Report night traumas
To frightened adherents
Who begin flicking change
At every wretched port of call
Some ports take longer than winter
Big tech is a language trauma
Study the nerve
The birth night slips through
I’d like to drive you nowhere
In the comfort of a smile
Sometimes now is all we can bear
Who are you when you’re still not here?
Despite the ire of ruthless showmen
Who claim to laugh at streets of dust
Invent the stars
When words aren’t enough
The purity of maybe
Is that it might not always be
I struggle to hear thunderclaps
That sound like ancient bells
A trumpet solo is a vowel set free
Consider the moon’s structure,
A tenuous proposal for azure,
A parking delimiter of pooled shadows
Gnarled at the pages of what’s seen.
Which case is empty? Which hermit victory
Ill-applied? I’ll chase
The apple healer, make compact with sadness’s
Twisted plight
In order to heave unctuous anime
By arraignment of laws & means
That I’ll be sure to bungle. In the meantime,
Shrive plunderers & freefall extortionists
In morning’s leaden gloom. Bump diamonds
If you would lie in grace of sandlots,
Afflicted with dog barkers & Sanskrit memes
You’d translate or mutilate maybe another time into
Lurid outros, tuning particulars
In a state of knotted means.
Were I a bicycle tuner, I’d sit here & grumble
At contortionists of forgotten city days,
But now the earth is tender as a zydeco healer,
& I must buckle roses up in deadpan mirth.
Loan me a proverb? I hear you shiver
At questions of dysphoric proportion
As children glance at dolls, & the moon crosses
A lonely bridge. Bring me some tune, then,
A cart widener turvy enough to
Bollix all misgivings. I’ll follow up with
Courtesy implants & feckless red teddy bears,
As seen on Oprah, with a wicked grin.
February’s leaking
Down the sides of buildings
A slivered heap
Tidy night grievers
Wind in the absent doorway
Buttoned means
Tangled motions
Bright shimmers left
For an aging paramour
Who is nowhere to be seen
The hand moves
The night bends softly
You want to believe, but
Dusk has acquired
This strange, overarching power
Hold out your hand
Will the light become bearable
In the morning? Will we ever see?
Then aren’t we always
Someone else
Who listens to mumblers
In a hallway full of mirrors
Often mistaken for thieves
While children clutch their pencils
With shadow fingers
Amounting to a slight wave or release
At the edge of the wall of a garden
Where we often sang
Telling bland stories & rumors
In the dark, with pressed fingers
Gently bleeding, in the night
Crooked with glass stars
Among those who forgot to do no harm
Bending notes like ancient reeds
With groundskeepers affecting a kind of forthright malice
Toward those whose eyes are often far
Away
Then gather up the night with bony
Fingers; trace edges in a glimpse’s nuance
Burn all the tickets
Conduct children to wishing wells
Count the stars at the end of the day
Awaken, while grieving
Like sand in an open wound
Even after lovers all pass by
Going to be?
What forms do words sound? Does voice equal
Speech?
Provided cohost snooze
It was a shambles until the next
Outsider effigy
The meme was full of thunder—
Smoke, Coptic mirrors, etc.— com-
position as day-
break
Pontoon silliness wilting
•
In what words are you
Trapped? implicated? burdened?
The gun goes
Off—
A subtext or nursery rhyme puzzle.
Animals feel it too. All are
On
Display. It rhymes with
Frozen. Blood on hand. It’s
Tuesday, maybe
•
Maybe in the dream,
Maybe in the dream, I’ll go
Maybe in the dream, I’ll think & gasp
Maybe in the dream, I’ll think I’m standing
Maybe it’ll all go away
Maybe it’ll go away tenderly
Tendered— night strata— flawed
•
Like feelings formed of
Words, appalling
Speeches without inter-
vening rain— glass effigies
Encoded or em-
bodied by in-
flection—
An angelology of the commonplace
Grafted to rathskellers
On the lips of the desperately
Poor—
•
New word order:
A spitfire beaux-arts flummoxing:
Psycho-economics of disjunctive foreclosure
With or without birdcalls—
When inaudible, sing
Sing anyway
When words appear. In what birth order?
Blunt poker?
Burnt paper?
Degrees of rapture’s
Cold becoming
•
For every book a passenger
To whom do I have the honor?
Libertine nightshifts—
A mirth of vanishing
Words, a gaping orifice—
A bedlam of stars. Words
Do as they are. Read
Further, in the night sky, constellated, brooding—
Clogged with history’s
Dark interiors—
A nostalgia for gasping. I have no fear
Of the poem
Going too far—
Things happen as they are
How far away is light?
•
Abetted by stars, their
Makeshift eyes
In films’ demanding
Rain
The poem eludes my turvy sibilance
In buckets of milieus
Made stark by reprisals
As if fed doubts by wishing wells
While keeping up with the latest chatter
Only to stew or bristle
At the archetypes of penitents
Who doubt
Even in the apparent evening
& All that it incurs
The poem is a tropical lesion
A ghost of midnight jackets crowding your angle of vision
In a lurch or widening
Downpours of collective amnesia
In which it’s still okay not to inveigle or consume
As you often do, in paltry rue
That internet junkies can ill assemble
On speedboats like parking tickets of adamant drowsers
Damage collectors of human follies
Afflicted with backroad anonymity
The poem edges its fill in blaring
Days of sidebars & hungry dowsers
Who each etch shadows on retractable grimaces
Cruel with amnesiac uptake
The shitty verve of pent-up realtors
Released down monochrome avenues
With excuses rough enough to pester the gritty
At sundown by parachute scissors
That collide with looks of down-&-out amblers
Waltzing toward a finish line
The poem is what it does— a reckoning
With time in thought’s order
A state of attention, gnarled trees at evening—
O where is the cart we could wander from
Free of assignments & history’s curve? Be
Loco in mirrors; the poem
Takes no excuses, offers no explanations. Carry on then, in full view of the
Locals, who meander, getting dressed up for dinner
Only later to scatter, as tensile
Harbingers loom, like turnbuckle prodigies, whenever fate’s concealed
Cold outer mentions
Tunesmith distortion
Tongue as going to be to
Be in here with
No one talking
Or looking, perceptively
As gnarled as darting
A shade beyond the crevice (barriers)
Shadows held at bay
Wealth of spun
Roses diagonal tuning
The gape of a leap sent bro-
kenly, brokenly
Indelible of night stars
In the air we take in all
As useless song
2.
Cold interior mentions (slumber)
Is all a household left to wear
Even when the sun becomes stable
As riven cartography, an emptiness sideways
Availed of speech a cold whirl
Consequential divining
Mirror, a winter bucolic
Temper, an open wound, distorting
As needs as wounds must be, & we
Felt, ordinary, mortally
Dull, wounded, pictured
Ever, & sing to me
In tawdry inflections
Rough indulgence
Broken nuance
Garbled phones
Heap plaster pummeled with
Stars, who also go
Away
3.
Who I am a voice might be
Nearly rankled as always (complaint
Of days’ long goings) carrying
On somehow (insert theme here)
As dusk descends & I slowly
Am falling in love again
With that book, its gangly
Lucid musics interior to
Somebody took a bite out of that bookmark but
I don’t know how it comes to mean
Transcendently, exponentially, etc.
A vase of clear blue diamonds
Held as knowing
Means
Grace on delivery. Let’s go. No
Grace can’t be delivered. A turnbuckle angst
Just when our nouns seemed to cease to implore it
& Crazy doodlings, by the way
If the sun weren’t lifted
You’d think
It weren’t so, because you do (circular
Reasoning). Then the weather
Is gorgeous, seems nervous (it’s supposed to
Snow this weekend). When
William Blake met Elmo
At the dark park wanting
The sun as necessity.
Social cohesion doesn’t exist anymore
Why should poetic cohesion?
“child you are is the source of all”
Alice Notley said that, you didn’t
4.
Erase clobbered means
Win sun a grace
Period after delivery
As thick as lucent dwellings
Backdated rathskellers
A theory not mentioned
In divining retail
Vestibules, when winter
Comes to harm
By grace of lunch
Floated, minuscule
Blissed out, serious
This is not a normal case
Normal isn’t moral
Beside which flickers
The whole world seen
Please request books on roses & daydreams
Otherwise, I might be destroyed
In blank sound mentions
Fertile & redolent
I’m sorry, but intend to mention
The grammar of letting go
As if impact weren’t ceremony
& Night
Inconclusive, flaming
Done with stars