menagerie

that is, the human zoo, when
was it being first caught & our
wanting to parade became night
& a gloom moon through the bars

the wagon wheels take us
from town to town, grinds us
to powder: oh imaginary waves
of grain to touch to sing

oh spacious ceiling, oh amber street
lamp, oh neighbor's amorous cat

eau de poesis

oh sumptuous sobriety of stops
washed up flush to end of the lines

oh faux fur lined slippery twats
of sledging elided expectation

oh true grit snowballing up the rime
in Constance in a sense deposited

in nomine Patria

give us this
day to day
rigmarole
for thine is
thine is the
let not thy
and He said
let
give us our
ever and
ever a
man oh man

systellar

sun:

old man of planet, we slow, but to
your skin's species imperceptibly.
why did we bother working up your
spin? they manufacture alarm clocks.

earth:

wobble, press
electro-magma
flux, itch in scrabble
weedy numbers, fewer
slow, oh slow
scracks heat
reheat cools thicks
hello? someone there
crusty haunted

travels

comeup ance her wholey ear
nest minute senseless ened
insutably my optic nervend

 may arm my aims renewing
 oh hey guise beach tours
 aboat apier afour oclock

planes only so cheat along
dates lines of transitions
pull up along chromosphere

in the smooth of the crescent moon

in the mortar
the pestle
to powder
people the
machine
w/ medi-
canticle
mercy

oh apoth
ecary thy
drugs
quick
click

oh, i have already prepared my eulogy

carry my body
as a placard.
the sun sinks
itself into the grass.
we worship at
the transparent mirror
of illness. some
of us crash.

solesystem

sun:

old man of planet, we slow, but to
your skin's species imperceptibly.
why did we bother working up your
spin? they manufacture alarm clocks.

earth:

wobble, press
electro-magma
flux, itch in scrabble
weedy numbers, fewer
slow, oh slow
scracks heat
reheat cools thicks
hello? someone there
crusty haunted

observance

for a while i dreamed of contests
of flux between our liquid and solid forms.
more or less races. i say: they say dreams
are not in color. you say: in my dreams things
go on without attributes, are suspended
placelessly in space and i fly among
them. the flying being the dream. it also
is at times a swim or a crawl. oh
please rarefied ocean-trenched earth do
not loose us when we wake. i am tired
of every thing colored and having nothing
to try for. i lay still heavy in the bed
for a while saying those purple sorts of
things then get up.

legend

...a method which amounts to this: try to have a great deal of talent and even of genius if you can. How vain are all the poetic theories and criticisms!—and the nerve of the gentlemen who compose them sickens me. Oh! nothing restrains them, those boneheads! -- Gustave Flaubert, letter to George Sand

thunder is a metal rattle
shook up by the tips of high
wave graveyards out in the ocean.
photosynthesis begins in crossing
wakes of stretchers rushed to the
ICU. a small crumbling war
memorial sinking into shifts
of reconstituted dunes is
how the skunk got its stripe.
the electron microscope was brought
to us by a childless persian king
who always weeps for his daughter.
the remington rifle is a masterpiece
of modern matter, the coherence
of a concentrated gaze. if you
say out loud the name of the heat
of the core of the earth it will
spin in your direction.