with water, slickers prevail, silence is its own protection. Everyone out of the way! The ice in my gin is melting to new political continents, map them with your acquiescence! I wave to you in your office building, you muskrats, staring at the nail that held the clock. I squeeze the bulb of my horn, red-full of fluid time, no honks but squirting, clown gags a face full of innards, I’m arriving, train bob, roller coasters set to sea for their Viking burial, not natural but heralded. 50
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Spent
The more yelling there is the less courage I have to go on. I am laid down like the road, sensibly, taking one point to another. I am laid upon the road, pulverized armadillo carcass. I am in the road like obstruction, the smell of spent fire. I am held low with dew. I am laid down to your points, antlered illustration, numbered. You are raised upon my wall, mouth still agape. I am knocking at your eyes, hello? I hear what you are saying over and over, repetition of the white line, punctuated with carcass.  
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Sunrise
I can’t lift this piano on my own, nor look at all these dahlia, nor sniff the urgent alarm of fresh cut grass all alone, I can’t. I can’t change the tire or belt the honeysuckle without dragging open the iron safe of my heart. Some, peering through the space beneath the creek bridge, might wonder who would have pockets deep enough to hold all that dark light and rushing water. I have put my love in a safe inside a marble vault beneath a lobby lined with wood and stern faced tellers, and I can, if persisted upon by hydrangea and soft wind, I can withdraw enough to turn the lights on in my eyes.
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Brocade
I love you in the ancient grave of buffalo I love you in the dark must of velvet drapes I love you in the hard crack of loose wood floors I love you in the hallway, beside the thermostat I love you in the cat parade this morning I love you in the sweet mold of the garage I love you in the mall with brocade I love you in the parking deck beneath the pipes I love you in the distant buildings I love you in the train of galaxies I love you in the face of the internet I love you in the drumbeat of a hidden marching band When darkness intrudes I dismiss it. When the bank of the sky darkens with cries I disform it, push back to the sun where everything burns. I am quite capable of bashing my head with the cloud gray rock until all eternity is loosed into a dawn set at your door.  
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Arise ye Clackers
The masses of herding quadrupeds in the Serengeti veldt are transmitting, via satellite, bready shapes, steamy breakfast confections ripe for a Christmas morn. While humanity in the left quadrant of eternity takes up the baskets and visits, through telekinesis, the heady ringing of their neighbor’s discomfort. Stay, all ye, megawatt scramblers, church bell philanderers, tickle the codes of heaven upon the resistant xylophone. Register incoming transmission!  
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Deluge
for Kristine Your hand, a nimble thumbed halo in cordite blue, wraps the sky-wrung starlings and stretches the softest trees until, barely breathing, they beg for selfless horizons, and in that twist of towel I am wrung like a water spout, knuckle thread of braided water, twisted sinning metal name of water, I am wrung full by the shinning of shook hair, peals of copper and lavender, I am wrung to you like the clapper and bell, like the birch tree and the bolt of bluest light, snapping down to birch the sky, I twist to you like birch skin through a chain link fence, sweet lava of bark sinewing through wire mesh to broach, to brocade the border, braiding it to forever, a circumference of borders knotted in to the order of forevers, strange groping clouds, clapping in surprise for the ever bending hum, snapping whatever despairs or stings to a crush of love, strange love, shimmering down in sunbeams so suddenly soft and clear.
 
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Clementines
They’re calling the clementines mandarins at the grocery store, and not even the pigeons notice, from their harbor in the return cart parking spot. The sky is an empty canister. All things are about nature, I don’t deny it. The rain, sudden, is a recoiling of humidity, respite to asphalt heat. I can’t make you interested. A drowning man must know when it’s too late, like the far traffic, limping through epochs of red lights. Seeing this here where the fruits are refrigerated but already dead, you are still watching, through the crosshatch of shade, a scatter of dots on the GPS map looking down from outer space, from your computer screen, immutable, hand held, grace and gravity, dimples in the rind of a clementine I hold up to my nose.
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Memorabilia
I have drunk your spirits, made glassy flesh in bottles of proud containment, set free in me we dashed head long into oncoming headlights, bright beach hotel neon and daylight in a reflective lamp, immersed, immersed, I am consumed.  
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Drink
I have tried to drink in all the darkness the world brought to me in its cup and I tried to drink it away. Your pain envelopes me in perpetual arms. It’s so much because it is so forever. I assume as much as you can give me I can take, the hollows absorbing light at evening, your pain, shadow, grows in me, in there. I hold myself to your body and pray to accept what disease of the spirit you have, pray to God to have it transferred by touch in to me. I accept it. Being here and wishing this I accept.  
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Elegy with the Sound of Hammering This is a list of things I can’t hold on to anymore. Motorhead, dahlias, the list of comic books I’ll never be able to read, frost on the edge of the pages, the memory a landscape has for the trees, buildings and parking lots that were once trees and leaves and moss until darkness. The names of trees is a catalogue of misnomers, sentences need to be revised a text that has grown too far up the wall, or too wild in the field has got to be dealt with, tree that are too far gone, need to be culled, sometimes they are pulled down by a gravity, and sometimes, when the wind blows it knocks the branch of a maple tree, leaves bright yellow in autumn, against the power line and causes a crack of electricity to arc like someone hitting plywood with a hammer. And the cat stirs a little from its torpor among the comforter and slash of sunshine, stirs enough to be annoyed but not, on the whole, to be prepared to move or take action. In New Kensington, the fir lifts a little as the cat breaths and little swirls of dust pass in the air, inhaled; and down at the comic book store, the legends are content in their labeled boxes, the sleeves of Mylar taught against aging, which despite the sun light, seeps in anyway and the print grows smaller even as the glass in your glasses grows thicker and the power of magnification moves further away like barges on the Allegheny River moving slowly under the new Ken Bridge, resolving themselves from the view of Lower Burl, a tidy affair. and somewhere also is the sound of muffled music, loud music in a closed house, music bursting to be let out to sail on the wind, to move a branch and smash a board. Music calling the trees by name, using a language we understand but can’t utter. When Lemmy Killmeister, of the band Motor head, lifted his warted throat and bellowed
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up into the mic, the people came to hear because they recognized their names being called as if by a teacher, markers, identifiers, arms raising to acknowledge, the crowds of the world were summoned, yearning to break, to break things, break their heads, their social structures, their stones, their tiny burdens, their grossly vast burdens. When Lemmy bellowed the people came, children first, their eyes filled with the glitter of broken glass, the chagrin, to the charge of the voice, the enchantment of rocks against windows, the voice, spinning on the turntable began to lift the very vinyl spinning, taking flight, breaking light into the darkened chambers of the world, filling them with slits of possibility. And the voices of cars, and highways, and bills wanted to challenge and silence that voice, the dog headed voice, the steam engine of freedom, chugging toward a precipice, away away, and the names of the garbage became the names of the garbage men, and hearts of the trucks became the hearts of the drivers and the weight of the coins became the weight of everyone’s fingers, shipped, bused, freighted out to nightmare. Until the sun shone straight on to the river, straight through the window and stirred the dust, which rose into the mirror and could suddenly be seen across the barges and glittering trash, could suddenly be recognized and the sound of the human voice spoke the human language, and the loudspeakers of ice were shattered, and the muffling walls were melted and the ice of the heart was bared to show, inside it, the limbs of trees. The stillness of the branches waiting to be warmed, to bloom with the spirit of the gods of blooming, of will and wanting to live. To be full of the venom inside the snakes, in the snakehandlers hands, who bite
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because it is their nature to bite and spread light, even when the light comes through dark doorways, like the sound of the music freeing the angel fettered inside us, the wine and the dance of the branch in the wind, hammering at the power in the electric wire, Do this children, the voice says, Change the difficult into the easy, do not take the law which forbids to be the law which erases, gathers the spirit in the shade of the tree, in the darkness beneath the tree in the darkness of the night, in the dark beneath the trees in the dark of the night you are permitted to choose whether or not there is an angel inside you and whether or not he is free. No one here is poor, there are too many stories to end things, and every story ends in a richness of possibility, we believe all of them, and none. Every god returns because they decide to, decide to turn the air in a swirl of dust, in to the push of music through air, through the crease of the blankets which can be a cloud or the face of a woman, or a tree, What do you with the light slipping in through the window, so faint it almost reveals the angel? What do you do with the water spilled from the glass on the kitchen floor, moving gently like the river down toward the city who unfurls its thin wings into skyscrapers? What do you do with the endless swaying of the tree arm? Stare at it until the dust becomes infinite, stare at the cat’s fur spinning along it’s shoulder, the small paw showing from beneath its chin, what the tree wants with its knocking is for you to confess everything, to let it in from the cold, to take down the world and make it a story like endless sun, stall the engines of the street, and watch the sunlight filter just beyond, gather ‘round children, this could take a while.
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Springtime Along the River Cherry blossoms in full float, hyper cannibal streams of pink dew, blotting into sidewalk gauze, harbingers of heavy fingered heat. The rip rap upon the river looks like jacks and crosses,
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makes a deviant indulgence one might drop an ankle into, crack upon the dew and slink of algae. Then, a painful infection of ham-fisted coke cans,
jagged toothed, and still a little whisky in the sun baked bottle, expanded gasses like a corpse.  
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Empirical
I can’t prove to you that I am real inside my head but I am much less natural than staunch which is what you appear to be, in your sunglasses and facebook, with grit and a regrettable photograph of cornmeal, your hair or haggis or spaghetti squash or mimicry. I can’t prove that I was alive to witness the crash of the space shuttle, I can’t prove the cold weather, or the television, or the classroom. Never mind your smart phone, smart ass, your later rocket launches, I can’t prove any of that. I can’t prove to you just how many stray cats inhabit the parking lot after dark, imitations of creatures in repose upon haunches, glow eyed and miraculous, ever after. Such lounging! You would never believe that or the length of the spent fuel cloud, or the way the sunset burns through the trees, such a beautiful deforestation, making way for the crops.
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Mockingbird
It is so far past midnight that only hope for day propels us. That and LSD, and I have been explaining the plot to Escape from New York for nearly five hours, and your eyes are marbles, alive with the glint of garbage fires, cigarettes, the sculpted curve of a park bench. I recall the long ashtray smell of adolescence. You believe my stories. I am telling you because the drugs have me at a boil and the mouth is easy fulmination. I have wanted to sleep with you for so long that I cannot stop filling the cavern of your ear with the whole memory of my voice. The roadways are barking to light, there will not be another chance to tell the story of doomed futures that will never come. I am a parody of joy, the joy I felt. Months later, when you saw the movie, in real life, you laughed at how absurd it was. I knew I could never trust you again.  
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Arise ye Calvers
Bear witness to the dislodge of great hunks of stone, glacial birthing, the tidal wave’s utterance of ruminant mudslide, burying, bear it, the hosting class. Fissure of un-lean lands, breaded as soup bowls, signal an end to the right covet of righteousness. Break off a crust for dipping, all economy, it saves surface area, creates a smoothness any creature from outer space could tell was beautiful. Your wretched morality, T.V. dwellers, vacuous precision, birthing ever more magnanimous vastness we cannot hope to find each other in echoing.  
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Joint
I think we know that bird flight mimics the weaker stories of a building when earthquakes settle in upon them, dreary. There’s nothing so solid a breeze and blossom, if pink like your inner lips, could unsound. It’s not bird call either. It’s the score of sill, immutable windows forced to shrillness upon their imposed track. Such failures the craftsman, servant of order and time’s collapse, grooves his wear into settlement, like in the seabed beneath the marriage of water, the flow of glass the glazier’s tongue into the wood’s resistance.
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Arise ye Smithys
Arise Ye Smithys and Garmentors, furriers of the social fabric, lighting your faces to luminous gall. Wreak your toll booths and fence posts raised where locomotives dare; wreak your trenches and protective walls, your batteries and furnaces. Arise and fabricate a city of permanent porch-fronts, sunwashed with stoops. Sew up a dazzling morning that whole neighborhoods will be forever gallant for. Thread them together with children galloping between fence bats, posters of heaven. Arise, you dormant angels of wreathing. Pound all the seasons with your furious blows.
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Stone
You’ve hit me with the continuous rock which is me just answering the phone when you are down on medication or in a bad mood, grit, aggregate, continuous rain through the night makes me worry because I have leak somewhere in my heart it’s probably the hole you put a nail through to hang your portrait of black swirls Stoney Point, Rockdale, Granite, Buildings wake to the sun, reflecting glass which is not a replacement for stone
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Arise ye Astronomers
Affix your gazers to the not so subtly turgid telescoping in my pants, where wide swaths of ungovernable starlight are opening to admit the milky way. Just once, you ought to pull your head out of your bacteria and insist on burning up all the love your holding on to in the deep, deep wells of your eyes.  
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Spine
Not a season full of ill intention, tarot decks begotten on the Plymouth hood turn skirts up to the breeze, anticipate a masking in the crowd. The day comes in, your pills are ready, stumble into the magazine rack, where self-improvement avalanches upon your embarrassment. It’s not your fault you can’t stay upright, it’s the pain of mislinked vertebrae the doctor gouged out with his chisel, no great masterpiece in that vein of marbled meats and scores.
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A Game of Stone
Crows and mocking creatures, skunk, black toed cats carrying wriggling birds or worse. The late haze of the day is sullen with boats upon their reflections, dopey trawls egress to whitecaps. Surely the washing is ready to come in. in the field beside the road some boys throw rocks at each other to see who is more manly, pressing lidless skies and waiting for a knock upon the head.  
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Arise ye Concavers
Plumbing the dimples and bat stoves, ye spell lunkers, ye heavy headed droppers, ye drunks, I adore, your slurs, deliberate epochs remembered, and those dimples on your head arrived at from the kiss of gravity to the delicate pucker of concrete. I love you too, man, remember, times two? The sweet bruise, the childhood story detaching like a retina from the concussive trauma, I wish, I wish I could give up my own history’s dark kiss.  
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Fracture Dig down deep enough and you will release a shinning wind, compact gas, a lonely breath the last breath of the dinosaurs compacted by the sky-covering comet, not a wave, but a quick exhale at the sheer size of how everything ends.  
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Strike
I threw a rock over the edge of the mountain. The mountain was covered in clouds, mist, airy fingerprints. I couldn’t see and I had no mind beyond my fingerprints. I found a rock at the top of the mountain round from air, water’s fingerprints rubbing you can not touch the statue of Saint Ugolino, Saint of fallen structures, rubbed raw. You can’t leave your grease to pool in the stone’s microscopic recesses. I threw a stone from the mountain top because the clouds obscured the view, I had no sense of a world beyond me, I lived in the casement of a mother’s anger, I jagged for precious order in the cold enclave of a tumbled childhood, not my own, hers, the lingering hand of dark centuries of bruised children, I had them all inside me, for a thousand years the wailing like wind through a chasm, I threw the rock through the vapors, and it went out and away from me forever. When I came down the mountain, a girl was unconscious, hit on the head by a stray rock. Did I see anyone throw a rock from the mountain top. The funny thing is down here the sun is shinning and the concerned faces have receded from me inside the groups of I will never be.
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Arise Ye Loomers
Wind back those knees and ease the buttock down till the click of cushion is sweet redistribution of weight, a tale of two cushions, cheek to cheek, factors of the hip’s axle, the dozen recalibrated vertebrae, smooth as a sea floor. Your cloth contains a politics as gray as the carcass of a whale pup hosting a mountain of hag fish who convulse themselves into meat rending knots, tassels punctuating swinging in deep currents as if to dance. Those bolts are shimmering wrapping the couch of the mind in a new upholstered sequins.  
94
95
Investigations
Forget the sages bullying Indians out of cow pasture, the jeep in bronze upon a hillside made of plaque. Forget the seeded deep’s infernal tapping. Here is the joke: you have to smell the keg to see if it’s gone bad. Bad to the postern, like the buried creek in sludge, press your nose into the rubber nipple while some asshole sprays you in sheep down.
96
Arise ye Antiquers
Come along burning plantation, your flame is a sweet broom of martyr’s hair. I’m woven into soft tubers, nuzzled gently to sod, sweet sunlight planting her kisses on my stretched knuckle skin, veiny thick and buried up to after burn. Come, take what the kids didn’t know to sell, I’m aforementioned, locked in perilous nod, Be-night my crescent fez with a set of fresh Dunlops. Everything that rises with the cinders, falls freely to low rent, house plays, horse rails, a perpetual game of corn hole. I am crouched in the bags, bean soft, a staunch cavalry wove straight up to the clack of plastic handles.
97
Reservations
All night I lay in the tree. I can’t leave the tree, I’m telling you. No point in leaving. It’s permanent, chainsaw-still, no forester’s hand can make me tremble, unless I say it’s ok, and it’s not because I don’t want to leave. Look, I over cooked the meat and now it’s too chewy and there are maggots, wealthy maggots claiming their birthright from me, the only one whose left to chew the hard plastic at the bottom of the supercan. No, I am waiting in this tree because they do not leave and hotels are distant and antiseptic.
98
99
Internal Combustion
In the interest of interpolating, I can carry you, not for giveness, but for gifts in the arc, high almighty, I give you the slither around my belts, whir-whir, somnambulate a thousand mile gasps, I can carry you as far as my insides will fall out I’m exploding here, with mahogany blasts, you wrenched of the earth, my curve, slice between trees, I can carry you so too far giving, though I turn one little wheel over and over and over and over and over as whole ecosystems are crumbling around me. Yet I go on, worrying my wheel, trying to carry you on, under the over pass, the wavingly serene and their faces, accomplished faces dipping in their measuring rods to see how far the fix is, inside, I am exploding everywhere, bits left over every surface which is a road, which is teeth upon my gears, weeping gears, the face-plate press a face-plate press a plate, here, eat this, delicate distance I am chewing up inside all over again, boom, churn chewing up all over, miles and heads popping, gravel gurgle, my piston’s diminish to a rattle.  
100
101
Arise Ye Clockers
Hamhockers, your glue is showing on the dark egg, your fresco scrape and history bugs are showing through. I urge you to admit no silverfish, nor other twin tongued backward escapees. Chiton lathered Palmetto Bugs Pocket-booking into the bathtub drain, You, mouth closers, patch up the errors, equip the air ride the current of my debris-ed waters, swim slathered to brio, to the two cards, colored in suits, red licking sky salamander, rub the black nubs of fate, take measure. The crumbling hours that collapse upon your faces.
102
103
Walrus Manifesto
Arise ye brokers of mackerel, slickers of the silver footed jack, the nostrils gulp aquifers you know, glacial consummates. Spirit your works even to the lounge, lay heavy upon the inert, be one with the ground, spirit of what bears, buoyed by contingents, contaminant, flowers of ice. We are not insulated from the debris Floating to your meeting points  
104
Fruits Manifesto
Hanging is a placement around, a seeming to behave such as bees and offerings. Hanging is the continued voice that makes for suits, for successes and the dead. So this sound is full of fluids. It will teach me to drain, to ebb from strength as walls surround a space, as fruit suspends until it is necessary. You can ask, but there is no string to keep straight by itself except the hook and the empty shoulder which is surrounded by a heavy change I hide there, fruit, condensed.
105
106
Slenderer
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