3.
Picture:
smog pilfers
away some stars;
some cars
my words

Silence:
like a pinch, a piercer,
a piercing

Little winter:
a pistachio
salty, sweetly
confined a bead
I crack the door open
I eat it up

Clock:
a pistil
in it
time incubates

This lamplight
is like a pineapple
I want to write, write, write

Privet! You are that
puerile, puffy
no longer the outline
that they had cut of you

Bold like a spider
smaller than the white spot
on my nail
I slam the book shut
you are faster
you skitter about on the table
mocking as if
but I like to play too

Morrow, morrow, city of dreams
Turpentine, slowly sifting
Invades here in sashes of silk
Sounds through bone, bone
Fluid, lures the brain:
It follows coy, curious
Shuffling its thoughts, like one
With fingers, like you
with seasons— blue, and then bold—

The crows shift on the wall
Linseed a moment, and then acetone
I can only overhang and see
The stretches of the city
Forever overspill, overkill— overt
And covert— sounding through
Its buz-busses and snorts; crickets,
Cats, night, white, night
An ox-y-mo-ron, you
Are an orchestra, a tryst

Sweet mo-no-to-ny, a
Platform in a plaza
A plaque on a platform in a plaza
I ransack the dictionary in search of you
The road to lead to the relic of you—
Feed the retrospect’s imagery away
Then the crows look at me
Like I killed their maa
Lit up a June solstice in the beautiful light
Pollution and sound pollution, you
Are homecoming, I say
I say, nothing blinds like home, I say
And I cough the air out like a slang
Your city is ****, a skullduggery
To last the brazen evening
And sag by the night, you are slant
Static, ruthless to the stone come for moss
A slap on the face
Of my sentimentality
How I love to draw you: this way,
This, however I like, since you
Are sightless like a TV, hive of bee
You jig like rain, like sun, woe to me
Like sen-su-a-lity
A satin city, itty bitty pretty
Silly, let me study!

Roused in fanfare, these facets
are full of scantiness,
of cold-***** futility, of bitter thanks

The light turns, morphs them
now they are faces, now limbs
now rancid rag houses again

Crooked sun gurgles, spits a fraud spring
and the office men observe their machines
straight-backed like chairs, they droop
rampant on scarped brown desks,
desks with picked-nail edges, so brown
no one sees them, so solid one forgets to

The sky runs her threads again
accumulating: stagnant noon, sitting
spread-legged, with wax-paper eyes
it watches, watches the aging

Slowly, everyone leaves
the formal men, their leisurely burlap work
lights blink as if to bulwark tears, and
the foul remnants of day's charred pleasure
begin to settle on skin.
the wrists thin, some nails cave in
some lichens on stone-nose

Things that elude cuddle elastic back
into the things they elude
and, spent, the sky breaks at last the thread
to another demure death:
glitchy and green, riddled
in its own secrecies,
dry-lipped as a crone

The light turns again
and this time, it is perfect:
just past the critical angle,
where bustle-bundles of beam
flee unfettered
and leave unlit the grateful subject
reticent, stale
bold in a boastless brood

only a singular fissure
of pretend slight
to mourn aloud in the spectacle of black

Did you weep too?
when we put down our cups of hot tea and joy
they seemed to speak to the wavering air
some reticent secrets of themselves or us
I thought: death is like my father now
it names me, not after, for itself
and I smell the petalled incense of its security
security…
Security. Security.
I thought: we are written
you pull right, and I pull to left
and we go stumbling forward to papa
I thought: I am a cold bottle put in the day
I wipe my tears, and I smile at the beautiful sun
and then again, I wipe my tears, and I smile at the beautiful sun
Did you whimper?
sweetly like a child
I could have loved you if I wasn’t afraid
You say: I am always afraid
You say: it is my excuse for everything
You act so brave, you think I do not think
I have seen you in the velvet dark
crystalline eyed and thin,
not yet the woman that becomes my sin
You are just like me

I thought the eyes would swell and mama would know
so, I stopped and quietened
breathing like a valley, sniffing like lizards
We heard the city sing by
I thought: it is like a train
its tail hooked to the nose, it moves in a circle
and we are in it
Say, do you recall at all?
not more a nigh to pass, but the sentimentality fades,
and we ought to go

Say, stay?
Say, stay for a dance
However pained– a waltz of held-hand and shoe
I will try not to tremble
like that acrid tongue of forever time
Now your forehead gleams with the smear of gloom
and we are wont to let it dry
wont then, to become canvases
wont then, to hide them away, in slots of unlit places
(like ******* or... palm-on-palm or... in between bookshelves or lip)
with so many others
Remember that one? Then that, then that, then that
when we wore our shameless dresses of terror and shame
and we cursed the holy heavens of youth,
when we fought, when we fought, when ran like laughter
There was so much grief
I thought: it will eat us
I thought: I will never escape this
this name that papa wrote
on the paper of my breath
we will always be here, babes, fumbling in shawls
and pleasing the house
plaint and faint and so much like fear

Did you weep too?
I was astray in the street, I couldn’t quite see
I could’ve kissed you like the girls on TV
but mama was everywhere, and she was dressed in papa’s shadow
She said
She said—
She needn’t say anything at all

Say, did you weep at all?
I said I was afraid,
I said then so much of it, I forgot of you
Say, I don’t think you did.

You are an idol of stone
You do not move, you stand at the doorway and watch
You do not talk
You stand at the doorway and watch
When you thunder downstairs to your mistress
Your wife sits blue-eyed on the bed
That is old and ugly, its wood full
Of red insects that bite, but you
Will not let her sell it
For you think it is just fine

When you drive away with your mistress
There is laughter in the house
There is a board-game
Of fickle fate and try
That your wife and your children toss dices upon
And there is so much chatter and so much sound
All red things crawl back
Into the deep deep dens of the bed
That your wife got from her own house
And that you will not let her sell
For you think it is just fine

When you laugh, it is like storm
Sounding through the fingers of the city
And you make so much noise, it startles the sky
It makes the fat dead TV wince at its past
It makes the gruff old drawers never want to move again
And you are always here
Such loving god:
We cut the stone from which you came
Into pieces, pieces, we carved so many of you
Now you are in every doorway
And you do not move

When you return from your mistress
You are happy
You put the new TV on, loud and the news
Of the city flood the house
You are a news yourself
You cough like a steel glass falling in the silence of the night
When everything is sleeping, you cough like its bouncing
That goes on and on, and like its spinning stop
You cough and you chew on the furniture wood
And you make so much noise

She cannot sleep

Well, after, you are still; grey-eyed and corpse
And the insects come; and they do not bite stone