You don’ t need a machine to do that.
A plastic bag will do. But he built it,
his tools cast about in the unit
while he got up his nerve to use it.
Nothing more was stored there.
A poured cement floor, a triple-locked door
after door after door down a corridor
reeking with the odor of everything over.
In heretofore phrases, he left a note
outlining his Help! in argot
so wrought it was hopeless to ferret out
his intent, meant or not.
I saw I dreamt
Two men hoisted hung up not American the rope
Not closed on their breathing
But this rope tied them spine to spine somehow
Suspended
From the mood of a tree not American they were
African Ugandan Nigerian
Without a license a right to touch
The sin their touching incites
And I heard their names called out Revision
Or Die and You Must Repent
And Forget the Lie you Lily-Boys you Faggots
Called up from the mob
Leave it to the street vendors
of NYC to improvise a shrine
from whatever they find,
setting a place at their table
for animal and divine nature
symbolically joined with
color-coded floral candelabras.
a face stares back.
across the hostile centuries.
add a twist — delicious.
and never feel a thing.
commercial — added stretch to every gesture.
how it is made.
I almost admire it. I almost wrote despise.
I’ d be all give. Let me put it like this==
in the nocturnal, recessed bed==
of nettles.
resembles the bird it will fly into.
Right now I’ m trying to open wide.
she turns to a tree.
she would be neither-nor.
smoky field.
that is space.
the bride.
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
