Let's fake an execution: tell me: do you breathe on cue?

parts

I missed your

call at five

this morning. What

makes a stem

sad, all throat,

no flower. We're

a lot like we like

each other, clean, small.

A tooth is how

the mouth goes in, sharp,

then running warmth. I

might need a shiver

to keep me awake.

I had a new smell

the first time I slept

next to you. Naked

belly, a pool on your

hand. In the dream,

our house starts to

burn the first night

and I catch

the arsonists. The second,

it burns down. The third

night, we live next door.

I can't imagine

starting here again. Just

a lump in the covers

with a few little dots

of blood.

Death is refracted light,

the boy not knowing

how to clean up, how

a mountain might

fall on me.

Meteors feel last night

the curved sky,
I want you

to feel with me, feel me

feel you, time repeats,

changes speed,

stops, all at once.

Sleeping 11 hours and still

The Oklahoma Land Rush

Wave,

and I'm driving home

where I wanted you

to stay and sift

through the quiet parts,

night of how I forgot

to speak, draw four

little bags between us.

If you had a necklace.

The sheets are not

clean, but soft, and lead

your eyes through,

the sitting cat through feet,

and if this will suspire

flush the land between us.

I found your necklace.

Now it is on my nightstand.

Quick, I know you have
other things, breaths or
sailing through the sieve,
how can we clasp, or here
we have all the meals
and mornings, my naked
chest, there's
blood all over my pillow. Wait.

Was there

Consider. We enter the sea with a shock; our skin and blood shout in protest. But, that instant, that leap, past, what do we find? Ecstasy and buoyance. Swimming offers a parable. We struggle and thrash, and drown; we succumb, even in despair, and float, and are saved.

--John Updike, "Lifeguard"

Knowing

You've seen how

my ankle heals for the past

week, and before then.

The bites on my wrist,

blanket in the grass

and bugs. Consider.

Your weight is a will

in me, wait for me to hear

you, can you save the

slum in me. I have a trying

sense in nothing, staring, leaving

for my back to hurt and happen,

I hope this will happen

is how I don't need to think. Make.

How we work is a swell between our hips,

solid froths of palm

leaves in the pool, sense, and I know

you are here. Here is my neck,

my hairline, swift shape up

through my thick so

I can sleep when you are near,

have a heat in my blue toes

and you will have my feet feel

skin, unclasp your tongue.

Isolate in my hair as an eye, or in,

I can turn my way out, speak

clearly and stabilize the hum,

know you'll hear it. You're

sleeping in my room.

Mushroom Drawing

Essence and accident

and if the rest sits fast, lands end,
beached, autumn seethes down
the door, call on hot or the cold
hot door of a room left dead, open,
hope it won't

call me in the way you used to cry
lots, speak, it does, is doing, dear,
it will be about reading, will it to writhe
in writing

will it away or over? orchards about now,
a crude ontology, in time we'll see the next seaport
and never learn to, never care to,
leave a slipped sheet or two, cease.

wrote this at the library drowsed on cough syrup cutting bits of folks' sentences seated in a tilted chair and I know it's never very good

Ibidem

At a party we're all fired
wind up slanting never the apse two-
toned lynch-it-up optimism, and
terrible fear. Are the paints
dry, when we die it's over, and then
there's mints plain old shame can
a care, keep keeping me, slanted.

Offshore there can't ever be. Info
into the white white crass of clementines
in memory, safe or soot hike you
white elephant,
chart. Currency costs, crests, oxford knot
care to join me?

Slated till up on down, deck's all
crows, find, we'll do better in the ice,
simply, have a minute?, really just
thirty seconds.

A visual: the shirt can't, leaning toward
Chinese, slope drop pen, brown
paper bag don't know if there's
color, folded, to give you a sense.

[lopped this off at the library]

So many pages of notebooks. Neat,
what she did. To be born.

Tinnitus

Like

Woe is blunted not erased
by like. Your hands were too full, then

empty. At the grave's

lip, secretly you imagine then
refuse to imagine

a spectre

so like what you watched die, the unique
soul you loved endures a second death.

The dead hate like, bitter

when the living with too-small
grief replace them. You dread

loving again, exhausted by the hungers

ineradicable in his presence. You resist
strangers until a stranger makes the old hungers

brutally awake. We live by symbolic

substitution. At the grave's lip, what is
but is not is what

returns you to what is not.

--Frank Bidart


Susurrus

I was naked this morning, so
there you were, mountain
or carpeted quiet. We know
what it feels like to roll over
surfaces, slate, macadam, awe
in cut asphalt, shale. Specialized.
Nothings. Tasteless, laundry-based
jokes, terrible quips of the lion
blood in the mail.

People say I look like
their fathers twenty years ago.
Are ration and reason synonymous,
or the pool beneath your hands?

How much everything tells me
about me, flies and bites, stet,
itch that off I will teach you,
saying neither can wear the wet
rope, becoming suspicious, if
that could possibly mean.

FUCK YOUTH; YOU CAN HAVE IT ALL

It was like one of those dreams where you're filled with some extravagant feeling you might never have in life, it doesn't even matter what it is, even guilt or dread, and you learn from it what an amazing instrument you are, so to speak, what a power you have to experience beyond anything you might ever actually need.

--Marilynne Robinson, "Gilead"

Distortionist

I can only draw rats. Rat drinking soda, rat
soda flavor not yet sure how that'd sit, plain
with white I know you feel this in certain
landscapes: terror, balustraded the shin of each
stair to your room. We sleep. All I have, both my
names mean rock, you could draw back your lip
and your nails burn as fingertip my shoulder,
bite, this is how it feels it feels if like that
between them

building sickening in came a skink, you, did she
care a whetstone bleat clasping nine of the ten
heads we hold, your chest, sex, starting over we
came this far only nice nice.

He's more NRA than
you, more of a little wicked liquor, hold it whiskey
in your throat a night you willing forget. He is
training. Know. Telling I lie, told the clerk leave it on the
counter paid for I'll be back. We love it in the arms.

Upon a night, she in the other room, really just one
large room, I hope she can't hear it doesn't matter
cold penetrating I hold it, your chest, here we are in
hail, twin tip, my hand, please it think, you will, you voicing,
our hulls barely tipping touched hold on to a crack
shoulder will readjust all so fair, so, know it, much fairer
in morning the mouse leaving his nest by your bed.

Updike, DJ Paul, Seth, Loaf & Me

Falling asleep has never struck me as a very natural thing to do. There is a surreal trickiness to traversing that in-between area, when the grip of consciousness is slipping but has not quite let go and curious mutated thoughts pass as normal cogitation unless snapped into clear light by a creaking door, or one's bed partner shifting position on the remarkably noisy sheets. The little fumbling larvae of nonsense that precede dreams' uninhibited butterflies are disastrously exposed to a light they cannot survive, and one must begin again, relaxing the mind into unravelling. Consciousness of the process balks it; the brain, watching itself, will not close its thousand eyes. The brain, circling the cell of wakefulness, panics at the poverty of its domain - these worn-out obsessions, these threadbare word games, these pointless grievances, these picayune plans for tomorrow which yet loom, hours from execution, as unbearably momentous. Life itself, that agitation of electrified molecules, becomes a captivity, a hellish endless churning, in which one is as alone as Satan, twisting and turning and boring a conical hole in the darkness, while on every side the wide world gently, blessedly snores.

--John Updike, from "Falling Asleep Up North"

Now if you warrin and runnin from them three-six niggas This forty-five gon give a reason to sleep, nigga Or bustin massive round some s.k. My last trip to a-t-l I fucked yo cascade Im strippin bitches and ima ball fucker with a limp They call me infer-stripper, sexy, red hoes pimp And quick to sink her on the nigga cause this what its bout We rob that trick and stick his dick off in his fuckin mouth We memphis niggas

--DJ Paul, from "Go to Sleep"

Sleep

Where did I leave that pen I'm stealing it's finally time to write to get a job you know how the sun starts humming and such a lousy prospect cryptogrammic grammar gumming up the gears round these parts we don't know shit. You ain't shit.

If I could wake up and know I'm coming down I know I won't wake up no one wakes up we read about movies rather than watch I want to (watch) write the back of movies you'll feel better. Certain. You need it. You are the worry I move about. The orange shirt I don't have don't hate me don't hurry. You need it. Care in the action such a lousy route through Milwaukee why would I go there I'm such a liar all I know are lies and I know it doesn't even matter I'm just filling in the shell, the fetish of originality, walking in, maybe it won't be a lazy day I will get out and I'm a liar, hear.

Drawing is funner. I'm failing. Feel on purpose. Why won't we ever billow out and get caught in the thin wires left by birds insect trails assisting tit for tat please love me it can't get much lower here than sitting read me a poem about the book I hit my head against last night in your bed. Neither of us ever knew how to sleep.