but thoroughly annoying

A dishonesty

forces nothing

we haven’t

already abandoned.

I mean

an easy

trash compaction

an easy

course withdrawal

an easy

letter sent.

These are

the changes

anyone expects.

Anyone expects

some sacred

decay.

in defense of the current tenants

Names like these rhyme. So do they?

Don’t they? Our horrible geography

suggests there’s no help right up

to the third line. But then. O then.

We all got stupid. And finally knew.

If you make a point of never saying

anything about human sexuality They

will find something anyway and make

a point of it. Architects have eyes.

then directed by the other's need

Having let myself fall

into the cask of Becoming One

I perjured a cat (don’t ask)

I invested in The Absent (ask)

I forgot myself up a small tree.

But back down here

there’s an axle that binds two wheels

to each other and a path.

“It’s the aesthetic truss of language

(as in song, comedy, and cussing)

that will confound and ultimately

relieve some of these aching cultures.”

certainly there must be reasons

Who pushes poetry so it hurts rushes back to the trees.

Tests our poetry all along without arguing. Thought art

Could approach the chaotic. Unscripted expansion in light.

Saying things I mean words tries a way through the blank.

Meaning comes like a lie. Course it is. A smile he said.

The truest disconnection. Snuck in by the gods way.

Ordinary day broke open blathers. On a strange stage.

Not awake though. Not yet here. Not a critical cell.

He said. Then drew back to forest edge. Which crows.

Which oaks and sycamores. Which hardy shadow beasts.

Understanding came like a truce. He whiffs a critter.

Comes like an informal invitation. This was lifelike.

In its petals and bracts. Deciduous permutations. As.

The science around it rises to say. This is its name.

No other until you make it. Like a person. An option.

clarity at the exhibition

Who I loved really loved looked at me

wanted notes in exchange for the looks.

They noticed my sideways appearances in

Homeric similes like stars so far off you

can only see them on the edges of your eyes

and you have to be in a very bad mood sad

or angry with yourself because you’d broken

all the promises to Them you really loved.

They looked and worried in time to jazz to

classic R&B and defined as second-rate breath-

less tunes I’d just invent and start with

an airhorn blasting them into the dreamy sky.

Who I loved at last loved looked at me from

homilies and circles and confidential asides.

vocation road notes

Harping along on the interstate, we understood the phrase “This is a call from God.”

We’re taken overland until the roadkill stops us. Bloody pals.

I imagine my car in the center of my religious life. As an inorganic optimist.

Which road had us puzzled as a dwindling resource. This was mine, then suddenly yours.

Attention to clouds, to thin metal poles, specks of birds. Who as future grant us the past.

And there. We’ve arrived at something. Holding hands and praising ourselves as ‘convinced of the fact.’

And here.

the complex networks of practices and accumulated subtlety

They’ll say you should take what is given & be

grateful enough. New floods have emptied the world

of what’s full. Remember when you grabbed a layer

of vexing fact & thought it’d do for a lifetime.

 

Hungry in the fines. Hungry in the soaring. Saying

inspire inspire and awesome to the most astonishing

degree. And we all fall down blissy cloud-scathed &

free. To extract one onion from the shocking soil.

noted in sleep the obscure resembles

The impossible appeals

to my homely economy.

A yard of names in rising

follows the long-forgiven

unfortunate comparison: river.

Wind of the stream. Bright scribbled others.

You on the 2nd floor. Them on the fifth.

Coded in cold I remember how cold.

Hewn like an old crayon box. The sun.

The whole world came to its lecture.

I was startled and stammered to recognize myself

in the pressed-out debris of each book’s tongue.

They came at me like fond hordes like damp fire.

in this special recording

The dreams mostly plod

from one mild strangeness

to the next where I fail

to hold up my end. The

others are not awfully

disappointed but I am

deranged and deracinated

peculiarly bald and one

note short a symphony

of shelves. Of glory.

 

of the lesser as a meaningful place

In that there is no one to apologize to

in particular no one but the many in general.

In that now & then you note a configuration

of sirens a block away you never heard before.

In that the sadness of a particular country

tune and lyric might depend on one of your own.

In that your fears are fractions of a world

you took on the whole to be consequential.

It follows that it’s not birdsong but a

squirrel’s grief that bewrays the morning.