You sway like a crane to the tunes of tossed stones.
I am what you made to live in
from what you had: hair matted as kelp, bad schools.
Oh, you will never know me. I wave and you go
on playing in the clouds
boys clap from erasers. I am the pebble
you tossed on the chalked space and war-
danced toward, one-leg two-leg, arms treading air.
For your birthday, I’ m learning to pop champagne corks
with a cossack sword when all you asked for was world peace.
I’ m actioning the deliverables to wish you many happy returns
of the ecstasies that are imminent when all you requested
was a contentment so quiet it’ s inaudible. Remember when
I gave you a robe of black silk that floats and does not rustle?
When all you desired was to turn from what was finished and hard
Valentine, valentine you arrive
in a town car with a chauffered envelope,
scattered pieces of you enrolled in schoolyards
like a recess of paper vanity, litter, old
with red-rimmed "loves," red-rhymed lies in lace.
The verses come, rising as easily as long-stemmed snakes in
bloom where swamps settle down and drowse
by dawn, a night of secrets slid out of drawers like knives nesting, a choice of chimes and slums overrun
by bejeweled heartbreakers. What a lovely
winter, almost skipping February.
She does not know
her beauty,
she thinks her brown body
has no glory.
If she could dance
naked
under palm trees
and see her image in the river,
she would know.
But there are no palm trees
on the street,
and dish water gives back
no images.
In the frozen square, the student asks me if I will
sell him the books from my backpack. He hides them
under his winter coat. Steam rises from the whole
wheat rolls we break open at the breakfast table.
We drink hot apple tea and pronounce the skyline
“charming.” In a jail a man counts the visible bones,
and recounts them in the blaze of morning. To turn
a self to light proves painful — each piece must
be dissected in turn; you pass through every feeling
imaginable, so many you might make a dictionary —
name appears
everywhere and in dream
body armor removed
what now, legacy, archivum
we female archons preserve of
intensity a durance a hand you recognize
(sounds sound)
assurance as lives on
drank of that
drank of this
almost suffocated, then drowned
downed but never
what only she could only know
as herself living in the brute time
speak of a syntax of rendition?
the politics of Empire chip away
as poetry attests, give it up
All writing around the sides the persons a galaxy all writing resounds a hot history. All writing is in fact cut-ups history will decide games heated and heated economic behavior. To rise up scene all sounds of Tahrir and inside supply side threatened. A long delineation. Longer than I would be counting. This, a whisper, this the end of whisper time. Rise up and wiser this the streets of the world. Commission overheard in spin a soldiering one. What streets of the world to spin rubric’ s yes yes commerce, no, a no, no. Tanks of the blown-off world.
Those twenty-six letters filling the blackboard
Compose the dark, compose
The illiterate summer sky & its stars as they appear
One by one, above the schoolyard.
If the soul had a written history, nothing would have happened:
A bird would still be riding the back of a horse,
And the horse would go on grazing in a field, & the gleaners,
Frères humains qui après nous vivez,
Soon they’ ll have the speed freak twisting
On a scaffold, soon the birds
Will come to peck out his eyes, & when
He’ s too weak & exhausted to turn
His head away, they’ ll do it, too,
They’ ll peck his eyes right out.
You’ ll want to watch it happen, you’ ll want
To witness it. You’ ll want to see Paolo
And Francesca almost touch before
They’ re swept away again, him in one line
Waiting for rations, her in another one,
Both of them naked, standing there,
Don't be misled:
that sea-song you hear
when the shell's at your ear?
It's all in your head.
That primordial tide —
the slurp and salt-slosh
of the brain's briny wash —
is on the inside.
Truth be told, the whole place,
everything that the eye
can take in, to the sky
and beyond into space,
lives inside of your skull.
When you set your sad head
down on Procrustes' bed,
you lay down the whole
