There is a curiosity that knows
I know
deathless ceiling of unknowing
...
I can play songs in my head
Yes I can perfectly replicate
(the) full-on
orchestral
every note
(when the lights / do down / in the city)
yet I cannot
compose, for example
and though when I was young I believed
that the fullness meant
I could recreate the sounds
I heard in my head with my mouth
I learned through painful iteration
painfully unsatisfactory
shameful the rendition
so partial
almost unrelated
the qualities are: note tone scale register vocality musicality
incapacity
painfully shy of representation
is there anyone?
who is a record player
...
Careening over the
highway in
my lightweight
Japanese
Death Star
buffeted by the great and powerful
winds
icy winds
of winter warming
cold air with hot air
under it
accordion pleats
of natural disaster
my disaster
in the past if you were to say to me
or to rage at me
in a poem
about America I would charge you
a great failure
to even use the word. It is
banality
this land is suffering because poets—
their great cohort—
I look twice
to save lives.
...
there are some things up there
uptown
I want to see
I want to see I'm going to look at that and see
I want to go up and see
that show. That show
I went to see, I went to see.
There are some things up
there uptown
I want to
look at that and see. I'm going to see
what I look. What I look at, when I look, vessel,
I stood to see. I went to stand to look
to see. Venturing further I went outside myself to look
at that wall. It fed! There was a box inside that was not blank, I saw it.
It was really different from an aura, the thing had
colors, the thing was talking
to itself. And spoke
to me, not incidentally.
...
Let's go out and buy something. In the sun.
No, let's stay home and make something, the sun floods the room. It
could be green, on paper. It could be money. That's the way to create
new matter.
That's how I detach boats from moorings—my boat, my mooring—
the harbor
shallow in low tide
skiff propelled over buffeting sands flats on
sheer
puissance.
...
because you're psychic
no one else could understand me
the way you
do and
I say
Drink Me
I say it to you silently
but it calls forth in me
the water for you
the water you asked for
...
I'd like a
lidless
Vicodin.
Oblivion.
Countless
sensation of him
leaving the room.
Come back soon.
It occurred to me
fait accompli.
Clinamen.
Phantom limb.
Black cat sleeping
(you used to be
next to me)
next to me
dreams our lost
telepathy.
...
I stopped by to see you but you were not home
marshland
the pure vision
my ancient lives all risen up and rising
shudder in my bed to come up against
a living religion; they get offended so easily;
blow up your hundred-foot Buddha
no problem. Entire mountainside.
Presumably it's an improvement
on whatever came before
on what was here before
ancestral crypt your daddy built; a grassy hill; a patchwork quilt;
inadequately warming.
...
Half a day is dead already-
a lady with a baby in the shady graveyard
promenade not quite the idea
but the first idea to be impressed
so firmly- Grace to be born
in the
bisected quadrangle
stones propped insensible
but all in relation
to the babe.
Babe what suckles
babe what grows comfortable with thieves in a fertile
bed of unsaid
slice of eponymous
grafted to the reef
Hold my hand
in the undergrowth
waist high at your leisure cheerful
child of melancholy and displeasure.
Soft in the lap you grow
hard at the breast- Oh
under- and aboveground we go
to relieve us. Camphor
and cambric by the hand not by halves,
one turn more
will take us back to where we rest.
Baby is not baby when she
wears her oblong
freshet
I will take her home to rest.
...
He died before we could honor
him correctly. Candied
impulse through the brain.
Your will subverted
that's a tree, a treatment,
a genealogy. Oddly enough if I need something
someone is sure to give it to me.
To supply me with it. Oddly enough,
it's not about cutting slack
but about positive reinforcement
Detergent in the sense that it is
emergent
deterrent
where the nascent
meets the latent
I put my tongue in the path
dug up some chestnuts.
"We'll keep looking
for a place for you
inside of nature"
I can't remember how I died.
Writing something down at the time
the grave had been disturbed.
Next thing you know, I'm making
an entry in my diary: No use
letting it get cold.
...