from 4play
#19
Three titmice fluckering in the oak tree’s former leaves.
We watch because we want to be zephyrs,
endless. Undercover support:
a leaf, a bird, a sad sad Sunday
bent under the branches of what wind?
Beautiful thing is:
beautiful is one of non-thin’s becomings,
a beard-branch.
A ranch hand singing broken folk songs:
no alternative
to nothingness but many alternates—
your hair, a detective we remembered well.
Did Poe slick back the sides of his hair too?
Swallowed, inflamed
and asking the author if, then, why
his heartbeat could not hear us.
#20
This is not a sad or despondent book.
endless. Undercover support:
a leaf, a bird, a sad sad Sunday
bent under the branches of what wind?
Beautiful thing is:
beautiful is one of non-thin’s becomings,
a beard-branch.
A ranch hand singing broken folk songs:
no alternative
to nothingness but many alternates—
your hair, a detective we remembered well.
Did Poe slick back the sides of his hair too?
Swallowed, inflamed
and asking the author if, then, why
his heartbeat could not hear us.
#20
This is not a sad or despondent book.
This is not to say anything about plums.
This is not recoil or abashed.
This is not your memory, remember:
this is not an earthquake bake sale.
So be it.
Be me being __________ . This is not being
mortar or ashes, ok?
Ardor or molasses. It makes no difference:
discord and bad blood between
the chordate. Ridges before a bridge is made
and we know not to cross it.
Or codes
that lick themselves
and don’t remember doing so.
Waking with one finger still in the electric socket.
#21
These adopted cities
This is not recoil or abashed.
This is not your memory, remember:
this is not an earthquake bake sale.
So be it.
Be me being __________ . This is not being
mortar or ashes, ok?
Ardor or molasses. It makes no difference:
discord and bad blood between
the chordate. Ridges before a bridge is made
and we know not to cross it.
Or codes
that lick themselves
and don’t remember doing so.
Waking with one finger still in the electric socket.
#21
These adopted cities
sutured to blue, witness:
saturate clues and quenches,
claims or
not, squelching
a person’s shadow
lit by the acetylene tooth of sky.
You call out, Star-fucker, you fucker
Fuck me harder, like in Brolaski’s new book.
Wipe this look off my lower back.
How lovely the world is
when you are the defendant.
Is there no release?
A release could be manufactured
between these gestures of constraint,
a plant can grow despite a weeded way.
#22
Another cinematographer Brooklyn-bound.
Bruised but not abandoned.
Glossed over and very tightly treated.
Trained to be a narrator
on a subway car made entirely of interior monologues.
Urged and encouraged to come, come...
cum home humming, an accumulation.
The conductor does not know this:
standard of never leaving heights stranded
beneath a periplum of Pound’s black bough.
Content simply to sleep beside her,
without the blanketer, her hearing stops.
The outcome of my failure,
the influx of my flesh,
the absence of my abstinence is
a way of moving there.
saturate clues and quenches,
claims or
not, squelching
a person’s shadow
lit by the acetylene tooth of sky.
You call out, Star-fucker, you fucker
Fuck me harder, like in Brolaski’s new book.
Wipe this look off my lower back.
How lovely the world is
when you are the defendant.
Is there no release?
A release could be manufactured
between these gestures of constraint,
a plant can grow despite a weeded way.
#22
Another cinematographer Brooklyn-bound.
Bruised but not abandoned.
Glossed over and very tightly treated.
Trained to be a narrator
on a subway car made entirely of interior monologues.
Urged and encouraged to come, come...
cum home humming, an accumulation.
The conductor does not know this:
standard of never leaving heights stranded
beneath a periplum of Pound’s black bough.
Content simply to sleep beside her,
without the blanketer, her hearing stops.
The outcome of my failure,
the influx of my flesh,
the absence of my abstinence is
a way of moving there.