Mean Tease

This formless dress.

As mutton shuddering

drivers, coupled with

abuses of the tongue.

You again,

I find myself having to

watch out for all-of-a-

sudden evil. As today’s

highs are thanks

to yesterdays workouts,

so too the lows creep

steadily, irretrievable

losses. Already.

Everything takes muscle.

Until you learn what to

do with big open spaces.

Such that even one

second is a clumsily

large unit of measure.

Awash, the spread

of the evening.

I'm choked with the push

to make something moving.

This world doesn't need

new things. It's scum, lad

—a sham—that slum lords

can find funds and still

some can't afford love.

But you mistake me

for someone with a big idea.

Everyone wants to be cool

and ruthless. As salt

on a bridge. A brute

but impunible.

Unruly but true.

Beyond the Drawing

There are concrete studies showing that people—when crowded too densely together in work and living environments—become disconsolate, feel obsolete. There is also a certain saturation point of the ratio between geographical area, doctors, and population when a hospital transforms from not only useful, but profitable. I want to know all of these numbers.

Otherwise, it’s become difficult to believe in education in the same way it’s difficult to believe in God. I want to—or part of me does—but as much as I try to focus on the horizon, always coming and always spinning, everything remains flat and the world stays unbelievable.

I like to laugh though. How people laugh, as they timeframe, “Back when poetry mattered.” You know, the way the old guy at the party instantly says I’ll bet I’m the oldest person here.

To write a poem doesn’t make you a poet. A poem is only a spell. A poet transmutes the world.

For lack of a better word

I’ve been on the worst side of it. So every poor boy gets none from me. I’ve been handed it all. No poor boy gets to be as poor as me. It’s a shame I’ll have to lug.

In the same sense as old stuntmen explaining that although there’s talent to the spin-outs and wrecks, and that with practice you can actually begin controlling the degree to which you’re losing control, you can never predict the degree to which you land the crash.

It comes down to either bracing or being careful. Never neither because there’s no such thing. Have you ever seen that video of the guy trying to knock himself out with a hammer? Gritting his teeth, pulling it back, and then—no, only hitting his head hard enough to hurt?

What poetry is. But come again. If this is going to be anything more than a draw, we’ll need to swing each other’s hammers. See it through (yes this driveway), though it stings.

Morning Ablutions

When the wind isn’t coming, that’s when

it’s up to us to see it through. Make it

marketable. Step for step, held breath,

when pike is put, rail is run, a step is stupid.

A new steepening in expenditure. Sure it is.

I’ve been beaten some by making money.

More by making a living. Still more I’ve been

soundly trounced by the binding tongue of love.

Lifted even as a cookie sheet, though thin

as a bedspread. Stuffed and insufferable.

My dog is good. Means are met, needs made.

Wait. It’s that I’ve grown afraid to say, in saying

something thoughtless, something meaningless.

What about having kids and making ends makes us

mute. What is it about finding ourselves fully

formed that feels so much like a last stop. Forgetting

that movement is all that ever mattered is still a surprise

when it’s remembered. Even today, babe, reassembling.

Even as I am with you. I love you. This is all to say that

history bears repeating. There is no such thing as this building.

Don’t worry.

I’m going to live forever. Snake

pit or hydra head, and all the awful

drawling. Without teeth (read toothless),

but tongued so sharp it can sever root

from cause—word from mumble.

Just one lash and the separation flies

open. Separation of serpent scale,

though lying flat and happy, welcoming

to knives slung sideways and any hunter

who knows even a lick what he’s doing.

Wedge head under heel, edge placed, peel

or unpeel. Skin clings just only. So it shrinks.

I’m stuck fighting for covers—when poetry—or the art of making poetry—ought to be a very different kind of competition. One, namely,

where its contestants aren’t in love. But I am in love. So poetry comes harder (fuck it, hardly). It’s difficult to write about difficulty

when love greases the daily passage, and when plots begin to form toward family—which, if you didn’t know, is always healthier boring.

Sled

Diction then, waits for us

to chop and sting. With girlfriends

at the elbows, rotten teeth

proceeding. What manages

to capture us is what hatches us back

in the end—I imagine. What catches

at our naps. Fattens limbs and faces

so as to detract from the actual

sabotage. Awful ain’t it,

that a camera’s illusory frame

can’t settle stomachs after snacks,

can’t catch the edges of its promised shot.

Promised shooting being not even

to mention the rest of what’s happening.

The explanation of a photograph—

all the truth it purports and makes

horrible, plain and present

is pure herring where read

letters fester. It is putting

in the proof. Vertical day

before ignoring, slipped in sleep

when bed’s too full of rest.

At best she’d snore important, lip

a sweet thing believed so meant.

Above is better, but beside is believable

But even now I know your thoughts

aren’t always with me. And I know

because it’s ok. Even in this climb,

this plumb to the source of love isn’t always

true. Yet you know it still has meaning,

hanging there. It is still our most solid solution.

The wandering body, the babbling

soul goes ever after. Nettle kept,

thistle hatched, baby you are my baby

until I lose my eyes. Until I catch a

hunk of metal. Until I bend and wrench

and rend. And then you will let go.

There is dirt under my nails, and it is not

beautiful. That saying so might even

pretend to be revelatory is because

we’ve backtracked. But each rounded

pass is yet anew, even highways poured

with traffic, then somehow with pebbles.

Only, that our spread is not so even

is what makes for our unease. That

there is distance between being in love

and loving. That, though there might

not be such things as second chances,

there’s sometimes want in life for two.

Barehanded, bending a bar of steel

slowly and strenuously

will always be more impressive

than the reality of bent metal.

Because impact and hammer

swing are incomprehensible. Seeing

Superman flex a bar of steel

involves that slender lie—that

seeing something happen

means we can understand it.

It may take a pastiche, a patch-work, a mixed up swathe of bastards to make right what’s in need of fixing. Have you ever seen a house, cousin, that’s not been bled of life or serenity that’s not starched and stagnant and dead? Have you ever seen a row of houses rotting, location breeds location, brother, we’ve all got neighbors and they’ve got shades to keep the inside apart from the out. But have you ever smelled a city, sister? A whole constant wrench of sour mashed together, stinking as one united solution. There is no one way, I say. We’re people, particulate, until we dissolve into only matter in the grave. Though this is not so sad, we resist it and smother our noses from the noxious breath of others, we keep our own inside, and cough into our elbows and remind our fellow men to do the same.

(An ugly start here. I just felt it must be gotten out of the way. So, fresh pages away. After all, my love, we’ll let some into our homes. We’ll find time for a few of the strangers who in fact come from the rotten outside.)

Sound Proof

A small room will forever be emptier. A bottle full of fizzy makes the day go down. The

uneventful life has no less meaning than the artist who becomes known in his own time.

Tell me why I never killed another man for having more than me. Tell me it wasn’t simply

that I knew there would be those with less than me waiting. Counter-revolution is

elevating everyone to some status of superiority—it is the instillation of a sense of others'

jealousy directed at the self. (When, let's face it, no one cares about your shit.)

For four square blocks

Dogs are known to dig up old bones. Also, if given the choice, they often opt to die

alone. We, however, human, die wide-eyed (of crimson, cry my son, and such). Cubs,

yes, even pups—we must lowly embrace that innocence is only deliberately abandoned,

never taken, never reft from our jaws, unless the utterance is our own. Guilt is so too

only admitted. We must own our tongues. Sometimes we must hold our tongues, or else

we’ll be exposed for having them. Out flowering is our fall, see, keeping quiet is our

lonely sanctuary. (Not that such security is good or healthy). Many people get nervous,

get agitated when they’re scared. I get quiet and altogether unfrightening. A thoughtless,

soothing voice, “I know. I know.” There is something new under the sun. Lo, eating,

they’ve perfected even their dipping, how they walk and gobble, they choke and swallow.

The boy’s first time goes unnoticed.

But there are last times for everything and rewards always just around the next invisible

bend. Least wise, there is nothing to comment once a perfect poem is read, for a perfect

poem is a circuit, which closes at the intersection of the reader’s mind and eye. That is to

say the head is a vital organ when reading a perfect poem—that is to say a perfect poem

is written headless.