You had a woodchuck and an opium ball.
The one ate through the furniture,
the other sat in its cage depressing me.
Now the woodchuck sheds its skin.
I have a cow behind the Dollar Bin.
You shouldn’ t drink diarrhea
unless you bring enough for everybody.
Turn it into a teaching moment.
Asian-American Students for Christ
have the room until 2:30.
I’ ve been here before, dreaming myself
backwards, among grappling hooks of light.
True to the seasons, I’ ve lived every word
spoken. Did I walk into someone’ s nightmare?
Hunger quivers on a fleshly string
at the crossroad. So deep is the lore,
there’ s only tomorrow today where darkness
splinters & wounds the bird of paradise.
On paths that plunge into primordial
green, Echo’ s laughter finds us together.
In the sweatshops of desire men think
if they don’ t die the moon won’ t rise.
All things belie me, I think, but I
look at them though. Well boys, at
least you’ re not dead, right? What’ s
the date today? Until something. What?
Of the lady of the whitening blow.
I’ m ashamed to keep on babbling
as if I’ ve always been oneself,
diamond flow through. Humble
flannel skeleton. Grin, laugh unbecoming
Living at the bottom of the water may
have been obvious all the time. But
I forget. What’ s my plot? Hand
of a child, paw of an animal. Paint
it red & make a pawprint in the psalter.
One fisherman alongside the other
one seagull alongside the other
seagulls over the fishermen.
This early the garden’ s bare
but people pay to walk it,
at plots of budless brush
stop, as if remembering,
and stoop to mouth the names —
araucaria
araucana, monkey
puzzle tree, something
Japanese — each particular
ridiculous to be.
Because with alarming accuracy
she’ d been identifying patterns
I was unaware of — this tic, that
tendency, like the way I’ ve mastered
the language of intimacy
in order to conceal how I felt —
I knew I was in danger
of being terribly understood.
I. Of Choice
Despair is big with friends I love,
Hydrogen and burning jews.
I give them all the grief I have
But I tell them, friends, I choose, I choose,
Don’ t make me say against my glands
Or how the world has treated me.
Though gay and modest give offense
And people grieve pretentiously,
More than I hoped to do, I do
And more than I deserve I get;
What little I attend, I know
And it argues order more than not.
I cannot change, as others do,
Though you unjustly scorn;
Since that poor swain, that sighs for you
For you alone was born.
No, Phyllis, no, your heart to move
A surer way I’ ll try:
And to revenge my slighted love,
Will still love on, will still love on, and die.
Constantly risking absurdity
and death
whenever he performs
above the heads
of his audience
the poet like an acrobat
climbs on rime
to a high wire of his own making
There's a structure for idiocy — lamplight —
all over the nation; it's an illumination
with such sheer creative force it is misrecognized genius.
I have misunderstood people's duplicitous ways — their lightbulbs —
as righteous forms of complexity;
not calculated obfuscations.
Much like the voice in a poem that insists it sing
the most important seer of light.
Am I providing this luxury as well?
Or is this my radical assertion in order to
call into question what an aesthetic authority looks like?
