Poetry

Who’ll pardon need? I was the baby & grasped things babywise: queer smells, voices, carpet nap all wrong. I crept backwards, nudged rear, rolled, sucked a red fist, knocked into & fingered at somebody’s new toy telephone, dialed up myself the house of murder: over there maybe fifteen tinny rings spooked the liver-&-white spaniel. Yelped…

Now they’re singing inside in monks’ perfect time, a God-world-world waltz every three hours. Why harmonize with the damned chimes? Match what’s built, and nothing towers. Misfits, looking out (the mistakes of twos) from a roof, for a blind date, aim their gaze— the empty frozen whites of it—and hold fire. Eyes, go ahead, past…

Bully for you, you made Glee Club. A trumpet voluntary for you!— but the Safety Patrol monitor lizard ruffles around to me when I call. You made high C, the suicide note. Attention-getter!—a smattering stirs the bleachers & I too murmur up a platitude as it ruffles around to me. Glee Club folds away scales…

Vaporous carousels passing soundless: man on lawn under brother-clouds. Swollen-breasted red robin present then gone, back to pick such reeds with a friend. Beak’s-work done, their cries are hatched, perhaps brought on by the man, perhaps of vectors sprung from the hectic mind that makes a bird’s tail swivel into radians, as if, fast upon…

I arrive again in the right place but with the wrong set of objects: a keyboard with four or five letters rearranged (in a crooked row) so it’s hard to keep things from coming true by accident. The nerves scrape feeling from the heart sac and refer it to skin on the left shoulder. The…

I’m smoking a cigarette and having a drink with the only woman who’s right for me. I’m telling her a joke that isn’t that funny but we laugh anyway as if it were, and then it is. Ideal forms are everywhere, the chairs on which we sit, the windows to our left and right, our…

Hurricane This is scaring us, Hurricane That’s not far behind, And we’re not turning our backs one second. We look at the screen all day. We find Hurricane This still flapping away At the shirt of Tom the Weather Guy. Canada throws an arm around him. Hurricane That just bats an eye. Hurricane This is…

The tines I used were basically the same. The line that read, “My blue eggs never hatched,” was fabricated, yarn of passion, play. I never laid an egg. I never lived a past, unmitigated life. (I think.) Of course, there was that time my childhood stopped its beating—Mother sat me down to preach her strictures,…

How exhausting it is to be constructed of a thousand parts—or is it several thousand? Even the potato locked in the darkest antechamber has a certain cunning, how it shoots its push to the window’s crack, how it sniffs about for whatever, dirt. You know what I’m saying— don’t make me say it. It’s too…