you tore me out into the night
following the world
through the bulb of your vestibule.
what cures can come of this
shadowing the supermoon,
grabbing handless at a halo
that tumbles down into a pile of koans?
we perch our listeners up in oakleaves
where katydids shriek across the limbs,
the song of neurons in our empty streets.
the white cat settles like a chinese lantern
onto the bench, and you sit there, too,
the pair of you, progenitors of silence,
suspenders of far off energies,
the dark heads of heather
that lap my nervous matter
back into the belly of a girl.
I wasn't meant to survive.
when they tell you to kill yourself by spoems, literature
Literature
when they tell you to kill yourself
they allow you just one belief
for life
id est
as long as you can hold yourself
your fallacies
your god
your junk
upright.
i’m not worth more
than $200K
that someone sunk
into a shrieking hive of cooling fans
and the peculiar reticence of diodes.
don’t believe me?
see what happens
when i topple them.
i’ll be disowned.
they’ll banish me from bars, from grocery aisles
set fire to my house
boil my children in street cauldrons
and sell off my lover.
whatever it was
you put in for
on day one
when they knocked on your door
and left the world
strapped to a timebomb
in your porch swing
what cavity you craved
to r
Left to me, your worst historian,
to pick up, in a daze, some depth of diction
I never found while you had lived
and I can only now pretend that words are capsules
of sanguinity, that they’ll unmask the symbologies
of sound that bore your binaries to their realms
like sacred dreams of Hypnos.
Regret’s a simple word.
I always thought of "A Separate Peace", and in those scenes
you were this Mozart in the rough, a perfect chord, one
which I would meekly channel through cracks of light
shown through the fist of my own interference,
steady indifference.
too long
i’ve held watch
over slovens in my chrysalis
rooting in my diaries,
in toilets
and in traffic.
i dream of razing their genitals.
if not for this ugly sycophant . . .
no,
if not for limestone
swept
into mud
how would i know
what instincts have been rewarded?
if i hadn’t made things
sacrosanct,
tree lines as noble architects,
a face, some godly panic
then i’d just see a headless corpse
some cat had torn
from shallow burrows
instead of this:
an Algernon
as still
and as holy
as
the flowers
that you left.
1.
i hear these words
and something happens
in the yard;
it doesn't fit
a poem
or planet.
i see it squeeze
into the slits
beneath your shirt.
i feel it fly the smooth
of you
from off your back. it turns
and hides behind the acres,
stock frontiers
of jagged rooftops,
kept far and safe
and free
of me.
2.
the squirrel
has left the limb
as light would leave
a photograph.
i’m staring into its absence
and some new kind of animal is made;
one where
only
its reversal is alive.
it doesn't move or breathe.
the park is wintered over, and i don’t go.
the poppies
are all gone.
and when they do come back, they never chan