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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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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