The word penis is probably the most misattributed word in
English, I think. Because almost nobody has a real one.
The standards are made in Japanese or German factories.
Womb/vagina sets are unusual too if genuine.
Standards are from China; they are recycled sheepskin wallets.
I was shocked too when I heard this.
I do not have an actual either but they called
me a genius when I figured it out about the fetal
lamb/sheep skin. What else to do with all the wallets
On the first warm day,
the aides fret about his pate,
fetch his hat. I push him
out the automatic doors
into the pallid sun.
Dad thinks we should
stay put until all the Indians
are back in their tepees,
but right now he’ s off to teach
a Latin class. Where are his keys?
They’ re a few miles away,
in the past, where he’ s no longer
active in the community.
I steer him along the asphalt paths
of the grounds: bark mulch,
first green shoots,
puddle of coffee by a car.
The first night at the monastery,
a moth lit on my sleeve by firelight,
long after the first frost.
A short stick of incense burns
thirty minutes, fresh thread of pine
rising through the old pine of the hours.
Summer is trapped under the thin
glass on the brook, making
the sound of an emptying bottle.
Before the long silence,
the monks make a long soft rustling,
adjusting their robes.
There are rooftops
made of cloud remnants
gathered by a trader
dabbling in car parts and burlap
At night, I dive onto the breeze
fermenting above the dirt
and dream that I am a crocodile
a tin of shoe polish, an audience of two
In the morning, before the smallest yawn
becomes a noodle, I am offered
a ribbon of yellow smoke
I opt for fuzzy rocks and clawed water
and, of course, the perishable window
I am one of the last computer
chain errors to be illuminated
I tell you there are rooftops
It had to be from someone whose grandparents were born in Shanghai
not the city’ s greatest citizens, but certainly among the sober ones
to make their small now eroded mark
It had to be from a distant or dissolute descendant (yes, moi)
who can sing praises unworthy of even a flicker of your attention
The challenge: to start
not with theory but with tangible performance
You and others, approaching
We shall be asked for a way out
to be fed
to keep warm and dry
Starting with experience, magic
genuine science
More than once we have been lost
in a trackless wilderness
dwarfed and shadowed by mighty buildings
subway trains wild as elephants
One goes blindly back to one’ s desk
These moments come, their dark
shadow
We wonder at our shifting capacities, keep
adding and striking skills
from the bottoms of our résumés
under constant revision
like the inscriptions on tombs
shared for generations
unnervingly up
to date
Made nervous by our shift in capabilities, we write:
The pianist Joe Sullivan,
jamming sound against idea
hard as it can go
florid and dangerous
slams at the beat, or hovers,
drumming, along its spikes;
in his time almost the only
one of them to ignore
the chance of easing down,
walking it leisurely,
he’ ll strut, with gambling shapes,
underpinning by James P.,
amble, and stride over
gulfs of his own leaving, perilously
toppling octaves down to where
the chords grow fat again
There is an alley
where you can go,
where you can kiss
someone’ s mouth
until you climb
inside them, force
your way in, push
your cells into their cells
and become one
creature — angelic.
It isn’ t the way
you’ d dream it.
There is piss,
dew-damp moss crawling
across the brick.
Some nights it is so dark
you must enter only
by touch.
Walk by in the light
and it will seem
like nothing.
The scripture
is written by wenches:
4eva, L+ J, I. T. A. L. Y.
Now footsteps on shingle. Make of it what you will. Seabirds roost
on the breakwaters, accustomed, of course, to twilight.
The spirit lamp in that house on the headland could easily fall and spill
and the fire burn all night. Some time later a subtle ghost,
yourself in memory perhaps, might well set foot
up there amid clinker and smoke, the whole place silent and still
except you bring in the tic of cooling timbers, and then the birds in flight.
•
Now chains through gravel. Make of it what you will.
