I was picturing the perfect hammock as an antidote to the mercurial endowment of the speaker’s eyes that skittered toward targets of greed. I saw firm feeling held between strong trees.
ready to entertain kidneys and liver,
that’s
our girl. some days
she goes by Sunny.
Diego trudged over and stood still below
the boy, now the king of that hill.
Diego began to make faces for the boy.
And the boy became giddy, so much lighter.
Even forgetful, perhaps.
sam wanted to know why i’d bitten
the hands off of all of my action figures
so that they couldn’t hold lightsabers and guns
if not for those children
playing war games
tearing off tentacles and petals
rehearsing explosions
memorizing marches
I shuffle the deck
and the world lays flat.
The bluer the sky the darker
astronomy becomes.
Channel Five flashes footage of my house
The newscaster’s tone not quite as condemning
as the word NIMBYs he keeps repeating
Referring to us who object to the bill
that wrote a half-way house for recovering drug addicts
Tomorrow Pasternak dies
in Peredelkino, where on his grave
we spent our youth
reciting "August,"
surrounded by quiet men in dark suits ––
they almost liked the lines.
a big black savage dog
is chained to the axle
of a rusty Ford
in the overgrown front lawn
of a dilapidated house
You need to know; you cannot condescend.
Reciprocity delineates
the limits you can test. Remove the mask.
Make yourself what love obliterates.
Recall with startling clarity,
the hue of a private tattoo.
I almost spelled your name again,
fingers tracing foreign flesh.
Your mother performed
Absence so you do not know
Limits to desire
Whenever you face the loss
Of dolphins a void hammers
The messenger burned out and crashed.
Once a quick-silver bullet
Screaming into the sky,
“Listen to me! I have so much to tell you!”
Hummingbirds emanate from a mirage's radiant haze now.
Tornadoes vanish on the glowing horizon comets graze now.
I fake solemnity and self-negation, finish my meal.
Mosquito swarm about my face, sweat beads on
my brow. Emptiness was more fun to write about
before navigating the corridors of cancer wards, orderlies
Admit the truth
open the window
goodbye to houses and hello to farms
this is the way things are
out in the world
Stop that crap! We built this country
And made it what it is, great again,
After losing the topnotch place
With our kindness and indulgence;
It is our country now, and our home!
a beautiful woman among the throngs
removed her dress and began to
march naked, cutting through the
thick crowd on the sidewalk like
a rapier, everyone moving aside
one time he said men will use
kite strings to decapitate other men
riding motorcycles
no, you’re fucking with me but it is
possible invisible strings can slice clean
In my death I meander through mirrors that reflect the void of my face. My eyes dissolve into black holes that contain multitudes of nothing.
Upon the scrotum's fell evacuation
the musculature normally declines--
or so the common wisdom of our time
lets one (that would be me) anticipate.
But here I feel a pair of muscles thrive
on my castrated travel-partner's sides:
with her prowed breasts
with her hands down, like an irish dancer
she scurried slowly across
Evil's another story, a story
whose orphan narrator is misery,
married to pain, son of suffering,
sibling of spleen. I have seen evil.
You have too, so you know there's
only one way to get rid of it.
Before he died a few years ago
I touched Moses' dying skin
almost empty
of its fleshy weight
or "aryan", or "norwegian". the ideal
of blond hair, blue eyes as wrapper
for a superior type of person
you know, the stable genius sort
You were very small at the time I admired you,
and from each glimpse across the water
you seem only to have shrank away.
They call it stormy Monday,
Thursday’s just as bad
Siri’s not responding
My GPS’s lead me to Riyadh
May you know your neighbors’ names. May those names cause
more pleasure than frustration. May they applaud
the life you choose to build—your triumphs and flaws—
your loyalty and trysts—your science and your gods.
The paper is ripped on the page
of my favorite Alejandra Pizarnik
poem, my ear aches, and I cool
my hand with a glass of anything
what kind of city is this where one line goes one way and another line elsewhere and another line with three possible points, another for foul shots, another for out of bounds? where telephones have lost some of their lines? where bodies come in types instead of fonts?
Speech was discouraged
to keep from setting off
the man of fire
who would lash and scorch
then burn you down.
like cornered in juarez
or the rough stoppage
on a dead end street
like this is your other
this is the price of looking
of behaving in a rational
and irrational way
A headless snake
striped like fresh high
way neck rough
gnawed away from mind
away from—
no matter which reality
The medical
papers in his left
hand somehow describe
a journey into hell
going deeper trying to
escape
The bar is stained with alcohol
with a mirror behind
so it looks as if there’s twice as many bottles
as there really are.
I am traveling with my uncle
down this old road falling apart
with potholes and chunked out gravel
an owl watches from the woods
the granite hills burn like buildings
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