TURN MY POCKET INTO A BOMB
my watch into a thousand boy’s haircuts
them hefting their guns
& shouting gutters
canal work
for the frailer
among them
what tree hardens from the root
how fruit grows ill
& then alcoholic
turn my stamp into a picture
the blanks we are sworn in service to
a pot forms all that’s thrown into it
into a
meal
given heat & stirring
The water above & below us
informs different slurring song
our saying this is that, our breath
how to sustain
the curvature
of the earth from a mind
spread over distance & time
one equates blinding with robotics
& surehanded doctoring
the divine width of a laser
puts a permanent smile
on the face
of the baby for the sake
of our bundles
bodies blown
apart by small changes
A THIN KEEPING OF INNS ONE LIGHTS THE DARK WITH
This is the new coliseum & this simulacrum
stands in for when
you have become an immense container
of dead eyed things
a store for housing certain feelings always folding
into newish folds, the form
many strands of thought happen & liked together.
No longer connections
just night creams to be bartered with—
smells that you call back across a yard
& into a certain quality of light
whether pale & ailing or healthful there is
no dissent can measure
how long the heating coils. At what key
individuals turn glass & how
volume leans into force & form to shards
of some projected type our
faces grant again this conjunctive mood
a pull that sets
the green to world a table by
a stroke of noon
to color some other rice stained hour
where lovers belt
their promises across a field or river
same stones there as ever dip
into the cloudlike water.
THE SADDLE YOU WEAR IS NOT WHAT I WOULD CONSIDER
Let the ghosts beat their horses. Dead dead horses.
Name regret the thing you wanted most and got. But don’t believe in your own instructive tendons.
A body is a mop waiting to be used. It is also the ground, or what we confuse between stepping and dance.
The ghosts can keep their locked-up instruments clean by refraining from crossing the air.
Their horses are trying to tell us something about the lightening of loads, but they’re horses and they’re dead. All dead.
Happy birthday America.