Use me
Abuse me
Turn wheels of fire
on manhole hotheads
Sing me
Sour me
Secrete dark matter’ s sheen
on our smarting skin
Rise and shine
In puddle shallows
under every Meryl Cheryl Caleb Syd
somnambulists and sleepyheads
MORNING
She always writes poems. This summer
she’ s starting a novel. It’ s in trouble already.
The characters are easy — a girl
and her friend who is a girl
and the boy down the block with his first car,
an older boy, sixteen, who sometimes
these warm evenings leaves his house to go dancing
in dressy clothes though it’ s still light out.
The girl has a brother who has lots of friends,
“While we’ re alive,” we kept
repeating. Tongues, throats,
roofs of our mouths bone dry,
skeletons we’ d someday
be...
Panicky masks we wore for
effect more than effect,
more real than we’ d admit...
The way we lay
we mimed a body
of water. It was
this or that way
with
the dead and we
were them. No
one
worried which...
Millet beer made
our legs go weak,
loosed
our tongues. “The dead,”
we
said, “are drowning
of thirst,” gruff
summons we muttered
out loud in our
sleep...
On Antiphon Island they lowered
the bar and we bent back. It
wasn’ t limbo we were in albeit
we limbo’ d. Everywhere we
went we
limbo’ d, legs bent, shoulder
blades grazing the dirt,
donned
andoumboulouous birth-shirts,
sweat salting the silence
we broke... Limbo’ d so low we
fell and lay looking up at
the clouds, backs embraced by
the
ground and the ground a fallen
wall
Carnival morning they
were Greeks in Brazil,
Africans in Greek
disguise. Said of herself
she
was born in a house in
heaven. He said he was
born in the house next
door... They were in hell.
In Brazil they were
lovebait.
To abide by hearing was
what love was... To
love was to hear without
It is terrible to be trapped at def con
with not even Ray Kurzweil’ s
daughter to gaze upon
I know some of you wish
I would go wherever
my people go, the factory,
physical therapy, a telethon
No! says my mentor
Not this. This is too angry
This is too much about
Not that. Not that
I like to hack, sometimes,
the Hebrew Bible
I don’ t think my mentor hacks
the Bible b/c it has too much
lame deaf blind circumcised in it
I was sitting in Old Town Square
with tourists and birds and I was reading
Foucault, how “he who is subjected
to a field of visibility... becomes
the principle of his own subjection”
and all around me the beautiful
Czechoslovakian boys moved through the first
day of spring like perennially
visible inmates in the opening credits
of a prison porno. The sun reflected off
the glass and my table was an inscrutable
tower of light from which I peered, invisibly,
at the swan-graceful boys who seemed to skirr
In a poem, one line may hide another line,
As at a crossing, one train may hide another train.
That is, if you are waiting to cross
The tracks, wait to do it for one moment at
Least after the first train is gone. And so when you read
Wait until you have read the next line —
Then it is safe to go on reading.
In a family one sister may conceal another,
So, when you are courting, it's best to have them all in view
Otherwise in coming to find one you may love another.
One father or one brother may hide the man,
