The Bronze Age

Every day absorbed in tupperware plastic

grows satisfactorily along cellular strata,

trees sniffing a wind’s trace, the boat’s bob

on specific ripples peeled off distant

undersea indecisions. This is what we

came for, excused from our tasks by

some emergent tumult, a lazy earth

not willing to meet the word “morning,”

not knowing what to do about birdsong,

not compliant with a calendar’s grammar,

and not for nothing, but not for everything

save a sentence to dig a root to. Scissors

we made from a flag’s colorway, cave painting

the sitcoms while we take a data hit

straight into the mainline. Should all of this

be recorded in a faithful fashion, today is the sliver

you jimmy from under the nail, pus flowing

to fill the vacuous cavity of how much I miss

the scent or your skin, or the scope of another

unspoken nest of silent strands, hopeless knots,

the eye pressed against the microscope’s glass.

Titled

I’m trying to remember the sense of forgetful ambivalence

that what you were always saying you recalled mentally

about that time, that one time when things had happened

or’d been happening for probably maybe a lot longer than

any of us had realized they had or were, and even wasn’t

exactly quite true, that something about those events

of that part of our lives when all those issues still felt

unresolved, and even then that whatever we’d been

working out – those long foggy mornings at the place

just on the edge of what town there could be said to

have existed in that country – was as yet still unrecog-

nizable as anything vaguely shaped like even a compro-

mise, something about those events held the most ill-

defined form of finality, but also with some hint that we

were already well into the very first moments of some

new beginning, like people from some far-off country

boarding some kind of vessel, or not even, just entering

the station, or not even that but just opening a suitcase

and wondering what to put into it, what to take out of

the storage, what to do next and what had been done all

that time we were already there and so ensconced and

yet also about ready to begin believing we could start

planning the eventual steps we’d need to take in order

to leave but without, certainly, knowing where or what

lay ahead. In all that fog.

The Company at the Tree-Line

Tired of monotonous, sloping skies, we turn our eyes to the ground and notice finally the

footprints. Curved arches relieve the earth’s pressure, broken stems leaking the night’s dew.

Heeled terrain scars us as we walk it. Irradiant phlox among the choked sewage spill. A body at

rest remains at rest, a body as a series of forms affiliated with time. A body in motion is a body

stilled by cloaked agency. He went this way, in some manner hounded. We turn our eyes to the

dome above and mistake the canopy for something more distant, don’t notice the latticed girders

and I-beams lacing our fate. There becomes relative. Distant gunfire beckoning the bored

who’ve grown weary among the flowers. We track him through the night. Other clues describe

his perambles. Circumnavigating the hillocks, pausing atop a knoll. What you want from those

you know. What you got from a history of relatives. What you talk yourself out of in the midst

of pious commitment. What you put in the pot to substitute for herbs you’ve invented in your

head. A dremel to notch the tree trunk. Tie a ribbon around theology. The skirmishing leaves

devoted to the breeze. The muddy footfalls we read through shadows and fernbeds, gently

parting the underbrush so’s not to disturb the disturbances that mark the path forward we must

follow. When we catch him I will slit his throat so help me god. Tired of what low-slung

branches take the measure of how ill-fit we are for this terrain. Buttercup, mountain laurel,

blackberry bushes, briar and nettle clog the company’s progress, swishing into thigh flesh as the

mumbling shushes the doves above. Tired of birds we shoot them. Tired of sighs we slough them.

Tired of typing we will disappear, the scent of a burnt powder the only reminder we were, once, near.

Mean Weight

Help hold I mean prop I mean

help sell I mean cough I mean

help will I mean push I mean

help calm I mean ease I mean

help us I mean them I mean

help this gentle I mean this soft I mean

help us glean I mean us dream I mean

help us to forget I mean we grow dazed I mean

help spectacle I mean intangible I mean

help roach I mean crib I mean

help her and help him I mean

help them to fall through I mean true I mean

help swallow some dew I mean blue moon’s glow I

mean

help shallow’s the lake I mean wallow’s the swamp

I mean

help compass the range I mean sound the ground I

mean

help me locate my I mean echo the sky I mean

help I’ve lost my I mean where the fuck did I mean

help is on the way I mean soft what light I mean

help a down-on-his-luck I mean mean times is

hard I mean

help cement to cure I mean stick in the mud I

mean

help promise the premise I mean argue the

negative I mean

help we’ve all been there I mean no one gets out I

mean

help the wool winter I mean silk is the summer I

mean

help sketch I mean shade I mean

help drill I mean dowel I mean

help jet the carb I mean pull the piston I mean

help cinch the stretch I mean pinch hit the slouch I

mean

help rout the roots I mean help ream the scene I

mean

help cut the carp I mean help shop the crap I

mean

help blow help lick I mean help cloy help scalp I

mean

help broil help blister help mean the flayed skin I’m

in I mean

help meme the joke help pull the poke help

plumage help vestments

help drivel help null set help flaut help molt help

poultice help suture

I mean help hep help hark help hassle help hedge I

mean help help.

wait I feel train I mean I want glass I mean

wait I sent help I mean I get gone mean

wait it was def I mean he answered yes I mean

wait what gives I mean what hopes have you I

mean

wait will it burn I mean will nothing undo I mean

wait gross I mean I hate the tough truck I mean

wait the bloke’s mad I mean gone mental innit I

mean

wait you haven’t heard I mean what’s to know I

mean

wait gloss the frame I mean freeze the flames I

mean

wait what I mean who the fuck I mean

wait the tables’re bussed I mean your hair’s a mess

I mean

wait the clap will come I mean the crowd’s a cloud

I mean

wait the laugh is cough I mean the brass is scuffed

I mean

wait we’ll go the route I mean we’ve sewn it up I

mean

wait she’s buttoned up I mean the jig is up I mean

wait damn the bag popped I mean the rag top I

mean

wait we got the crop I mean the bag’s a dope I

mean

wait for just a sec I mean the slacks’re soft I mean

wait to stop the bridle I mean the top of her girdle

I mean

the link in the middle I mean the foam finger

dangle I mean

wait her clasp is caught I mean the fingers pop I

mean

wait we sing to sup and I mean clang the cup I

mean

wait in barstool slouch I mean the kettle’s perc I

mean

wait in the sitting room I mean I am a patient I

mean

wait I watch and wait for what and wait the scales I

mean

wait the heart and wait a day and weigh the dead I

mean

wait I mean fellate I mean to comb the cock I

mean

wait the barn’s a burn the rooster roasts the pig is

poked

I mean wait with what, we wait with wit, but wait to

go

too long I mean too late to make the train we

mean wait

for your whole life for that big break but wait I

mean

wait the wasted days with waiting, let them

succumb

to the wait we wait mean and meridian, the

average wait

which breaks the back the will the bones and the

rank

slotted wait shoveled under by the wait of graves

where the ones we loved wait a while longer for us

to

wait and then think weight.

Wording

I don’t know what words you

I do not know what words you are

I can’t tell what words we

I wasn’t telling you words are

I want to know what words you

I was wearing words but you

but you are the words I wore

but you wore the words we were

I don’t know what words me

I do not know what words I am

I can’t tell what words me

I wasn’t telling you what feeling is

I want to know what it feels in me

I was feeling words but I

but I was not the words, you were

but you were what worded me

you were what worded us

you wore the words down

until we didn’t need to say

what we were, and so are.

Ode for T. B. & B. C.

Always the radio in someone’s story is suspect.

Is it the same radio that played in my story?

Did the same songs – Comfortably Numb,

(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction, Sweet Jane, etc. –

play at the same moment in the other’s story?

I mean this as a compliment, that I really enjoy

that what once was the loneliest moment I’d known

was shared by someone else also very lonely

probably thinking he was the loneliest person

ever in the history of the world, in fact sure of it.

And then, years later, to be united by the cliché

of a simple origin-tale trope, like two birds

both blown off course by the same jet stream

but six states apart, and so small and light-boned

and easy to lose in the glare of the sun.

Always the words in my head, like the radio,

conscious that I’m tuning in, annoyed by the static

to some common broadcast, thinking instead it’s

narrow, and meant just for me, when it isn’t, it’s

meant for us, broadly, and it is only our lives

that narrow the circumstance as we get older.

But we are not birds and it’s no use pretending.

Can you make some mountains, or pretend to?

If I have a facility with words, it’s because the

bulwarks against social anxiety were not well-

built in my youth. I have words, but none

of them has me. In the furthest reaches of

intent, any connection I’d like to have been

making is simply an occasion for convenience.

We’ll still do exactly what we want to do, and

remember what we want to remember about

what we’d thought we’d been building between

us, shifting in our seats as we whispered away

the language we’d agreed to speak. Still

birds on wires or – you want me to say flit? –

flocks that flit willy-nilly in the negative space

of an October morning sky, it’s 8:09 AM,

and all I know I’ve folded into a note

that I stuck under your windshield wiper

on a similar morning in 2009, when lawyers

spoke my name into machines, the capstans

whirred, and slowly I rose to greet the clouds.

A new ending process wants its will to be known.

If It Will Have You

Chance will have you

put down the remote and

will have you linger a moment longer

at the rest stop exit.

Luck will have you

spend all day diving for

the gallant necessities of a solitary life

through the singing rain.

Circumstance will have you

place specific pressure on

those wounds that bleed most fervently

right when you thought not.

I self-reflect a lot lately

a moon’s glow not the moon’s at all

just the misdirection of a gift meant for

someone who could put it to use.

This is why hotels exist

in the space between towns.

This is why tailors reseam the shirts

we buy at a discount, knowing

someone else’s passion had

ripped them in love or hate.

Conversation will have you

state the obvious smilingly

will have you reach out an imaginary hand

to part the curtain gap.

Writing poems will have you

examine the electrical cords

to invent a less-unsightly routing solution

& end up hanging yrself.

Complimentary breath mints

at the diner cashier station

absorb the scent of desperate human need

to redistribute it among the populace.

Footfalls and the radiant beauty

of falling asleep in public

grease the gears that turn the turbines

sweep the streets of collective memory.

Closure will have you

recapitulate among acquaintances

learning when to stop reciprocal bowing gestures

and get on with the fucking-over.

Performing those songs will have you

become again anew for another flock of acolytes

whose definition gains another nuance

in the already muddy stream of prescription.

Blowing the wad will have you

empty sense from a syringe

into the arm of market analysis speculators

will supply crumbs to tongues.

Slipping a mickey will have you

regain some high ground

from which the advancing decay of nation-building

becomes increasingly beautiful.

Adjusting the control pots

on the equalization circuit

will have you if you want it to

adopting the voices of the listeners.

I have half a mind to

make paintings of skyscapes

sand the floors to erase the stains of

footfalls, blood, shirtsleeve buttons.

I have no confidence that

what I hope will stay will stay

in its original shade of vague

shadow, a remembered scent

But a page is just paper

and will turn again

back or forward

in the wind. It

doesn’t even need the hand

or the eye, or the constant

pressure of a letter

unpeeled from the page.

Numb Frame/Empty Set

The emptiness of our South extends as far as we’re willing to let it.

Spool out the tether, fields to be filled with personal financial information

lie fallow in the low gray cloud-covered predawn quiet. Distant huffing

of unhappy combustion. The blows come in quick succession, each one

concussing a different brittle bone. A tightening in the brachial plexus

numbs some nerves, preventing any coordinated defense. In theory,

this vacuum should make my head explode. I have mislaid by helmet,

my water-cooled underwear. In theory, your letters would reinvigorate

my campaign, the words resounding in my head even as I hunker down

for the next exacting volley, the chinks in my armor prolapsed, that raw

and timeless invitation. Blood beckons the predators, and they understandably

can’t help themselves. It began in the thumb, index finder, wrist then

forearm, the slow syrup of forgetful nerves, until the ratio of sent signal

to received perception tips definitively toward the former. Eventually

everything I feel I create, and soon all I know will be ancient, will be the

remnants of innate predisposition, muscle memory, genetically-directed

programming incapable of learning what the new world needs, what a

well-fortified foe invents on the fly. I’m reduced to strategy, when what

the world requires is tactical adaptation. It’s important to stay hydrated.

It’s incumbent on the subject to record his experience both during and after

the procedure in order to provide practical data for the technicians to analyze.

It’s crucial to the legitimacy of the test to maintain exacting conditions.

It hurts to breath. Now I cannot feel my shoulder. The events recorded by

the observers must be held at arm’s length until the data nexus can be

examined by the specialists. Your co-pay has increased dramatically in light

of the government shut-down. Non-essential procedures are not covered

by the plan. Listen for their armor in the underbrush. The East is ideal

for massing the platoon. My fingernails grow long, but I cannot cut them

without discomfort. Atrophied callouses, a yellow tinge as the blood

succumbs. I can no longer open your letters, the pages too smooth,

dexterity replaced with frantic fumbling. Desperate to send a signal,

I incant ghost limbs, but it’s no use. My inventions glimmer in the moon-

light, but evaporate with each morning’s sunrise. The cock crew. The

bloodflow. The clink just behind the forest’s dark curtain. The South

we knew grown over, kudzu and the thin crinkling of aluminum beer cans.

I fumble to sign another form, then realize it requires a notary. I cannot

click the pen, cannot cock the rifle, cannot feel the trigger. Without

consent of a close family member, I cannot leave the operating theater.

Look West, imagine reinforcements, what uniformed squadron might

provide air support, but all there is is what there always already was,

just the tingling of these porous bones, latticework of decaying frame

whittled away in administered apathy, the unmaking of a body proper.

I have an imaginary head, I said, and the flow kept on flowing it out.

Compression Check

The hard write is the writing of the despised, the turning of the brush back toward the hand, the gaze of

the eye directed convexly in, replicating endlessly the sensing of the sensor. Apathy requires a new verb

tense, as does despair, its queer shape against the body in a bed. What’s broke will fix it. I mean, keep

it fixed, pinned to the felt under gazing glass canopy, cool objective eye the new sun around which

sadness orbits in mechanical reverence. I need to do the dishes, and the dishes need done. I need to

scale the day’s wake, waves fanning out behind the slow hour’s plowing past, the shadowy creep we’d

all rather sleep through. Fold the pants. A winter garden grows only deaf. A callous hand breaks

everything it tries to touch. Severed nerve endings equal some new unfelt beginning, the absorption of

the other, waking with one’s own hand’s touch, wondering who completes the feeling. What happens

to an impulse detoured? Inscrutable bird shit spelling the window frame’s portrait of what a day looks

like wasted. Plugging bullet holes with conjecture. Scrapping the junk to purge me of the clap. What

dope dust flies when I collapse a couch posture. What chronic bought reveals about the tee-shirt

militia’s inventory crisis. Despair reflects poorly. The despised person exists solely for the act, the

transgression, the artifice of unfulfilled conspiracy. Despair absorbs not only the particular, but it cannot

filter out the general. There is no abstracting hate – fertile soil denied a sun, an occasional shower,

nitrogen, the tunnels of blind worms that endlessly nose for the rotting bodies – when hate has no

center to hold. Despair blooms and blunts in the same gesture, the compulsive unbuttoning of

shirtsleeves, say, or the tolling of bells, painting of paintings, signing of signatures. We can always ask

questions, can always cock ears or poise our pencil tips a few centimeters above the ruled paper, or get

stumbledown drunk and piss our khakis. One thing remains. Surface tension stills its descent. A

circulation from one to what. From word to would. I can ask anything I want, and somehow I always

start with did. Letting the verbs go’s my first suggestion. And blowing holes in the bellows is my second.

The Sketched Boat

Reading the connection is connection in the imaginary head. Spelling with fingers for

the spoked of the mind. Felling what are logs floated down the pike. I conceal my

intent with a jersey stride. In the well of the pause the conversation dries up. Only if

statements will spell an end to this predetermined syntax. Exhaled smoke emptied of

its potent truck. A house is a home for inert land-grab tactics. Twill swish against

the gabardine rustle under the corduroy susurrus. A component of ferocity is

feigned historicity. Hanged and dangled from the interstitial bridgework in a dead

dude’s mouth. He’d got the clap at the close of the curtain, which was thanks

enough. A pillow, a hangnail, a fro-yo, a car park, a kid’s skit, and a blow dart.

Drowning out the sound with inverted flippancy. Worn-away wood where once the

hull defied a sketched boat. Rerouting the speaker to play the microphone.

Perception is a heresy against the sentient repose. Clacking in the typewritten alley,

the detective ruins the ribbon. These dozen prisons generate enough revenue to

hire another nanny state. Energize your capital with a burst of chin-up stomatism.

However, duty might be another man’s pill-addicted negligence. Well worth gratuity

equation to suffocate anti-rapture posi-traction. Thus everything’s a fiction nowadays.

Mouthfuls Defile the Previous Position

The driven mind sucks the sleep from stones

curled all fetal under inadequate quilts

& afraid of what’s to think, gnaws instead

on the mechanics of how to speak, how to bleat,

how to bark and caw a muzzled jaw’s manifest of

cautionary tales, archetype tragedies, cartoon plots

that in the reduction boil away the distortion.

I’m leaving out the coughing fits, impulsive verbal tics,

clenched blurts, retches and gags that double

one over. In the morning, before the sun’s come,

residual traces of yesterday’s being coat the tongue

in a temporary tattoo of ruined glyphs, unreadable

except for their broken ascenders, a litter of serifs

forming new punctuation marks to halt

all subsequent speech. In this way, the dreaming tongue

silences itself, denies new iterations forming

in the ruined web of whatever beings we’d been.

Reverse Engineered #1

when you do not know how to enter a room

you pluck at strings instead of speak

when you grow a new row of teeth behind your teeth

you leak from the ceiling and pool on the floor

when you bleed like light in the space of the sill

you precisely balance a thought between hope and dread

when you combine a memory with what’s dreamt

you split a word into meaningless syllables

when you cut but don’t bleed

you fuck but can’t cum

when you blink but still see

you drive through the mirror’s view

when you bathe your body in rust and flecking paint

you build a home out of your own shed skin

when you pull the string that pulls the tendon from the joint

you do not know where the smoke goes,

it goes to the heart where it papers the walls

where limbs grow lithe and fall away to flail,

it caves a roof with the weight of your past,

where skin absorbs the chemical color, to dry and slough away,

it feels for the curb, the median, its own way home,

where the eye is the factory that builds the world’s façade,

it desires the other & consumes the self,

where flesh gapes so the air can enter,

it trips the tongue, tricks the ear into some state of faith,

where thought thinks ideas for once to follow,

it wages war for what could’ve been,

where a room becomes itself a plane, refracted into its various strata,

it floors a porous host no good for holding you for long,

where mouth’s a maw that consumes its hunger,

it harps a ghost with some older song,

where the room’s a cell where nothing goes.

Last Account Activity Impulse

if I asked what when

to search the sentences’

interstices for a silence

& if when what I said

wastes of white space

cordoned off a notion

blow by blow the prolonged light

marks each division with a hair’s breadth

with a gnat wing, with a moment

when the shadow’s creep finally finds

the far wall, these most personal sunsets

our own vocabulary of a life’s equating.

days spent are days lost

the balance of something half unspoken

another word in its saying goes

a sentence an unwound string

the bookshelf a sentence

the traffic a sentence

the scar on the hand a sentence

medical history, cancelled checks,

matted hair and foam pulled

from the constricted drain,

archaeology of wasted selves

we knew had other names before

if I asked how where

the city sky bleeds the stars out

the same way poems about poems

slow the world in its modulation

the stanza collapse reminds us what went

where the white space now was.

Italic will

I learned that the body is not my body, the blood through it not with it & not mine to poison

dilute or spill, it wills its own poisons, secretes pollution into the brain and spills the tainted blood

recursively, whenever, into whatever air I’d found to force it through. I learned self-mendicantion.

I learned the body thinks against what I’d have thought, resists the muddy language of the

subject, makes itself master and exerts a will invisible and implacable. I’ve invented songs to sing

in protest, have occupied its center, have thrown stones at what I thought was my body, and

have learned that in turning against it, the body hardens, instantiates its being, reduces all

pleasure to pain, all delicacy to shit, every victory to its own tactics, all battlefields to bloodbaths.

I learned to read in spite of its brute ignorance before I understood that everything I read it read

over my shoulder, tapped the lines, steamed the seals open and turned the pages of my diary

hunting for leverage against me. I would speak to it only to hear my own echo in its empty

rooms, every sharp syllable dulled by its mute walls of flesh. I broke its back with words, but the

words made it my back and added a burden for me to carry, a crushing load of senseless sounds.

There is no crossing the curved plain but the gradual chase of the unending, retreating horizon.

There is no rowing against the confused tumult of current and eddy. There’s no quieting the

mechanics of heartbeat, bloodflow, synaptic click. There’s only this hunting season, hunkered in

the pre-dawn air, sights set and fingers too frozen to feel the trigger. There’s metaphor as quarry.

There’s a split in a life where the unwinding begins. There must be a name to imagine the line

between where one color starts and the last has ended. There is always the body, carrying on its

interminable task, and my head’s the parasite that at best annoys, will be shaken off, will suck the

blood for temporary sustenance and then wither, be forgotten or not even known to be

remembered, not even have a name but the fleeting word I tried to tie it to, only to know all this:

I learned the signs seemed like constellations from afar, I drew imaginary lines to paint pretty

pictures in a vast sky that moves forever away from the fixed perspective of the minute and brief

terminal point, the body the larger body that cannot be fixed, that has no time, was only thought.

Kitchen Wolves for Greg Ames

What the noun does to the verb.

What talking does to the notion that thought it.

What the paper does to the plot it’s printed on.

What a sign does to the one-day sale.

What a sail does to the doldrums.

What a camera does to the lengthening shadow of the weeping willow.

What fucking does to the crush of longing.

What the yelp does to one’s fear of wolves.

What apology does to the impulse to hurt.

What forgetfulness does to nostalgia.

What melody does to the lyric.

What the doing does to the will to do.

What waking does to a dreamt-of death.

What a fist does to the handshake.

What a river does to the rain.

What the skin does to the tattoo.

What the road’s pavement does to the long-distance lovers.

What the stage does to the players’ script.

What poetry does to the keyboard keys.

What the leaf does to the rake.

What radio does to the ionosphere.

What blood does to the murderer.

What a font does to the typeface.

What a bridge does to a river.

What the planewing does to the vaportrail.

What a windshield does to the winter frost.

What a name does to the orphan.

What a leash does to the birthday puppy.

What a shit does to the breakfast burrito.

What the trophy does to the race course.

What a playing card does to the skillful shuffle.

What the appositive does to the comma.

What the smoke does to the fire.

What the ear does to the shrill siren.

What the goose does to the dark winter sky.

What the oxbow does to the creek.

What the lung does to the cigarette.

What the summer does to the sun.

What the silence does to the thunderclap.

What the brakelight does to the rubberneck.

What the piston does to the sparkplug.

What the slagheap does to the coalmine.

What the grave does to the backhoe.

What the highfive does to the touchdown.

What the skull does to the bullet.

What the root does to the sunsetted silhouette of a treetop canopy.

What the sculpture does to the sculpture’s eye.

What the vowel does to the fricative.

What the hard-on does to the negligee.

What the bruise does to the knuckle.

What the song does to the plucked string.

What the skin does to the pinch.

What the wound does to the switchblade.

What the ditch does to the shovel.

What the ash does to the campfire’s crackle.

What the wave does to the seabreeze.

What the lunatic does to the moon.

What the nose does to the rotten corpse.

What the neck does to the necktie.

What the drip does to the faucet washer.

What the crease does to the iron.

What wedding does to the priest.

What the fault does to the quake.

What the push does to the pull.

What the black does to the white.

What the tooth does to the gnawed bone.

What the body does to the mind.

What the nut does to the bolt.

What the student does to the teacher.

What the verb does to the noun.