The belt kicks on with a whir & the whir
licks the end grain of the offcut with a hint
of hesitation. A small wind of ochre dust
sweeps off the belt before the belt comes back
to where it was. The whole room swells
with the scent of cinnamon & desire.
How imprecise the smell of desire.
The wood takes on a sheen, a gloss
the grain can live behind without worry
of being forgotten. A single knot blinks
out of the small block and becomes
He was just some coked-out,
crazed King w/crooked teeth
& a teardrop forever falling,
fading from his left eye, peddling
crack to passengers or crackheads
passing as passengers on a train
chugging from Chicago to Cicero,
from the Loop through K-Town:
Kedzie, Kostner, Kildare.
I was just a brown boy in a brown shirt,
head shaven w/fuzz on my chin,
staring at treetops & rooftops
seated in a pair of beige shorts:
a badge of possibility — a Bunny
As a boy I bicycled the block
w/a brown mop top falling
into a tail bleached blond,
gold-like under golden light,
like colors of Noble Knights
’ banging on corners, unconcerned
w/the colors I bore — a shorty
too small to war with, too brown
to be down for the block.
White Knights became brown
Kings still showing black & gold
on corners now crowned,
the block a branch branded
w/la corona graffitied on
garage doors by the pawns.
Women asleep. Carlight,
east red and west white.
Women, and men made of them,
and lambs in their droves, and power lines east
to the women-made men and women of men,
when a man is a sum
of what women he knows, and I
blurred my vision till I
saw a woman and lambs in the streets,
west red and white east,
and I wanted to eat. Women and men,
don’ t fear me, I am
a hand come to wake her. Red
in the west says
woman is man is woman is man.
Little Enoch learned his colors from lettered blocks
(for a is the color of fleet,
b is the color of war and demolition,
c is the color of echo and blur,
& c.) and built
a bricolage:
So cab was a whirring warbler.
bach was the Spanish Armada crashing
and crashing.
And enoch he couldn’ t describe.
And when it reached the height of Enoch,
standing, he tore whole tongues
down to their colors.
Tennessee: We are here, between trees,
with the tempo of a rosary being strung
in a queue of escalating beads —
Carolina: It’ s not quite the count in
the countinghouse of my chest
but the heart does make an awful attempt
t: and a circle wherever it may be
there was music coming on
c: which though machinery-like
moves not in cogs, and never
springs, but waves through
t: like wired applause for antic backstage
buds on the pre-comeuppance buzz; but it
fades
c: but only after the chorus has pulsed
In the road, a dog. Days dead,
that dog. Liliana was walking beside me awhile
(I am sure) and I was almost not crying but then found
what I was looking for.
She heaved it for me — all of it, the stench, the weight —
in her thin arms until it was too much.
Tired, she dragged the thing by its wasted paws
all the way home. Her dress was stained. This is how
I learned about love. She did not mind at all
the silent, steady distance I placed between us.
The sill plays a cruel joke — thrones me. Frames me
lording over lawn mower stripes — myself
in a shallow trench. In grass blades. Myself
persisting, despite a dickhead sun — me
in chlorophyll. Early, I find myself
swaying — me! in the black chokeberry, me!
in the rabbit’ s throat. Me, the rabbit. Me
dancing out pellets. Out-dancing myself —
my father’ s pellet gun, the hawk. The joke
is a bright belly full of dark hopping
along my father’ s garden & the joke
small, between wrapped talons, is the hawking
Two spiky-haired Russian cats hit kick flips
on a vert ramp. The camera pans to another
pocket of the room where six kids rocking holey
T-shirts etch aerosol lines on warehouse walls
in words I cannot comprehend. All of this
happening in a time no older than your last
heartbeat. I’ ve been told the internet is
an unholy place — an endless intangible
stumbling ground of false deities
dogma and loneliness, sad as a pile of shit
in a world without flies. My loneliness exists
in every afterthought. Yesterday, I watched
This early the garden’ s bare
but people pay to walk it,
at plots of budless brush
stop, as if remembering,
and stoop to mouth the names —
araucaria
araucana, monkey
puzzle tree, something
Japanese — each particular
ridiculous to be.
