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dog at my pillow dog at my feet my own toothbrush
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for the second time this week i've watched snow fall at sunrise dawn arrive on a breeze
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did you know that maryland has no natural but only man-made lakes nope
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whereas you with due forethought and deliberation bite into an apple's heart and wish it were your own
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where can we go when our wings weigh more than the rest of us
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hence an axe above each separate entrance as the hero becomes hardly a voice and the sad dogs appear on the screen
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the doors of the subway car imitate an o opening and closing in the blood the o spirals its helix of defects genetic shadows but there are no instructions for identifying loved ones who go crazy
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i am afraid i will walk the streets naked i am afraid i will shout every fucked up thing that troubles or enchants me i will try to murder or make love to everybody before the police handcuff or murder me
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you must look without looking to make the perfect circle the line the mind must be a blind continuous liquid until the drawing is complete
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i wanted to make myself like the ravine so that all good things would flow into me
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compare those with the risks of becoming a well with a well-bolted lid
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the palm stands on the edge of space the wind moves slowly in the branches the bird's fire-fangled feathers dangle down
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that's what misery is nothing to have at heart it is to have or nothing
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it is a thing to have a lion an ox in his breast to feel it breathing there
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he is like a man in the body of a violent beast its muscles are his own
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the lion sleeps in the sun its nose is on its paws it can kill a man
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he was trying to teach me to economize with my language strindberg gray he said instead of
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and your genial smile made it plain: you were pleased by my wish to please and then you died
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yesterday white and blue sails pretty on the water sharp glint of skyscraper glass then this derecho
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for a moment it is something that stays with me like a memory that does not give up easily i try wiping my hands onto my jeans but nothing
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the seabirds' hunger rose in rings flung rock-clams to their shatterings raked gullets full the bone-bills scraped
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all winter we slept benched together breakers sleepdrunk children in a car not conscious where they go
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we kneaded bread kept out the weather while old suspicions huddled by the door mice in the snow
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on the floor and hear the clink of silverware the stars their distant speaking and picture the ceiling the back of a woman kneeling covering the heart and holding up the bed and roof and cooling sky
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powerful disobedient inside their draughty haberdasher's climate with these people
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and not for the waterpools would i go back the great muscle of my heart to thirst like a drunkard for the scent-storm of the trees
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water mirrors house with high green door opening out (no steps) into pure air
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i have lived it and lived it my nervous luxury civilisation my sugar-loving nerves have battered me to pieces
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madness on my bad days (and i'm being broken at this very moment) i speak of my ambitions
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and he becomes intensely gloomy with the look of something jugged morose sour mouldering away with lockjaw
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i grow coarser and more modern (i who am driven mad by my ideas who go nowhere who dare not leave my frontdoor lest an idea
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go to the cinema i particularly like it when the fog is thick the street is like a hole in an old coat and the light is brown as laudanum
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is somewhere else in his dead bedroom clothes he wants to make me think his thoughts to keep away from
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swollen drums they had gravel underfoot and tongues that could peel citrus
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radios throbbed the wet hush of my breath flung itself to mother
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i spied everything the north dakota license the baby on board signs dead raccoons and deer carcasses
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i was single-minded in the buzz saw tour i took through the flatlands of the country to get home i just wanted to get there
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how can i say this more clearly it was like opening a heavy book letting the pages feather themselves and finding a dried flower
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so if you speak only to imagined beings what does only mean
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a way to spend an afternoon back when an afternoon needed spending before all the silence flooded the house
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none of the streets here has a name but if i'm lost tonight i'm happy to be lost
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monument to the fact that no one can hurt you no one kill you like your own people
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but may you never go through what we went through may you never see what we saw may you never remember amp may you never forget
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by the river years ago recursive in memory a finite moment the past ended future began
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the river flowed south you were a man's face floating among stones
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by a river in autumn willow leaves were yellow whisks in updrafts we were not alone
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the river sounded the swish of its name you waded the neosho as it meandered east
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no one saw flood-seined silt gravel broken mussel pearls i stayed you left
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by the river i was a child i am grown i remember water pooled not moving
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live jazz at el fresco is one guy electric plinks until he turns off the switch closes his eyes and warbles a boy's tenor wood-flute tones
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a time to eat fat and oil a time to gamble for pennies and gambol
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i carry his mother's framework a sturdy structure i learn his birthright
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every person has rights no matter what color be respectful
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someone's going there now the two are sure to meet translated from the korean
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van gogh waves his paintbrush leave leave leave there's no funeral tonight
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mr president mikey's cursing again
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a clamor in the distance a crowd running under the rain beating down between the canvases the sea wind set clattering
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i took refuge in a museum outside the great wind mixed with water reigns alone from now on shaking the glass panes
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on the night of a beautiful lunar eclipse the silhouettes smiled translated from the japanese
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growing going in drought or monsoon mold or blight what is the rice if not alive
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snow explodes like sugar that someone is stabbing with a spoon in a glass of chai
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why i'm going to the taklamakan desert at seventy-five leaving all words behind: the cry of the emptiness there
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there in the taklamakan desert the silence of a thousand-year-old skull translated from the korean
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but in fact i haven't even touched you at least not yet
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i look up and calculate their exact arc and find instead a flawed theorem
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heavy translucent vaporous split red by mother tongues winter's breath is pink
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i'm taking this back to my perfect desk said the hg this is really something
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and coming back at night we get on too quickening to the safety lights through shadows of gates that thrust across the grit
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should i tip him am i dead what happens next
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the baby sleeps sunlight plays upon my lap through doily leaves a black lab comes a scotty goes the day wears on the baby wakes
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white soot descends and he finds himself dressed like an apprentice baker
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anyone could be crucified two thousand years ago but to be crucified now to be crucified in napoli lift me up
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eyelids fall softly from their gritted corners chalk let it drizzle stinging flank heifers in their shove and jostle down a bank drinking behind the curtains billowing with images how the unseeable dispersing into folds slung aloft in sea mist impermissible point i breathe i look i carry forward i can sense the last of you taking o rail i hate the thick floor beneath breathe over a market quarrel let the vault branch recklessly light-streams maze air's stirring giving what-for to earth seeming to attenuate rock is marked fans across the inlet a white shadow writes over deep-set floor
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because they could not detach from their objects of unrequited affection they became the predominant clientele for future singles cruises unilaterally sustaining the singles cruise business
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giving it back to the doctor who had slipped it poorly into his coat
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flies out of the tree to try rum cake on a plate of caroling cherubs
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ends up on her back wings flared silly girl spinning over the kitchen floor
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later between the blinds tiny bump of silhouette a stillness against the falling snow
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forgive me aunt phyllis for rejecting the cut glass dishes the odd set you gathered piece by piece from thirteen boxes of lux laundry soap
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and the woman with a hard heart and softening body who stands in the driveway making change
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and has two sharp horns about in ea
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compiled by some paralegal underpaid in phoenix i assure you i will always serve i am the envoy
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death is coming and you must build a starship to take you to venus
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they say that planet is torment whipped by circular wind choked in vitriol clouds
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we were always hiking some hill toward some beauty some human meanness ruined we were always waiting too long to let ourselves be seen
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gregarious in hunger a flock of twenty turn circles like whorls of barbed wire no spot below flown over uncanvassed
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it wasn't holy so let us not praise gods let us not look to them for bread nor the cup that changed water to wine
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they were expert at sabotage hand combat you stop the clock in your paltry chest the one that says choose choose
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deep sleep with necessities i never knew i knew until meeting you a few days or many distant voluptuous lifetimes ago
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molecules that accumulate in drifts too soon strewn with sand hewn into browning mounds by plow blade left to turn to slush
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as in giorgione the suspense is eternal
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because i'm stuck like this my thoughts are crazy perfidious tripe anyone shoots badly through a crooked blowpipe
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my painting is dead defend it for me giovanni protect my honor i am not in the right place i am not a painter
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'sinister ugly lurid be their fame may their familiars grow to shun their name and their brood perish everlastingly
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colonel cold strode up the line stiffened all that met his glare horses men and lice
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those who watched with hoary eyes saw two figures gleaming there gaunt in the grey air
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only a mean world would have this man driving around in a city where for no reason someone is going to fire a bullet into the back of his head
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though in some of your works no chapeau for in them it is not a bottle but a test tube one finds one's finger stuck in
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no i i see there's no point in talking to you
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and you will never answer back sun i do not think you have that power only i do and i will go away and be the sky
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