At Issue to Below Your Nose

Pillow brackets, silk covers we all confirm

Upon like a Bible--the wise things of the world

Feel like flesh when they melt, feel like pulling hair

Out for to press between pages. In carving the nose

The appendage must not be overly handled and made

Too slight such that the rest of the head needs 

A lot of sanding to even it out, and how much

We know so much depends on what we have

Below the nose anyway. As a child I was kept

Away from wet chickens, which stopped being white

When left in the rain. 

How simple my possessions are I understood

Only after living at home, having made it cozy 

And intelligible through tended growth. 

The garden, itself in a fairer hour, 

Saw the sun between the iron gate small enough 

To be blocked by a single bar 

That now has an aureole. In acceptance of its

More general role, like wit, it is practical even

While transcendent and spilling tea all over

Herself. She demands I leave the room

I am using for reasons I would not have

Other than we live together and have sewn ourselves up.

I have heard we will never hear the end of it. 

Nothing, she hissed. The audience cheered cautiously

For the Black Dane from Zealand. It would have sufficed

At what we are although I'm not sure what one

Is supposed to talk about while sober. 

Add to that, I'm conspicuously not smoking here

On the fire escape next to that guy whose hair I remember, 

Who stills writes papers due long ago, timing it so 

Because he expected a riot and wasn't disappointed

When he saw the bruises on my cuticles, 

Shaped in the symbol you had adopted: a black triangle. 

He had sharp, daggerlike sideburns

And was raising his children as anarcho-primitivists. 

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Love that Costumes

While often rapt in plosive elegancies, we are searching

And powered by nuance let and pushed off like steam

Around a sweating metal spout.

You know I had already run away by this point.

I had begun to run without knowing I went

Along almost scratching my nose against the pavements

Of Paris. The twist at the end is he is meeting a woman. 

And, you know, he did make it out. 

He did escape and become successful. 

They (Christie and Springsteen) have met twice

And don't talk. I have my keys in my pocket

And my hands are filled with grocery bags

Which I now place on the ground and later onto the counter. 

But the dish tastes good and would be sad if swept away

By the texture of the meat and power

Of anything I can imagine coming from me. 

I can't reinvest a leather coat worn over

Linen undergarments, by definition it is

Gin-based and delicious. That's what agape tastes like

The shoulders rubbed in oil and singled hairs

Feeling like cracks or imperfections I thought that I felt

It while looking for my glasses, such as boulders in a river-

bed, in bed. Guiding only from

Below and aside--and the

Theatrical convention is for no-

body to hear him though

Ophelia is also onstage. 

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A Pastoral Of and For Our Times, which Uses the Word "Sheeple"

Serif an O and wave a bubblewand

For others to blow through. Place those

Trim, comb-like teeth to work to mine

More gunk than usual. Though I was rushed

When scraping this morning, and still

I've dried soap around my lips. 

A shepherd winks across the pasture

And it is carried by three different winds. 

He looks foolish when he chases after these gestures,

As he sheds his wolfskin cowl without ceremony. 

These patented genes were airborne, a beneficent spread 

From crop-dusters supervised by Gates Foundation.

The serengeti cups the sun in an acacia, 

Speaks loudly as it is itself a big stick. 

I heard the Cetus sifted through plankton before 

He was turned to stone by Perseus. 

He Greek hero had very little hair.

Stared into our great green 'nother. 

The day the shepherd's accounts came due

He raised his crook and lowed, "Wake up sheeple!"

In the stadium and in the well-lit yet inexpensive apartments

With wooden fire-escapes on every building.

How hath this day deserved a guide

Or a directory: a model for the calendar of sins

As those enumerated first by the Warburg Institute, 

As we follow their lead and the sway of their handheld machine

Which two men hold, standing each at a post in the doorway. 

They bring their arms back in useful mechanical 

Motion forward through and through the door. 

Crawling out from under mine own unnatural self 

Takes a few minutes and holds up the rest of the group. 

The sun is set and you hear a distant  *clink*

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Contrite Traditive

I wish I had wheels in my body. 

Maybe that is how it ought

To work with long-term rentals, 

A modified patronymic tradition. 

In the bride's hometown

No abbreviation is necessary. 

We could feel the axles crossing, 

The wheels propelling us towards nouns

Swagging deep, guiding loud contrition

With studied fingers. Your mouth, the lentils, 

And I have been serious for far longer than I thought. 

With them hazard lights on, the scene gets bawdy. 

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Valediction for Joelle

I have the chance to really be somebody, we think. 

This I consider my most salient feature. 

I speak to many people, like they're water

And I am a green glass soon to be beautiful though

Currently at an antepenultimate stage of truth. 

I am going to be new-agey next year, I can feel it.

An ominous tone as the observer comes into focus. 

A man in scrubs rubbing his hands together, wondering

If the existence of the system is merely a moral imperative 

From the point of view of totality, the same river

Thats flows beside the throne of God, the same, 

Side-tracked. Interested, so to speak, when you say

Rising early and returning quietly. Left watching Pawn Stars. 

The auditory flash-forward forestalls suspense and represents 

With an equal disregard for tragic overtones

 An American tragedy whose subjects have been absorbed, 

Bit by bit. I feel so hedonistic, surfing and scattered. 

Your child is missing. Where are you taking that train.

The Lake Shore North has been closed; anyways,

It's not my car. We have become one flesh

And the flesh is you. The proper entity of comparison

Is the world. Trying to contain them so 

To beat them later, I guess. Wisconsin to Chicago

To Austin to Houston then north again. 

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