Allow me to just run, no tricks.
We’ll see then if I have lungs
to withstand this air.

Because aren’t faces temples of sand
capable of melting in wind?

Still, when I was born, I saw
blue curtains gently shift
from the window my daughter
lifted open beside my bed,
to let it in, last, that air.

What can be done?
What do each of us really have?
Is it really just a handful
of blank photographs that
crimple in the hands like
a family of tired leaves?

From outside I can pretend
to understand how it might
come to nothing, a frozen block
of water being that metaphor
for numbness or indifference to
inexplicable flow, but inside
there is too much. Heat

A cigarette is just dragon spit, dragon spit
To tilt the world

Skull writing with ***** hands

Smear of words blind, dizzy
Onto walls of fireless caves

Out of the orange pulp of distant gerberas
Hopeful, and alone

Flick of sparks in air: dissolve
Downward around and everywhere

Like my thought

I wonder, if before me now were nothing
Would I jump?

There’d be no pain nor fear of end
There’d be nothing

I must transcribe this caved orange flower
Blindness somehow

There is a corridor that has escaped
and is out and is cold
and is overlooking Clarkson avenue.
That much I know for sure.

Because I turned
the cold brass ****
of the cold steel door,
heard the wind bellowing
obscenities as it absconded
berserkly. (I think
the other way.)
And also
walked through.

My mother’s voice has been
droned out by electronic
waves tentacling the immediate
space around me, around her,
and everywhere in between.
She sounds like a strange

robot, made-up. By me?
By God? It doesn’t matter.
Because that is
what is heard now.
That voice telling me with
the tragic kindness of
a mother
that I’ve forgotten
to call her, and my
dad, and my
sister,

and how come, have I
been busy?
How is life treating you?
Pretty good, I say. What’s
new? Nothing. Well then
what’s pretty good
about it, she says.
I laugh, she laughs too,
and I laugh again, inside though,

differently.
Slowly, our voices
wind down and we say
quiet goodbyes so that
I feel ice
about to rush to my
nose, it’s tentative, it
stops, and I
hang up the phone.

I am on the 6th floor of
a sick house, a hospital,
where some are healed,
some die, and others
stay sick. On the
ground, hundreds of feet
down and away
there are people I think, they
look so

small. An obese
mother, probably with
diabetes or hypertension or
heart disease or all of it
together, pushing her
baby in a carriage. A
smoker alone smoking
away something I’m
glad I don’t know and
other people just walking,
moving, like small living

things and then
I look down, closer,
at my own hands growing.
They can be
so large
when they move to
slowly cover
eyes.

Decided to run with him today.
Have the windpipe burned.

Which it has, though didn’t think
my tongue would grasp the air this way—
reach out further than the dog’s.  

Should’ve been just a wet towel
hung red over a balcony for the sun.
Instead I’ve discovered
mine is thickly wanting.

A bloodied wormhead.
Collapsed and writhing in a drain.

Sore, it’s been lopped. Beaten—cut.
By words which, kept crammed,
find their sharpness—my not-knowing-how
to listen to them heard.

So forms my residue of jilted buds.
Their shrivel in the mouth.
On a dead tongue.

While his, it seems, lives. Always kindly out.
Not only on the run. And his thoughts
are surely just as strong.

Being outrun, I’ll try to imitate.
On the way back—lap air by the wind
of my breath. Keep cool by releasing
from my tongue. Only heat.

At a party [many people, dressed nice, cocktails
going round] someone I guess awoke to my presence
as if I’d just appeared out of nowhere or something
and asked me [totally circular eyes, spearing pupils]
like this: And what do you do? I looked at him, and I
don’t know what face I made, but what I wanted to
look like was something to this effect, matter-of-factly:
Well, what do you think I do? Obviously, I simply
try to avoid, day by day,
a wretchedly hopeless case of dismal ennui.
I try to endure, as stoically I can, the
inner doggerel convulsions
and mawkish throes educed by the
realization of transcendental insignificance
(or, otherwise: paradoxically substantial nothingness)
that imbues all hope of Elysian ecstasy and
reduces it to but the terrifyingly
ineluctable fact that we are essentially
impotent holograms functioning by the fixed fractal geometry
of a dynamic and chaotic, kaleidomosaic-like reality,
which, as eternally self-transforming and
forever utterly inconceivable,
is devoid of any certainty, absolute truth
and, most of all, compassion.
Furthermore, when I look at you, I see a deaf-mute
reflection of a reflection of myself, and
to be morbidly honest, I don’t
know what I can tell you that would
make any difference to the fact that, freely or
not, we are both, you and I, just passing
through our lonely, fathomless, patterned
deserts, blinded and lured by the Fata
Morgana of our sadly sublimated
consciousnesses, due to which, undulating up ahead
of us in a chimerical haze, we are
conditioned to think, fatuously, that we know,
or that it’s possible even to know, that
it means something to love or not to love, that it
matters at all whether we are alone or
not, and that, at the point of death, there will be
something, somewhere, that will condense
somehow out of this
nauseatingly numinous fog and, like a deserved,
blissful wash of our “souls”—like a salvation!—
will come to justify the inanities
and insanities of our mundane life as just the
confusing buildup to a final and triumphantly
epiphanic crystallization in which, at last,
we will truly understand, unquestionably, the meaning of I,
the meaning of you, the meaning of truth,
and the meaning of meaning—I mean, honestly sir.
What do you do?
That’s what I hope my face looked like, but I guess it
must’ve looked like something else, or maybe I said
something, because the man just raised both his brows
[his left one slightly more than his right] and stared
me down in mocked awe, on the verge of superciliousness.
His eyes slowly receded like a tide imperceptibly towards
the back of his skull, his lips pursed, parched, and pitying.
Then he nodded complaisantly, too energetically, saying:
Oh, how interesting! Did you always see yourself getting
into something like that? Mmhmm. Hmm! [and so forth]
And how do you like that? Mmhmm. [and so forth] And
the pay? Mmhmm [etcetera]. After I’d finished answering
some of his questions, I said: If you’ll excuse me, I just saw
a friend of mine, I really should go and say hi, but what a
pleasure it was to talk to you, sir. Take care!
And I excused myself.

The powerful moment was so—
and so—unsustainable.

An atomic cascade leading
to the parting of air between air.

A new between,  
laying bare in split existence

old air—heterotelic. Not inhaled
but absorbed, and us—beautifully

unaware—beautifully
sustained but for a moment. An

unaware beautiful being.

~~~~

An explosion is a powerful moment,
unsustainable always

in eternal space. To keep alive,  
all of every existence

must give itself, continually,
to the cascading firefall.

But hasn’t this universe
achieved just that, since

the beginning—a courageously
growing child, for us unwilling

to fail exploding, continually?
A moment once,

something here did feel
like an enduring self offering

its unaware beautiful being.

There are some days many poems
begin themselves in me, and I am
given many first lines.

They come fast those days, and I
have to catch them as they rise
like a thousand geysers

shooting up from a vast barren land
(in shards of what could be held
in the hands) before leaving as

child’s balloons. I do not catch them
all, I do not even catch many. I
manage to touch just a

few. Still I am thankful for those
days. On those days I can feel the
ground shake from their rising,

the ground underneath, whence
they came. The tremor and pulse,
whence I came.