Because of Words

Without poets to connect
The consideration of the mind
With the backbones of the dead
We should be two earths
Rather than the sun and its reflection.
The dirt.

The dead are one earth
And the mind is another—
The same, but somewhat intemperate
And more muddled and premature
The separation lessened
At birth.

There’s a spark of the Devil
On the paper below the pen
No moral is intended. Even prone
To dispossess, the language of larks
Into lit protest, and the words
Are broke.

The costume of a corpse buttoned
By the burial in a figure of speech
Destroys not our work
Nor muffles the bell of thought
But the moment of final exhalation to its mute hour
Is rotten.

Flesh is the soul of sound
And breath is the evaporation of indifference
But writing words like facetious and abstemious
Decorates the atmosphere of every vowel
We turn the phrases
And tread.

Wherefore by the bright face
Of each key and point we drain
Our thoughts together with per mutations
In a spectral shower
We rest between expense and expanse
And live.

Unexpected Birthmarks

Pigeons peck at chicken scraps
& no barks respond as sirens pass

Nature now dry trees & replication
& dead birds keep flattening
on paintings—

Mistranslation is missing
the brushstrokes

One visible fingernail like a nevus in a pine tar sky
& a finger sweep in the public frosting

Venus roller skates while steering the stroller
& the dog walker limps & has twenty-four legs

Awkward pedestrians overlook
our mannered postures regard a solar eclipse
before a gazing apparatus

& continue these steps despite exploded heavens
anatomies of rats in the street—morsels & a mouse remain—
light particles

Perhaps for orphaned armoires & what they could contain
& ex-library memoirs expunged from the system

Nervous gleaners take a sleepwalk
around midnight & take a gander at the air

I diagram the firmament & note twelve elephants
steadying the atmosphere

~~~

The nocturnes. The sacral superimposed on the sermon. The nocturnes
the ornament and the hearse and the ornamental near the heart dangled.
The sacral. The temperate humor traipsing along the fulcrum.
The nocturne. The nascent sunshine eastern present ascent.
The sacral. The fulcrums. A temperate hour traipses along them.
The nocturne. The haste. The sunshine nascent nearest ascent.
The spore. The haste. Sacral superimposition on a sermon. Porous.
A temperate humor shifts inside it. The haste. The spore. The ascent.
The melancholic. The fulcrum. The haste. The spore. The temperate
heart traipses among them.

On a Whale

Sand is felt on tin as nails or fists on doors
Tore down a war to stand with you man
And I stare at flesh and gore
Now hell and he send horses and messengers
Downwind signing against the gale
I feel slow and shallow as dew grows
New on a tan I felt
Grind the sand into the shore and fish will follow

O
Not

A

Wing
Has half
A
Life
Enough to feel a fellow minnow’s fin

Money is a kind of poetry. Wallace Stevens

A kind of currency. Lingua franca. Electric voltage to jumpstart a body or fry it to a crisp. Everything is bark. Words. Mots. Palabras. Pesetas. Copper. Argent. What a verbal illustration—a tip dessin vert—a mint species. Green olive and foliage. It will buy you a lover. Keep you in debt. Make you use bills for scratch. Jot your bliss. Spend it. It is vibrational. Tonal. Clinking in your pocket. You’ve got some. Everyone hears it. Wants it. “Just keys,” you say. Honestly. We’re bound by an imaginary trust to compensate for a world we can't afford. A cent is more magnificent in power than in form. The opposite is true sometimes too. Shells. Buttons. It attempts to replace all things it cannot be. Tender to feed children, who will always hunger. We want it we want it until our change is perceptual. We see trees different. We learn the value of patching a deflated tube inside a tire on the shoulder of an empty highway. No promises but to leave a memory imprinted on grooves and creases of our palms and fingers. We exchange notes on a history of dead men and wonder is it a means or an end to suffer? I drop heaviest coins into the mouth of a washing machine to shake the debris from the skins that protect me. Spin. Slide on a magnetic strip of data. Plastic. Rarely seen or held. Easily drained.

Reader Takes All

I roll Dekalb. I
watch color walls. I
illegal scrawl. I
feel
Fall. I
keel haul to
port of call. I

kill oak gall. Jackal
dolls bawl in
mess hall.
Ah !
ritual alcohol
non-habitual. I
waterfall

default to
thrall crawl

no wherewithal. I
drawl to
downfall. I
anchor

ancestral temple I
follow falsetto to
steeple to
people to
purple pall. Je
suis pas mal. I

Overhaul big
basalt ball
bearing to
Nepal. I
maul dhal
enthralled
by witwall craw
FAUGH!
I
am
salt
to
this
call.

Description of a schoolboy

You were born on an autumn day—
that held both crisp and soggy things
maple leaves among mushroom rings
apple butter ripe bright decay

hot cereal gone cold and starched
shirts the crunch of sloppy kisses
under awning reminisce this
your lips were cracked sucked and parched

ergo, you know several things
about orange and assonance
ships, harbor, sea and ambience
about mulch and daylight savings

when you first smelled the East River
you released your cogent control
to transmigration of the soul
you believe relive deliver

you see a child yourself you posit
or as a female passing on
away across the street at dawn
you pull receipt from your pocket

to postulate her fears scribbling
plans to find a Brooklyn rooftop
where you pop open your laptop
to settle for the evening

to roll a cone of tobacco
to tuck behind the cigarette-
holder growing out of your head,
denim jacket stained with stucco

rummage through its pockets and find
hardened tissues from wash and dry,
an old matchbook from your last high
and a receipt with some late-night

epiphanies that do not sound
so smart now in your “creative career”
Appear austere with beer not ear,
you laugh stepping down underground

take a train as far as it goes
to watch a woman slip and knit
a story with each hook and stitch
she’s Scandinavian, you pose.