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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A Bedtime Story

The tortoise lived by himself in a tree.
He survived on the fruit in his home
And the smaller primates passing through.
He was hundreds of years old and remembered nothing
Except living in the tree. Which he did not know
Was on an island.
     Off the coast one day a shipwreck
Left a mother, father and daughter on a lifeboat
Until the daughter was caught and tossed by a wave
And deposited upon the beach. She was OK
And sat for some time on the beach by herself.
She was scared of being alone. She saw
Tortoises with small tails dragging in the sand
Higher up on the beach. They dragged their tails
Extremely slowly. She asked them some questions
But they didn’t respond to her. Bored,
She wandered into the forest that seemed
The majority of the island. Above her
She could hear rustling and grew fearful
That she was not alone. She saw the tortoise
on a branch,

who looked back at her.

She was unlike other things he had known.
He grunted in surprise.
The girl asked,
“Hello?”
The tortoise was further surprised.
“How come you can speak?”
“Excuse me?”
“You look cold. None of the other
Primates here can talk, though.”
“Well I’m
A girl. Though I learned that I think
Is a kind of primate.”
“Did you catch your fur
On a branch when you fell out?”
“Oh,
I am too scared of climbing trees.
My friend Alicia broke her arm
Last August in the Park by my house.”
“And where is your house?”
“Uhhhh
My Mom remembers but she’s uhhh
I think still in the ocean. We got knocked
From our cruise ship and I don’t know
Where they are now. Have you seen them?”
“If they look like you I have not seen them.
What is the ocean?”
“I don’t know. Around?
It is where the other tortoises live.”
“What?”
“The other tortoises. On the beach.”
“Oh I don’t know about that.”
“Well how
Did you get in that tree?”
“I don’t know.
I suppose I was born here.”
“Do you like it?”
“It’s OK. Its lonely sometimes.”
“Really?”
“I suppose I have never seen another tortoise.”
The girl agreed to introduce them.
The tortoise came down very gingerly.

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The Four Ply of the Heavens

The Day gathers itself
Into a bindle for wand’ring Night,
Who on a metal harp
Tuts out a bending note.

You take a bath in the ice where you slipped.
You watch the dirt splash back around each drop
Of rain. The impacts upset some loam
Beneath the ice and soil, and it gathers in a puddle

Dammed round with feathers.
The birds usually just tut around the lawn.
They continue to patter-off loose down
While scooping up silt in their beaks.

You feel better through wet eyes and when you move your head
The moon seems to swipe through the clouds like a flare.
We will start walking
Come promise of stopping.

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"So anyway, I didn’t get a flip phone

because the buttons had octogenarian proportions."
Its not like I am actually rude, I’m just surprised
To see you here, in this same taxi, after all these years.

He caught at some of the words that I used

In my effort to steady and comfort him

And clung to them. “And I was going to suggest to you

that you serve your eggs with hollandaise sauce in hubcaps.

Because there’s no plates like chrome for the hollandaise.”

I can quickly appreciate it because of the colors and the size.

I forget about my job when I look at these paintings.

I don’t think of anything when I see this.
Did he die from the chest, or the filling up of the fluid?

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"That there is

one fast ambulance.
What a pity. Wake up."
Open the door, she
and ways to love
flash the sun
with a cloud.

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That Great Gatsby World of Extravagant Hats

He came shambling up out of the dark, towards us.

We asked him to sing it first, so we could know

If we wanted to take it with us. One song as long as the trail

From Texas to Montana, with a stanza for every traveller.

She made me understand the cause of my anxiety

Was the spirits trying to communicate with me.

The Americans are brittle, i.e., they tend to separate.

Kin to Old Icelandic brotna, to burst, break, or still forming.

See, too, the Old English brytta, one who bestows

Gifts, avoids the doors and windows that he leaves always open.

We maintain the “trace in the mind”that certifies these distinctions.

I went to bed that night with a bright light shining in my face.

I was on that roof more than once. Every full moon

I like to have a drum circle. It’s perfect for me as far

As rejuvenating and so. I will be there with my drum, singing

So soon, so soon, I’ll be at home.

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Spam 1

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