Social commentaries

The three men now stood satisfied, arms crossed,
joking among themselves, but only moments before
they hadn’ t been laughing. It had taken all three
to bind the struggling man. First, to limit his movement,
they had duct-taped his wrists together behind his back:
for that, one man had held his legs and another had pinned him,
one hand on each shoulderblade and one knee on his head,
at his left temple, grinding his right cheek and eye into
the dust and straw and dried shit that formed the floor of the barn.

defunct
list of
common
names
proxy
for the
bearer

nor’ wester
buffets gear
reach
into our
canisters

“Cassirer”
drawn and
sewn into
my lapels
assembly of
illegal men
peril will
not know

two
Roman
slaves rain
the rage
passes
through our
teeth into
interior
pneumatic
doors

my evening
of moniker
stamped
upon boxes
of envelopes

She wakes up in the afterlife in a fog. Unaware that she had an enemy, she was unprepared when the villain approached to deliver a fatal head injury. Part of her soul is stuck in her tomb, but as is common, it has a fake door where intercourse can occur, while another part of her soul begins a new adventure in form and in name. Always a reticent young woman, in premature death her speech-producing anatomy becomes irrepressible as she tries to render her circumstance comprehensible.

Wise emblem of our politic world,
Sage snail, within thine own self curl’ d;
Instruct me softly to make haste,
Whilst these my feet go slowly fast.

Compendious snail! thou seem’ st to me,
Large Euclid’ s strict epitome;
And in each diagram dost fling
Thee from the point unto the ring;
A figure now triangular,
An oval now, and now a square;
And then a serpentine dost crawl,
Now a straight line, now crook’ d, now all.

When Love with unconfinèd wings
Hovers within my Gates,
And my divine Althea brings
To whisper at the Grates;
When I lie tangled in her hair,
And fettered to her eye,
The Gods that wanton in the Air,
Know no such Liberty.

I got a letter from the government.
It said let there be night.
I went through your trash.
There was night, all right.
I consider how your light is spent.

I have butterflies a little bit.
I have some pills I take for it.
I’ ve been up since four the day before.
Agony’ s a cinch to sham.

Don’ t worry about the environment.
Let it kill us if  it can.
I give a tiny tinker’ s damn.
I put the ox behind the cart.
Consume away my snow-blind heart.

Follow where all is. / Follow the transfused. / Follow what is still and what is still-attracting.

That light / That beauty / That love / That, that is massy-borne and rising up, like a drifting star.

Like stars lift. / Like lifting stars. / Like the lifting of stars, I rose. I rise.

Rose. Rose. Like a thing beyond words: satiated.

Let lie in the ravage. / Let lie in what is ravaged-wrought.

Why fear what hasn’ t become?

I beckon, like light. / Like a star, I will beckon. / You will oblige. / You will lend the want. You will eclipse my blinding.

We liked to stick it in a bb gun and shoot it.
We tattooed with it. We said hallelujah,
the poor man’ s tanning lotion.
Then the frack wells began, something black
capping the water and we got high
watching a green-backed heron die.
We got funny at Clarion, flung
each other’ s underwear into the trees.
Why was it we got naked there
and nowhere else? Maybe we knew
we were getting good and ugly, rusted inside
as the trucks we rode into the water.
Maybe we knew we only appeared

There is no escaping the storm of roses
crisscrossed on the split-cracked wall
of a dead fountain arch.
There is no escaping their uterine balls,
expanding as a reminder of the children I never had.
If you listen carefully you can hear the vibrations,
the heart drone of their petal jaw-harps.
And there’ s no going back,
no indiscovery of Mars
or these red planets brooding before me,
light predators, sun-hatched
and bloodening like the fists of women
who have gone to war.

When the man behind the counter said, “You pay
by the orifice,” what could we do but purchase them all?

Ah, Sandy, you were clearly the deluxe doll, modish and pert
in your plastic nurse whites, official hostess to our halcyon days,

where you bobbed in the doorway of our dishabille apartment,
a block downwind from the stockyards. Holding court on

the corroded balcony, K. and I passed hash brownies, collecting
change for the building’ s monthly pool to predict which balcony