What war poets capture, and what they leave behind

Careful words. What that the bird could split seeds and twist licorice trimmings, opposite a window from you, opposite your eyes to me. Worry isn't something I've gotten used to, but it fits. Just as the lights are humming, they are my breath in deaf tremor, eventual and hesitant. The permanence of sound.

That I never knew

No song will ever catch

the fleeting flight of my

taut heart, upon the button

being let off its last thread.

That it was neither pulled

nor popped, only come free

in my passing fingers.

And still I see her face.

[What chance have we

if cut young is the cloth

so close from home

and without a farewell?]

Don't Call Them Suckers Who Call It Art

Call them suckers who pay for it.
And so was played a chapter closed with day.
He did not live long after.

To grasp the enormity of something
is to consider it very small. A curtain.
A door, bald at spots with knocking
and being propped. [A beauty too broad

to be beheld, too fine to be exacted—]
[A frame would make it nothing—nothing
being anything that it's not.] Just excuse us
cats and dogs from being watched—

that we might die and breathe unknown
—being known being the stopping point
for anything that fits in a box, or a sentence,
or a frame. So see only that there's nothing

more for you to see. Leave us in. Lock us up
that we may be and that we may only end
somewhere further than you know.
[The day I knew you loved me, I had no more

use for writing. No more use for dissection
or cross-sections of love, pasted flat
and abstract to a finite plane—whose purpose
was only ever binding the time I spent behind

my door, my curtain, to a solid and sanitized
memory of passage—like a look in the mirror,
needed to know—though alone—I am still in
one piece. I am not one piece though. I am

an uncountable set. I'm a dynamo of love.
Such that limiting these to just a few
moments of thought or phrase does injustice
to my greatest vanity. My infinite secret—

never spoken, so never stopped.] Your art
assumes I'm hurt. I am not hurt. I am quite well.
On the train in Moscow, what worth is there
of freedom, if you've never been bound

by something greater? America and Her Pleasures.
To always be certain that I'm getting more
from my job than my job is getting from me.
To buy comfort comfortably. Mainly, to be able to

choose one's own frame of reference, and to be able
to change freely between. See, what means one thing
on one day and street is to be seen as was then seen by me.