I've already failed to show up every day, yet I have lost nothing and gained everything. My favorite so far is 09, Need.
If you have something constructive to say about any of the pieces here:
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22 — Trust in the ballast
I look up in the vertical surge,
ribs excised with sick force
in an instant. No seawater.
Grease in my lungs, long
collapse in relentless
white heat, the crucible
and the equalizer.
21 — How's work?
We both know fire is sometimes
25 watts on the wall.
A drink each makes busy hands.
20 — A circular mercy
Spent incense piles
in the palm of my hand,
these effortful tears dried
to salttack on sugarpine.
The sun splits and resplits
in matrices of branches,
pulling close to bear what
marches with many boots.
A circular mercy,
this business of knowing
and knowing.
19 — No exit, go around
The clover melts for miles and sinks
to the vascular underground. The belly
of a long cloud catches, conduction
coil and the black hills,
never closer. Back to earth in
pieces, the better for digging.
18 — Common sense
No glory in hunger, no savior
in the backlit glass or its
pigment bleeding.
Cut fruit. Scrub the floor.
17 — Poem for the light swinging
My spine props itself
up with effort in the booth
seat. A whole world waits
in the lights already on,
in what makes
itself with my hands, over
and over.
This close sky falls,
an excellence. See a person
like god and time
melds with the wall, the table.
16 — A brightness
slowly pass these
vaulted hours
a brightness
the cannibal of
memory as it forms
15 — Yoga
Shoulders over hands,
hips over knees. How much
would be enough?
The mallard wants my breakfast.
The hawk, my eyes.
Call to body, tend to home.
Rise to cactus, heart to sun.
14 — Lucy of Sicily
Your eyes blink in my skull.
You write something
sweet to no one: like minds.
I call back finally: it's fine.
I miss you like you're dead.
13 — Arm there
The road subducts behind me
between steps, just as
one meets other.
Deafening, bloody, inversion,
reckoning. An arm there,
an ear there, a foot there.
Still followed,
still followed.
12 — Spider
stones packed by hairs under each
new footfall shifting
fitting the only subjects I need
the split in my side and the
spider learning its first and last square foot
of residential paint then earth again
11 — Select and delete
My whole world, a dim yellow lamp
shaken where it stands by the
ten o'clock train. A thin
blade and a stack of magazines.
Tell me something true, quickly.
10 — Timelines
Angles in crystal print
on this beating heart. A string
of beads pops, the scattering
perfected by a sunken
kitchen floor, its slopes
and grooves. No,
this is no ideal world, but
something else completely.
09 — Need
Search a face, a word, squirm
in the polarity and static. I beg you
feel this ancient awareness
of bodies as I do, this
tributary brutality, this threadbound
straw star warping and
warping again.
I hear the man in your voice, and the boy.
A thousand times, touch me barely.
A thousand more.
How long must I
hold all we do not speak?
08 — Take it easy
I fall behind, pulled only
by a rope around my waist.
Who comes to wake me but the
clothes hanging by collars
off a dipped wing? For
the first time in a long time,
I use a candle all
the way up, so use it
that it's nothing
but a blackened glass,
a lake's edge, three
fingerprints hissing
then quiet.
07 — Late now
The radiator climbs between my ribs
with its hum. I breathe for the streamers
that flutter from a single pin,
and they breathe for me, and
the radiator breathes for me, too.
The carnations I bought with my eggs
rot from their drowned stems.
A gauche flower, the
carnation, annoying. And perfect
from a certain point of view.
06 — Sensory life
In all this talk and clamor, consideration demands
a split feathered edge. How many more times
will my first finger wake
to consciousness before
there's no more to be had? My feet are
where my feet are. My own focus, the only
teacher there is.
05 — Two can run, and you first
To protect love, to seek love,
to be love. What is it to count stitches,
minutes on a cake? What is it to count
miles, hours, to note, to know
the details of your worry by a twitch,
an off tap, the way you tipped
your last word down?
The witness overgrown,
too granular to chart
the sea, or just enough.
04 — Ink
cropped hair wrought iron plain paper inked
to its limit so much that this layer
won't sink at all just tremble
on the surface and drip
drip the edges almost rounded off
defanged what does my witness mean
to the nature of a thing like that
03 — Chicken katsu
How much comes with us
like the blush spring? Your
notes go brittle, the pen fades.
Why hide your face from another
curious lover? There goes the stuck man,
one foot already in the grave.
02 — Grenade
What comes after
the big one? Nobody
which means everybody
knows. I cough up dust, I
size the dry heat. One hand
to my chest, one hand
to my gut and breathe,
gasping, greedy for some
stupid fantasy
of my own heart settled
and soothed.
01 — Multi media
Where do you go
when you do go? What
do you see in this clip
of a woman's cut and
trembling hands, a mosaic
sculpture her just
reward? It dwarfs her
its shadow falling heavy
I see graph paper
a pearl
I see flesh buzzing in the every
facet of your insect eye