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.