seventeenfingeredpoetrybird

2012-01-31T21:50:00.001-05:00

2012-01-30T22:16:00.004-05:00

2012-01-30T22:13:00.002-05:00

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2012-01-29T18:50:00.001-05:00

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2012-01-29T14:05:00.001-05:00

2012-01-29T13:59:00.000-05:00

2012-01-29T13:57:00.001-05:00

2012-01-27T21:34:00.002-05:00

2012-01-27T21:01:00.002-05:00

2012-01-27T00:02:00.002-05:00

2012-01-26T23:18:00.001-05:00

2012-01-26T01:02:00.002-05:00

2012-01-23T23:38:00.001-05:00

2012-01-23T23:36:00.002-05:00

2012-01-23T02:15:00.001-05:00

Night Landscape Lit by Lightning at 2 am.

2012-01-23T01:04:00.002-05:00

2012-01-22T23:23:00.002-05:00

2012-01-22T20:31:00.002-05:00

A little Pinkham Ryder

2012-01-22T19:04:00.000-05:00

Ghosts

2012-01-21T21:14:00.003-05:00

sideways

2012-01-18T22:35:00.001-05:00

RAYMOND CARVER

You left the milk out. Now it's ruined. I never moved
so quietly through such outlines, the rows of cedars

   standing just
past the film of the screens. "What good's the use-by dating."

My shift at United Linens? The former coal miner flicked
his ash onto his plate with the chicken bones. This was

   after the
armistice, the flaming peonies. More than a few stiff drinks. It

was summer. I had a skinned and gutted squirrel and a pot of
red potatoes. Wild asparagus. I wrote down and then drew

   a line
through every job I'd ever quit after a single day. We would

appreciate it if you returned the store handbook. I can't find
my glasses again. I got out the lemon juice, the celery seed, the

   big brown
knife I bought at an antique store in Yakima, Washington . . .

2012-01-17T23:11:00.001-05:00

DOG LOOKING AT SELF

What's with all the windows? Dog looking inside
one window. Woman posing in window. Other windows open

   Christ is
barefoot again. The seagulls cut through the chambers of

ice gray swooping over geese, the unfazed hands reach
inside the deer, warm with blood. Christ is wearing a pair

   of boots . . .
He emerged when an animal crossed an open expanse of

snow and nothing else happened Sensor lights came on
It's dark, white in the flood lights, without nuance, gray is the

   ice out
further, hair blowing back off fair shoulders Dog looking at

self in one window Dog barking at window Christ standing at
door in boots Dog and man on street in dark everyone sleeping

2012-01-17T00:15:00.000-05:00

THE ANGELS

Shit, with grace. Plastered on walls, or casual--
I forgot my sunglasses--going back in time

   Hands smooth
in it--breathing all over the work, a seashell, horse, dinosaur,

a leaf The air-conditioner prattles along . . .
Born, young and sleek on the beach, the smell of

   suntan lotion.
Rainwater collects in coffee cans placed in a diagonal

Three hundred sixty-five days ago
There was an amber alert when the car was found parked

   perfectly in
the shade at a well known ice cream place in Plainwell

2012-01-15T00:51:00.001-05:00

THE TRIBE

Or you could think of it this way

     I was studying the situation in the rain

I still felt the dry room, too long blending with a flower

     Ducks, I kept noticing them, too, their increasing IQs

The ferry-boat had crashed, we built fires to protect ourselves

     Great works, levitating above the book, the open hand

No boats left, the eyes turned colors unimagined by stars

     I dissolved out of sleep; the bees were already extinct

2012-01-13T14:44:00.001-05:00

TRUE STORY

Tobias Wolff wrote this story called called
"Say Yes," and that kind of meaningful slick

    stuck anyway;
One by one, to accumulate companion animals;

to colonize, interpolated with the spaces in the
landscape; Barthelme's "Margins" :

   The silver
bowl held a mixture of harmonious beans (You are

ultra-organized, artful; suffer egoism) . . . Hence the
handwriting all over the majority face; Carl leaning against

   the architect's
building. One of the larger cats growled. She smelled good.

I didn't bother anyone. The brown shadow, the white sun
so delicate on the emerging human feelings. It was like

   watering enthusiastic
patches of dampening hair. The hurricane remained outside

the city. Well you just poke at the inner mechanisms, Carl didn't
say, though I thought it. Then I signed my letter. The sidewalks

   disappeared inside
the envelope. I held the conversation out in front of my body and

walked a block through snow, past Family Dollar, The Men's
Warehouse; the traffic lights in an entire city stopped working.

   Palms trees
again, half bent over. I walked forward, the story in my hand.

2012-01-12T16:35:00.001-05:00

THE VISIT

If you have any metal, say a bolt introduced into the
architecture of the knee. Suddenly the leaves won't

   change color
Where he (or she) fell, but no sentence is finished in

such dark times. Left to decay in the wind, fire
roaring in an oven, but no. The birches are poetic and

   their leaves
Mostly animals carry the bones to dens, cover them

with branches, leaving the screws and hardware. My
neighbor had her hip recalled, big plastic shovel with its

   chest puffed
out. Swapped it for another Their yellow leaves cover the

impression left by the resting metals It was a Depuy hip recall
Standing in the rain like a gunslinger, in the slow dark onslaught

   of winter
stepping rather lunging through the now wet snow new face a blur

2012-01-12T00:24:00.001-05:00

ANOTHER CONSPIRACY

                                 (Kenneth, what is the frequency?)

I wish you calm a boat rising in winter
snow ice the remaining leaves blackbirds

   Footage a
word we should bury but he was knocked over

the hood of a Studebaker with a stick, dear
Dan Rather, into the studio, past make-up

   (I guess)
and Donald Barthelme scratched his chin hairs

thinking Grand Canyon My Jock Strap Flies Proudly
From My Old Impala Antenna the last thing we need

   is black
and white footage please please I Beg make a snowball

2012-01-11T23:39:00.001-05:00

ADULT FILMS

Implied chaos, that happens, whether it be an
orderly dismissal: there they all go. And what do we get

   Mr. Milkstick
Century? Fracking. Brush the thinning hair nice and

hard then 1) pull the plug toward the center of the room and
2) swing the plug-end around until it hits things. Icicles

   bleeding despite
climate control. 3) tap the on button. Let the bodies

"undulate" around the tied up host (paint the lenses of his
glasses bright pink). If that should fail to please all

   onlookers, focus
your attention on the now blind executive-host. Bare your

smallest teeth. Wheat. Carrots. Meatballs. (Beef, Pork,
Water, Breadcrumbs), Beta Carotene for Color, Soy Lechithin.

2012-01-11T22:42:00.000-05:00

JOHNNY CASH

I've got a bumper sticker I'd like to whitewash
onto your face, maybe there near the tab for Birth

   Date, economics,
all the sliced cling peaches called consciousness. Tell me

   (I'm wearing
new contacts) detective . . . (I have to pick up a pocket flap)

Detective Muncie. What are they reading on the moon
these days? I don't think this glass has been properly

   cleaned, oh,
he had accents in his hair, poor Britney, he screamed,

getting pixelated, like with a big flat blue fishing lure
streaming out of his It's got spots, and it's got a feel to it

   like something
happened somewhere. The room kept getting emptier

2012-01-11T22:03:00.001-05:00

ESPRESSO

It pours too little light. Mice, their curved feet, a last breath,
the infant who is stung by a bee. A car backfires in a Milwaukee

   One leper says
a priest in our alley is lost. That's just great. Another family

expression.  There were dolls piled in the sink when she
went back; uneven burning between them, the people across

   Big Opportunity.
The murderous sunflowers seemed to scream along King's

Highway, up on two wheels, Her lovely house in the
swamp, the manager said, street level . . . But that was

   last Friday.
"He's blessing stones,"my sister told me over French coffee.

2012-01-10T00:06:00.001-05:00

2012-01-08T23:19:00.001-05:00

WE STAY HERE

I did it so I would know too much, like
a trash compactor. You've got to unlearn those

   things, panting
over his pancakes, sex-smell in his chest hair, a cool

breeze swirling in through the open window. A
painting of two nudes carrying a deer on a pole

   rattled on
the wall. Right then I could imagine our backbones,

our posture without flesh, spines bowed sitting up, or
supine on a table, the scraping tools of the scientists,

   the fact
that we are solid after all, like a grocery cart.

2012-01-07T22:32:00.040-05:00

WHAT DID I DO TODAY

Is it called the Acorn, petite hearing
device one plants in the ear? One's brain pushes itself

toward sound,
the head a beach at full-dusk. I'm talking one night of

serious drinking. Now it's morning. The dogs
snore near the fireplace grate. I watch a tractor push dirt up a

grade while
a daddy longlegs carries a cricket over my latest manuscript.

2012-01-06T21:25:00.001-05:00

THE LESSON

The joy cannot continue,
cannot extinguish the fire in

the bathtub,
the sirens roving from room to room

in the small house just down the hill
from the seven large houses, candles in

every open
doorway. This is how you see in the dark, he says,

and he takes her hand in his hand, her hand
holding a yellow pencil, and he crosses words out.

2012-01-06T20:25:00.000-05:00

UNSTOPPABLE PROPORTIONS

Even close up, the architecture resembled
a gallows. In the distance the trees opened up

   beyond the
hanging beam, and stars wheeled through that open

space, a limousine. I filled the radiator with water
from Flatrock Creek. White lies, and black lies--there

   was lava
somewhere in a pond not boiling. And perhaps I'd been

a guest, dead bungalow? Bugs or a rodent declined the
leaves, but a falling star burned a crack in my windshield and cut

   my visit
in half. I'd been unusually comfortable? For effect God, or the

hanging invisible man, let it begin to snow. The creek was
almost a ditch. Then the water froze. A coyote bayed at no moon.

2012-01-05T14:13:00.017-05:00

THE STURGEON SINKING INTO
THE DEEPEST RIVER LIGHTS THE
WHOLE WORLD

If I were, I then would be--substance. I am,
fortunately or unfortunately, caviar and

   baptism. I
have still hands, and I use them along her fabric-covered

legs, reading braille. Then I know what I'd thought I'd
forgotten. The sunlight itself, it travels in the blood,

   turns blue
in the closed eyelids of high noon. Black eggs stirred with

a little salt, so expensive, but I find them in the dark where
ice serves, in December, as a delicate platter--they grow

   like wild
mushrooms on top of the lake. Baptism is like a photograph

I've seen and so remember, the sunlight all sanded and varnished,
the dunking under black stones, a still life buried in the seams

   of the rain
and the clouds' reflections off the lined up shining spoons . . .

2012-01-05T00:16:00.002-05:00

REFLECTION IN A POOL OF WATER

The fan spins overhead. It always does, in
rooms, a clipper. Fields burn, and the crickets

   glow inside
them. Birth dates and death dates, a bottle resting

in the crotch of someone driving
under stars between burning buildings . . . I'm taking

   time-lapsed photographs
and feeling the end of all things in the way the eventual green

is flung out in front of my face like a stop sign.
In other words, speaking does nothing. A car sails over

   a hill
but it's the plastic flapping in a barn window I notice,

certain of flight. I wash off the eye shadow but the wind from
the fan bothers the surface of my cup of coffee . . .

2012-01-04T23:24:00.000-05:00

Frank Stanford lived and wrote part of The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You in this hotel.

2012-01-04T13:10:00.001-05:00

THE RUINS

Incommensurate, the visual's a thing-in-motion,
geography on skin, the pornographic an end of choices, not even

   the hands
on a clock, no wind . . . There was the bowl of sugar

dumped on pieces of apple while a tarantula
calculated nothing under a countertop radio, the sunlight

   in Tampa
Gulf-colored sea shells. And salt, a tomato glazed with it

   and devoured
whole. Sugar and salt. I liked catching the small blue-eyed

crabs in the canal near my house. No storm clouds. Trash
floating on top of the ocean becomes a dolphin fin. Things you

   can't touch.
Things you can eat. Things you can't eat, but touch.

2012-01-03T17:33:00.000-05:00

2012-01-03T11:47:00.001-05:00

REHABILITATION ASYLUM

                                             (1962)

This isn't anything you should be
concerned about. Were the houses going to

   be raked
by nuclear winds? You should have explained youself,

worried about your unstuffed rabbit. Your mother
was like a fifth child. I was three. The shadow of Cuba

   sweltered in
a corner of my room. That rabbit had been steamrolled,

machine-washed, stuffing beat out of him. Huge broadleaved
plants covered the centipedes. I was stuffed into the bag of an

   older child.
Passed around in the sunshine and pines, the hammer swinging

sideways, dead birds eating the baseboards. That was my
lineage. Thirty-one years old, wearing the mask of the prisoner.

2012-01-02T13:24:00.001-05:00

CRYSTAL SPIDER ASCENSION

Death's turnaround time, terrifyingly, a portal--
we swim there, multitudes, collectively sea-

   buoyant
Your teeming pieces float out to the stars where

fish begin larval, eyes stored near the stomach; every-
thing / nothing   umbilical   constellative

   sweet   tungsten
floating   lubricious   molecular   terminal   morning

          (for the title of this poem I rearranged the words in the title of a Charles Wright poem)

2012-01-02T11:50:00.000-05:00

THE DOORWAY

There were clouds on the cement, a bit of instantaneous
recognition. The water meets a shadow, a mask

   I tear
into paper, and foil. It's full-royal; flowers, my skeleton,

a cigar box of old love letters. Cigarettes, coffee cup
on saucer, two pieces of silver--Ok, he censors, unsustainable

   modality. The
cataleptic gnats lick rust. But the trees are forgiven, living

where nothing else visits. Picasso's collage, in progress,
"objects on white tablecloth." I see a window, waves in the sea,

   a Teddy bear . . .
The certainty of union or group ecstasy, 17 years between cicada

ascensions. So deep is the mind made of flesh. Curved in a
transom. The innumerable seconds divide back to the singular

   instant. It
is an injection. A crowd comes forward in the infrared sunshine.

2012-01-01T14:20:00.003-05:00

THE VILLAGE

I guess I usurp, hush puppies be damned, and the hard-
core moon, pearl set in a division--Beauty will do that;

   symbolism; the
real smoke, and fences to crunch over. But it's a kind

of a lie. The sun's what's coming down to me reflected on
what's really the face of a rock. I salute you! When they burned

   the last citizen
I could see out past the rim of my own ring of fire. That's why I

take folic acid in pill form. God let me survive this miraculous
hanging. The highway of the intestines elongating with pleasure.

   One black shoe
fell to the ground. Hoarders arrived in old trucks, then walked
away.

I want to live in somebody, swallow the medicine, too; one slow
searchlight getting past the rope. After the fingers went still came

   a second release.
Dear Earth Mother forgive me. I stopped taking notes at 5:30

But the grass was still warm, combed, the air bitter. Resuscitation
as flood, her lashes grew dark as a lantern in the woods.  She

   stretched her
wet fur. The curved board swung free; now it was making a print of

itself on the ground. I folded the knife inside a towel and breathed
harder. Eavesdropping, the law was waiting at the far-flung gate.

2012-01-01T03:12:00.002-05:00

2011-12-30T23:06:00.004-05:00

THE REPLICA

The secret is being able not to. Or
Don't do it. Don't cry over the fact of procreation,

   over the
prelapsarian signature . . . How wonderful! They are

Nude in front of it. But we don't want to write that script--
far from salvation--or even before winter . . . before

   Creation. A
hawk stood on a branch looking down at the owl

decoy. The rest burned down right after the election, but the
view's still the same, now roomless; the paintings aren't gone;

   they're just up
in the sky with the clouds and the rest of the broken geniuses.

2011-12-30T18:10:00.002-05:00

2011-12-29T19:02:00.000-05:00

BEING OUT OF FASHION

I had two thoughts: obscurity as something that
resists--not the same as difficulty. The smaller the

   better; tongue,
finger. But I want to get (in) there. concussion:

under the spiraling Jesus. I could be in Lansing, Michigan,
off-cells, the retina has its plan for you (for you in

   particular). "Darkness"
is everything the present tense is not.

G-Force--trying to get to the future so that the present recedes.
I had it also that I might eclipse the imprisonment of my

   own perception.
Tunneling to the other side. It was in this moment--the

conception of fashion, the moment of seeing (knowing) growing
smaller. And smaller. There was pressure on the forehead, the

   knuckles. Both
shoulders ached and strained. An eye lash touched a blood star.

2011-12-28T21:06:00.001-05:00

UNFORGIVABLE ABSOLUTE

But we're living, the great released   occasionally
unburied, isolated autocracies   insects bowing

   in rows
somewhere the first dark erased by a candle   a brain scan

resurrected with millipedes   the bone isn't a balloon
an architecture for flesh, the day suddenly warmer   I can in fact

   let go
now   Born unto hands, Surrounded-by-Kin said   an absence of

nudity   your dirt, your disorder, your jet-trails   broad minimalism
of the naked back   the body swaying under   signification stripped

   to swamp-wood--
fingernails, pores   tire tracks; lightning   the cost of things; kissing

2011-12-27T22:20:00.001-05:00

GLORY

The air faints; we rise. I was on the feast
rebellion. it's everywhere you place your mouth

   The flower
loves its burst of blood, especially as a consequence

of sin. so once we just said: That's it. Liberty and
zippers. I watched as if I'd come back around looking

   the posture
over from a car, got out with my gloves on. 10 yrs old

was horrified by the unavoidable emotion, how to keep
it in check (or show it) undressing mechanically.

   Please just
look at how they don't have to do it (it takes care of itself)

though it's nice, the one chair. red fingernails pale sea frothing
back and forth, the fur coat pushed there, champagne was what

   I imagined
my eyes. i need a flapping rag to wash this noise, dirt all over the

bottom of her feet. I mean it's survival in action, stirring with a
spoon--interest is accruing, we're sweating over ignoring that fact.

2011-12-26T23:14:00.001-05:00

AIR RISING OFF WATER

At Between the Buns you're expected to want
cheese on your fries. Ho ho, only I can count the days I

   spent in
your neighborhood. I smoke when I'm aggravated.

The Dali Lama burps on stage, and I consider making
him a write-in candidate for (something), I want to

   amass a
collection of "personal" poems, door to door, beginning

with the prompt "I fucking love/hate" etc. but throw in
the name of a loved one, some kind of bird you don't give

   a shit
about, maybe a disease (or nostalgia for some appliance

from the past, like a popcorn popper). I want an open-minded
burper to be my personal saviour is really the point, but I'm

   uncomfortable about the
word personal. The good news: no one I've ever met seems holy.

2011-12-26T20:22:00.001-05:00

1-800-YOU-FAKE

                         (for K. (you'll never know who your are (which figures)))

What's in this milk shake? Today I encountered
bad cheese. Why me? we scream into the camera on

   TV, smiling
a little, through tears. One of my old passwords was

DOGBITE. Boone's Farm, Annie Green Springs. Ask
your grandfather. I'm sort of fed up with everyone, always

   making plans,
a nameplate flying through the stratosphere, personal

seconds in bathrooms all the time (I'm not a crybaby!), and if
you're lucky a strategically placed barely blurred window so you

   can go
in two directions. The shocking private moments of Karen

Carpenter. That's what I see in a drawer full of mouse poop
and newspapers, the nostalgia of before, right now, after the

   mosquitoes in fact,
but __ years before my (or anyone's) death, still waiting for snow.

2011-12-26T16:12:00.001-05:00

EMERGENT AND INTEGRATED

What do you know, revenant, your level of
wakefulness isn't in any fashion surreal, I can see

    the stage
becoming funereal . . . Under a film of coffee the blinking

eyes of reptiles, a giant squid, fossils of large protozoa.
We are like poinsettias, the hidden anger in the laughing face

    turns into
welling tears, talus pile-up, live bait sinking past the unfocused

eyes, stone precipice—the order of things gets unestablished;
the dragonflies, disturbed, light in a row along a graphite rod,

    each shivering
exoskeleton indistinguishable from another, each sparking sunlight

way past dusk. I do believe in this. They said, We're going to start
over again (again). Two pillows, hair combed, two sets of

   staring eyes . . .
Now it’s summer again. Their final months were cocreated.

2011-12-25T00:18:00.000-05:00

TWO COPIES

What makes you dig the things you
dig? I’ll tell you what doesn’t. You staring

past me

again. “That so? Davy Byrne said . . .” doesn’t

address anything. In other words, I’m not your

mother. I don’t care how much you know, for one thing. Try

to be

more generous. Try to be more generous. You sound

like somebody’s mother. The two of us sat

staring into our fluctuations, our desperate faces

a discontinuity.

2011-12-24T00:02:00.001-05:00

THE DIFFERENCE. THE STILLNESS

Maximum leaf color, red mostly, but there is
no sound. The waterfall is silent, the mosquitoes fill up

with blood
I can't visit this beach anymore. The golden eagles

keep substituting for bald eagles, mortals live in white
plaster, encased. The jug sat on a stump for years and

migrations took
place inside it. Music resulted from breath blown across the

lips of the stem. Deep in the dark forest, behavioural patterns
were discovered in feathers, everyone brushing everyone's hair.

2011-12-23T16:06:00.002-05:00

THE ESSENCE, AND MEMORY

Art, the act of water skiing: ginger's subtle, exotic
spiciness; but earlier than that. The flight of

   the elephants.
All this is closer to what is. Or from.

They call it a train box, maybe a bit feminine, open it
and you begin a line of what's important, the past with its

   telephone poles
(I think I can see the future from here) and anxiety (the

clouds hang low; he slaloms right toward them, if he can't
do this everyday will I die?); I wake up sodden,

   my spine
a bridge over Cress Creek, that ice at the bottom of the

world. But I was too there then, and only the people
watching remember me grunting. Those sponges.

2011-12-23T00:50:00.000-05:00

VOCATION

It's not elastic. The Bible that cracks open
is glue, integument, tree bark; a book full of love and

death. Insecurity.
Stir the plaster of Paris, or whatever it's fucking called,

until it comes. You're a presence from your hair follicles
down to your anus. Thank God you learned to

play drums
while the others were mapping out their careers.

2011-12-22T22:49:00.000-05:00

THE DRAG STRIP

I keep falling in bed. This is old, old,
always, the happiest garter snake in

Cincinnati
I walked out onto a deserted drag strip last weekend.

I thought of Mondrian and Pac Man,
I saw the herons guarding against intruders.

The night
stunk of gunpowder and cognac processed by the

liver. It was residual, I guess, redolent of being human--
and dying--after rising out of dirt.

2011-12-22T21:34:00.003-05:00

SPIRITUALITY

Genuflection comes, it dries on the skin,
it fills the air outside the face with plumes--

it oscillates--
The man holds onto her, thumbprints on the delicate

wing feathers. And the way she moves around him is like the
emptiness inside a manta ray, the deep black sea, intersubjective;

I want
to craft an interruption, some sinsemilla in her eyes. Or twist down

looking while digging up the green; the bullet seeks a closure. A
final kiss. I wrote my lucky number there . . .

2011-12-21T22:17:00.002-05:00

CONSPICUOUS LACK OF BAD ENDINGS

I slept on a bench, forty-nine days, getting
stupider, my money back in Ludington, while

   the ferry
pitched. That was ok. Later the bulls ran loose on the

country roads, and once I poured milk on her
bee stung rib cage in a burning barn, pigeons roasting,

   the moon
on her body; the days it took to fall through North Dakota

and come back out sensitive, shackled with the masks
we took to wearing, mine portraying teeth as if

   the lips
had been ripped off, hers graced with the image of two pried out

eyes. We rested near Dead Colt Creek, stripped to nothing from our
necks on down, fog rolling over the bones in our hands all evening,

   a catalpa
shifting a little wind, a boat in a dream; a convulsion.

2011-12-20T16:05:00.000-05:00

MOUSE

Good reading at Fiddlers Sunday--poems by Neil Kelly,
Rebecca Pelky, Charmi Keranen, Jeff Tatay (and his nephew!),
Jordan Eash, and others. But I'm really here today because I have
a mouse running around--a little black fleck of a thing--in the
kitchen, living room, etc. It likes my bags of bird seed for one
thing.

I'd normally let the thing be, but the "droppings" that eventually
appear are a deal breaker. Only problem is the traps, the usual
wood and wire contraptions (one thing that hasn't changed in 50
years) aren't working, since they appear to be geared to a variety
of mouse somewhat closer to rat-sized. My mouse keeps stealing
the bait (peanut butter) and pooping right on the trap. I'd be mad
if it weren't so fucking cute.

2011-12-20T00:04:00.001-05:00

MIDNIGHT

There are metal

fences, classes cancelled,
snow drifts moving

across the road. Dusk

in the morning, the
numerous stars

seemed to be piled

outside when you
woke up. One last

cigarette. Chain-
link, dogs roam the
junk yard, one last

walk to the store—
cold is just such
a condition.

Nothing moves for
years, you walk through
the cathedral.

After you cross

the train tracks you

climb over the

fence still sleeping.

2011-12-19T02:02:00.000-05:00

HELLO NEVER-ENDING-NESS

"Pigs suffer too, I said to myself, and immediately I regretted
that thought."

2011-12-17T22:59:00.000-05:00

ORCHESTRATION

                                     --after Lars von Trier's Melancholia

We can't see past the face, wide plastic
shell with white lips . . . The matches are for lighting

   furnaces, a
child riding brainless in the belly. Lace passes through

these frigid constellations, jewels breaking
in pearl river water, the heartbeat a rock-on-rock

   echoing of
sound, a trembling of leaves, the fawn smiling

with its neck broken. I got up from my usual stadium
of green and moved from wall to wall like feeling was

   a game
played underwater. At the end of time all the colorful birds

will colonize what's supposedly heaven, bleeding into
one long trail of planets barely missing other planets.

2011-12-17T01:07:00.002-05:00

PAINT

I don't "experience" business, don't know
how to lap it up, can't stuff its straw into my

   mouth. I
don't know how to tell anyone Submit to this--

"the RN believes the doctor is an idiot pigtailed
in kindergarten"--unless it's full of broken eggshells,

   the stink
of old paint, a little wind perhaps, peripheral with moths

and clogged eaves troughs; the ripped up threads of flags,
a tin of sardines in a coat pocket; I have no idea what any

   of this
is worth. This vocabulary of pine needles and haylofts.

2011-12-16T00:13:00.003-05:00

THE BABY'S DOCTOR

To deactivate and unroute the semi-reclined
baby's doctor, unroll a towel. Unlatch the face,

   first amongst
the carbon-dated vestiges displayed, subluxation

from the kicked off jaw, lost eyes wet behind your eyes
behind your eyes behind. Elucidations. A logical picture

   of facts
is indeed a stethoscope. The trumpet vine makes a

cup, such a tender mouth, looking out through deep well, a bird
in the sky, five branches of splintering light holographically

   meant to
be my world up there, my baby's doctor, the hot sweet shriek

of two squirting kidneys; drink all the fluids you want!
Position the lap part of the belt across your pelvic bones. This

   reduces the
chance of internal injuries, your chest providing optimal

protection from the airbag--a nexus, a concatenation of
names, a wing chair . . . No one should rely on one's baby's doctor.

2011-12-14T23:09:00.001-05:00

BELT BUCKLE

Unbuckled, you prick can go nine
ways. He saw the writing on the (bathroom)

   walls. Walls
rivered with condensation, a saturnine burst

of testosterone. My face is in the sky. It's
bleeding a piece of the son. Let me go back to

   the stall:
squid, goat-pig, lunch on a blasting cap,

the faces themselves not involved in the dreaming, not
allowed in the making: like a dog catching a rocket in its

   sideways mouth.
Near toilet paper. I shake and I shake in the stench of

this god's
tiny heart.

2011-12-13T22:42:00.001-05:00

WINTERKILL

As well you might, coriander; the yard is hugged
with vermin--blue, blue--every second zooms

   forward: the
death of nostalgia. It's about the framing, isn't it?

Aren't you panting amidst the yellow wings,
death's heads, the vulgar remains from before?--

   Dream is
that a face pushed through it. Darling, it said,

the hair out at sea. Darling, over the gale winds,
she lost her words in the eye of the poor thing's going:

   The fence
that is collapsing, and the worms that are at hand

were a buoyant affliction . . . I dared you to say it,
remember. I couldn't. I wasn't squinting

   or waiting. No
one was laughing; white gums, stitched with nerve endings . . .

2011-12-10T15:55:00.002-05:00

2011-12-04T22:18:00.001-05:00

THREE RED TULIPS IN LANDSCAPE
WITH HORSE AND RIDER

Under bushes, autos, house stoops
You were maybe fourteen, sixty-seven? If the

   Ostrich leaps
And breaks across the differences, trot-lining for instance,

Trucks and trash in the water, is the velvet hitting
Wire? The girls were often smaller,

   Bigger in the way
A body scopes an issue of another user's body--

Stewardesses, come to the cockpit please
And misguide the pilot, let him know he hasn't

   The skill
To man a rowboat. Standing near your thriving seedbeds that day

In Racine, lights glittering without misfortune,
The jet engines like a lover, I listened to the

   Skeletons drying out
Like flowers opening and shining in a dark apartment.

2011-12-03T22:54:00.002-05:00

ANTAGONISTIC

Two rooms, three rooms, forty-five
rooms, and a man fishes for his

   Lighter in
His pocket. The cucumbers look so green

On the white plate. The wash sits in the sun,
clothes just out of the dryer, trees getting into the

   Person. That's
The idea, fluffed with air, how can anything feel

Better. It can't, she says. Someone who doesn't
Like you casts a lure over the lake. He's not going to

   Get anywhere.
One by one her buttons pop like firecrackers.

2011-12-02T23:37:00.000-05:00

HEARTBEAT

Sidereally
maybe
rich as something

white
surgical
the afterbirth

ten seconds
is long
enough

wind
nothing is moving
nothing

2011-12-02T00:32:00.000-05:00

THE LOVERS

This starts in the flowered hill-scape, drained
Of love, sipping crushed pomegranates. You were like

Botticelli in
The foam last night, a bolster for my broad meta-

Physical ennui, not even standardized, all messed up with
Sugar and pimento olives. Now the lake-swept

Breezes rake
Our damp hair. At midnight I put on the X-Ray glasses and I

Looked at you. Seagulls sailed above the house while I watched
You kissing the front of my face with your eyes wide open.

2011-12-01T12:39:00.001-05:00

ICE

The bay is frozen outside. It will melt by afternoon. I like when

the ice freezes before snow. Occasionally this happens with such

intensity the clear ice grows thick enough you can walk on it.

Without snowfall fish freeze in the ice (earlier winter die-offs)

and the ice becomes a museum of bluegills and perch, frozen

seemingly in motion, eyes staring, sometimes for miles. I used to

play hockey on Mona Lake (in Muskegon, Michigan) on such ice,

and the constant flow of blue and silver and yellow fish whipping

by as I managed a puck with a hockey stick seemed miraculous. I

thought, this is heaven right here. Transition to: a few months ago

I watched heron swallow a nine or ten pound carp. It was brutal.

I collected snakes as a kid and watched many such hard-to-fathom

swallowings, full of remorse but amazed as well. The heron

stabbed the carp with its long beak for fifteen minutes, killing it.

Then began the long process of swallowing it. It took over an hour.

At one point the heron simply stood upright, about half of the fish

(its back half, its dorsal fin and tail) sticking straight out of the

bird's mouth. Once it swallowed the fish (I watched all this from

my back porch), The heron's neck swelled to enormous proportions.

It was simply a neck the exact shape of a large carp. I was dizzy

because I'd been holding my breath, or breathing shallowly,

whatever, and then it was time to get back to things, and for the

heron as well, who took a few tentative steps, stopped, looking

across the bay, and suddenly flew away, gracefully, as

beautiful as ever . . .

2011-11-30T23:51:00.001-05:00

THE PURITY OF SNOW AND VIOLETS

Or you could leave that towering sex slaughterhouse, roll
Up the goats and condors, the penciled slopes of two

   Human hips,
Ignore the sawdust falling out of everyone's spinning

Eyes. In the fields large running birds
With hairless heads ignore the hourly sirens and Asylum Lake

   Burns. This
Isn't the way it was supposed to happen,

Of course. A walk down some railroad tracks, pollen
of weeds and the aspens, a howl of a train in an unimaginable

   Distance. A
Woman in a bath kept singing while it grew darker and louder

Outside, one of your molars coming away white in
Between aching fingers, its root like spiraling vines.

2011-11-29T23:26:00.002-05:00

FIRST SNOW. FIRST SOUL

It wasn’t so much a puppet—
They were dead in the sewers hung up along

    The curbs—
Or even a big wedge of corned beef.

I picked up twenty knives before I found one heavy enough
Because the heart’s gnarled meat—you know this, right?

   The flowers
Blooming along the windows in the elementary school

Blistered like soft blouses . . .
Man looked at herself in a mirror and that was that

   The tape
Looped back over and over again unlike the tracks of animals

2011-11-29T22:22:00.000-05:00

ROOM FOR RENT

The house is a cove, the house
is a cove, the house is a cove, the

   House is
A city, a stone's throw, a kindly

Regurgitation, I'll admit
Where have all the bellboys gone, off with

   The sluts
Yes we were in love with that kind of magic

Are you distant or something
The rain connects us with the water, the sadness

   Connects with
Can't you see the sun on the horizon bleeding

All over the surface of the lake
Where the loons swim in it laughing

2011-11-29T21:31:00.001-05:00

CHEAP ENTERTAINMENT

                                    ("as I sd to my
                                            friend, because I am
                                            always talking")

On the lower register, despotism--
I'm as free to be a bird as the next swan.

Literally picnicking on hindquarters,
we spent summers soaking cool in a blush

of blood. The jugular, the shit sack,
my David Bowie albums. "Just because

dental floss is skinny doesn't mean you
didn't just litter." You're kidding me . . .

You're cooking in it, two cups full of freedom
and the fiery (angry) inside of a bean, the face

that stares and stares, long bone of a nose, wet
eyes--the draining lungs of an empiricist who

got the game all wrong, makes soup out of what-
ever is handy in the fridge (I've got this leftover bacon),

then checks out her "projection" in the side view mirror--
I think we're all just panting dogs.

2011-11-29T01:10:00.003-05:00

DAY BRAIN

I had that face
On again--G-
force, strapped in. The

Moon is private
Property, the
Floats there having

Been abandoned,
I thought to my-
Self, rattling in

My cage, my face
Fluttering, my
Mind still moving

At the speed of
Light, para-
Sites feeding on

Other Parasites,
I didn't want
to go that fast.

2011-11-27T20:28:00.000-05:00

THE NECKLACE MADE OF LITTLE CLOCKS

It was back in the bowels of
The place. I left with a wide hockey stick,

   A goalie's
Responsibility. Battalions of these things,

Webbed against the ice, flooded the hallways,
left all the curtains in tatters. There were a few

   Nude models
Waiting to draw a wage, drawings of white socks mostly,

Some tendons in the thigh and ass, the brown thrasher
That strutted from easel to easel, screeching, or flapping

   Its wings.
You have to understand these were the usual habits,

The jerking and sucking, the standing in the basement all night
with nothing on, the huge heat vents blasting overhead.

2011-11-27T00:27:00.004-05:00

THE COYOTES

There was a way to think, what
Disappears, what is destroyed, what

   Splits apart.
We came out and found a large circumference,

A stone that crunched up clothes and bones
When we rolled it aside to claim what had been ours, had been

   Taken away.
We trotted along the cold turning road.

Easter had never been like this, bridges rising out of
The dunes, nothing to go back to, water collapsing into

   Deeper water.
We continued to believe in this, the law of animals

Who don't look back, the sun in the sky gold as the yolk
Of an egg, her face looking almost human in the evening light.

2011-11-26T21:28:00.001-05:00

POEM ABOUT SAFETY

A tablet, Tylenol 3, beef jerky,
you open your mouth and a poisonous

   Fog moves
In. Until I ran out. Now I will dance

Forever in the leaves, nickels shining
On my eyelids. String, wood, and paper.

   A bird
Pops out of the clock. I want you to use this key

So I can't go anywhere. Another virus, you know,
Is moving up the driveway, another standing ovation

   With a female
Name. Steel gravity. Go stand up over there and rain.

2011-11-26T19:45:00.001-05:00

A HAIRCUT

Velvet and fur, or sometimes I'd come right
Out of the water, walking like a black statue,

Blue eels
Squirming on the swept clean floor. The prayer'd

Go sideways into light. It was because of the
Nozzle jets, head back, warm water rinsing my hair

Until I was
Just so happy. A pipefitter comes, removes

Splinters. I could get up now. Because that's
What you do with parents who refuse to touch anyone.

2011-11-25T22:13:00.003-05:00

THERE WON'T BE FLOWERS

Opposite corpses, I mean
A snapshot, a beautiful fence,

A beautiful face.
My own drum cracked a little,

My heartbeat, put your hand here
And don't move it. The flag blew in the offshore

Breeze. The
Slenderest of legs, crossing where the rain is,

Asphalt hot and mixed with feathers, orange spray,
A garden beginning to bloom there, her eyes closing,

I witnessed
A sudden birth, blood connecting us at the lips.

2011-11-24T23:53:00.001-05:00

MY CALENDAR FOR DECEMBER

Yeah, I know. The tricycle
paddles over the hole in the sun.

   The soup
Is too cold. Examine the significance.

If you burn an ant with a magnifying
Glass guess what? Take a Magic

     Marker and
Draw a circle around the womb

As you remember it. As you were beaten falling,
And laughing, as you were thrusting, as

   The snowfall
Increased, as the human diagram dried in the sun.

2011-11-23T23:11:00.003-05:00

CONFESSION

There aren't that many voices--storm
Door. All the windows slammed shut,

   Japanese beetles.
I whispered in her ear, silverfish in

The wiring. The result was music,
Mechanical, like a crop duster buzzing

   Inside a jar.
I moved to the rear and placed my hands

On the stirrups, little hammer in her
Eyes. We lived so long there, dirty in

   The leaves.
It was storming when I wrote the letter.

2011-11-23T00:19:00.001-05:00

THE MUTE BUTTON

The pause is what fills the bottom
Of the stairwell. The rest of the windows

   Are paintings.
Like a train swallowing a beam of

Shadowy air. My story ends and hers
Begins. I sigh, press "play." Usually no one

   Is watching.
A cottonwood splits. Half of it silently

Crashes to the ground. When the neighbors
Wake up the house across the street looks empty,

   Swallows
Flying in and out of the windows.

2011-11-21T23:18:00.000-05:00

NEUROLOGY

Runaway, ghosts, when they
Swallow they hurt the earth.

The puppet's
Eyes were lead. He lived for

Solace, alone, in a box, but he
Had a heart. There wasn't a soul left

In that house
With me. One time I found my cup of

Coffee outside, sitting in the sunshine,
Some dirt sprinkled on top.

2011-11-20T20:30:00.000-05:00

PERSON

Don't hurt me
don't and endless
earth seismic with it

thinking in
to yourself's own shelf of
sun room vacation

close my eyes?
I walked away
like it meant little

I stay here
I tried roaming the countryside
born as meat meets

explicit--nothing like that can
burn down my body with
your body

your kisses'll bring me
nursed and abandoned
will bring me

like you meant to communicate
to say (to say)
I'm not going to just suffer

a single mallard on the pond again
Jesus H
I breathe the breath (I say)

the breath will not exactly
matter
which is not to say it won't

it won't even be
a thought
anymore

2011-11-19T21:21:00.000-05:00

I HAVEN'T YET TAKEN NOVEMBER PHOTOS

It's late on a
Saturday. Sports
ensues--everyone and their cousin

are at the sports bar.

The romance was in the burning of leaves,
the life after the first wasted life, trying to make money,
but now the smoke just stinks up my foyer . . .

Out in the yard, rakes, sunglasses,
a familiarity you can see, or misprision, deck shoe
happiness and a cup full of cigarettes . . .

I just happen to have a pack under my car seat.

Because I'm a survivor.

I bought a little jar of olives for tonight and I do plan to use them.

Is it average to tolerate love

then crawl around in the new snow saying Where is everyone going?

2011-11-18T23:08:00.004-05:00

THE FISH

(Mona Lake Channel)

Error. No interrupting tears
came to its eyes, forehead like

oil, but there was the cup of brilliant
water it gargled on . . . Our

alcohol was nothing like
candy. Hook that could swing a

wrecking ball was burped out sideways
under the moon, and I felt a chill

on one side of my face and forearms.
Give me your knife, Hawkins said,

but I was confusing my
swallows and bats again, the

water fluctuating with wings
and music. Later I'd kill some

other things. It made me read
a lot more books. The stars speak

for those who have no voice, an
old wino might have said but

didn't. Four doves in a pine had
rearranged. I circled a line

of words on a page. A long groan
accompanied a flood of water

that pulsed out of the breathing muscle,
its lips like sculpted plastic . . . Some

stones turned dark and stank. Never mind.
A cicada had turned into a monster.

2011-11-17T23:54:00.001-05:00

RIOTOUS HUNGER

Prescriptive, a new face, wasteful
but a blast. The torn attic books through

town. The house squats
or it's relaxed. It's way over there now,

screens ripped, glass blowing . . .
Cartons of cigarettes, catalogues, old flattened

receipts. Nothing lives better, nothing
living, looking back, the tips of buds in

picture books, ice dams . . . the heart's
on a table--we can't help it--eating cubes of

horseradish, wanting what it wants, the face was
erased, said the headline in the news, he went

to bed and never got up. Flash flood, it all came
out around his gas mask, clapped back like a dream . . .

2011-11-16T22:47:00.000-05:00

THE CODEX

(for Alice Notley)

Medea--vase painters
all--you stand with your hands--

don't pose--experience your breath--
breathe it into the--codex--I'm--

I'm opposite, shamed, ceiling full of books--
but--the sound

as it flies
from the body--coughing--

like something coughing/crying--
blocked windows--

or laughing--a cough or a laugh--
a laugh--the soft--skin

I go--imagine some features--
topographical map of--

throws it--shame in the sweat--
throws it--out--the expression on the face--

gladness--it barks under light--
she coughs, they both cough, laughing--face lit

by face--a second laugh--everyone else--eyes--
open eyes

2011-11-16T01:06:00.001-05:00

STATIONARY

Lecture me
a person listens

doesn't learn.
She trusts you . . .

And your favorite drink
this morning is . . .

Memory is a
Moog synthesizer

Your body is
a liar?

2011-11-14T23:52:00.002-05:00

RUPTURE OF THE FRAME

I'm not tensed against the spirit,
the word

razor-gutted,

like laying pipe, the fungus carnival masked up in a lab

Pick a corner, damp

oh your fescue, your eyes writhing, exhale and go

I've signed a new contract, for gems such as you leak--

Lynx diamonds--

Jewelers circle the brains of hammerhead sharks

I'm not losing what I've learned
that deeply in the ocean softened

by sawdust and milk . . .

My resolute, I'm the pivot in your heart (the birds rotate)

your hand, my veins, consume these functions . . .