When I was younger,
I hoped to be like Andy Warhol.
Everybody like everybody.
I hoped to be like God.
Anyone like Anyone.
I hoped to be somewhere,
with new faces.
I hoped I wouldn't lose mine.
When I was younger,
I walked like Grace Slick.
Someone like Someone.
I walked like caterpillars,
foot after foot, going slow.
I walked like someone
with a place to go.
I walked with no destination .
Now that I’m older,
I hope Andy Warhol didn’t know
I hope God doesn’t know I couldn’t see him.
I hope somewhere leads to one face,
I hope I can pick mine out among a million.
Now that I’m older,
I walk and thank Grace Slick.
I walk and don’t step on caterpillars, squirming.
I walk and go somewhere,
Walking until I reach Myself.

I leave behind
a signature constellation of half scraped
blu tack smattered across the walls

a scrawl in braille to the shell's
next inhabitant: life is out there

I was here, living
I drew a picture of an elephant
for no real reason

I didn't follow the news enough
and skimmed books like stones

I persuaded three friends to beam
from a glossy page at a birthday party,
I cut a cottage from a magazine and
tacked it with a daydream

I hid from the clocks
and watched pounds stick then fall
stick then fall

I lived in this room,
now it's your turn

Men who look like ferris wheels
every color representing different aspects of their personality

The first three words don't have to be beautiful
they just have to make sense
like connecting dots on paper

men who love with their fists
and hate with their mouths
who once were boys taking things apart
like remote controls their own fathers used to beat     Obedience into their small bodies.  Left them with a fury tattooed across their hearts
Just to give them the challenge of putting themselves back together

They buy their wive's flowers after
a four day bruise isn't so glaringly purple anymore
not so accusing-
kiss her broken ribs
and tell their children midnight stories

children trained as mood detectors
human robots
know when to shutup
speak when you are spoken to*

Men who speak like cutting boards
Every slice of the knives in their toungues leave
hollow aching missing parts
just to teach their children that not all
things can be put together once taken apart

whose daughter glues together the parts of old telephones
to spite the missing pieces
so every welt he beats into her bones
she sings herself unbroken
until she stands robust and imperfect
there are holes in her armour
but she holds it together

with her fathers fists.

by heart we mind our verse... dredging funk, for carbuncles and silk wryms.
apart. entwined. our words....tumble from our chin straps. [ bits bit ]
we are writing poems like paradigms
equal twenty. our backs are bent.
we two: scratching magic with blunt tools, we are sonnet ‘s fool as much
as any crime’s pet. we shank the warden in the prism. we free the rainbow.
we change a blank page into a blank stare.
by heart we mind our heart’s thought.
on a bed.

from a chair.

And Diogenes is an outcast
not wanted by society;
his mind is way too far
and he doesn't belong -
and where does he come from, anyway?
and they don't want teachers like that;
and the men and women of Dignity
have made sure he stands at the periphery,
as far outside as possible


'O why do you beg,
Diogenes?'
asks the butcher

'I'm a teacher,
Old Butcher, '
says Diogenes
'I beg in order
to teach'

'And what
do you teach?'
asks the butcher

'Generosity,'
answers Diogenes
*'Do you have some bones
and meat you can spare?'

"It's a universal urge to pair up." They say.

It's 3 words and
Suddenly files are executing
Auto-running and auto-installing.
When you've been alone,
It's like
Every rancid dream inside of you is
Awakened. Hyper aware & readied
Preprogrammed bugs start to run.
Users in remote locations
Triggered by tracking cookies
Wheel- in backdoor worms
And all I have to do is click

I/O corrupted
Cloudy decisions, decisions

Ads for free cars, free girlfriends
Glittering pop-ups.
"Hot guys in your area!"
But **** is for the lonely
Bait;
A smiling **** Madonna 
accompanied by
Beguiling hooks, fly-paper,
You-name-it

Can't tell if I'm in love or in lure.
But I have to go for it.
And that's the point.

"I love you"
[Click]

who says love
has died?

he's alive and well, reading
a newspaper by the corner store

and shaking our world together (turn
to page 5)

‘Puts Me to Work’ echoes through the house,
Cate Le Bon’s voice bouncing off the walls.
I can almost see it, storming down the hallway,
Barging out of the bathroom.

This floor is ******* freezing.

I can see my reflection in the shiny wood;
A circle of condensation that grows and shrinks
As I breathe in and out.

‘But I know that you’re there,
‘cause you’re making it hurt.’

Entire galaxies are swirling in the shaft of setting sunlight
Streaming through the broken blinds
At right angles, sharp and sudden.
Solar systems shift and spiral,
Exploding every
Time I take a breath.

A lake is forming by my chin.
I wonder if it is clear and wet
Like swimming,
Or white with froth and paste
Like winter.

I stop wondering when the shivering becomes me.

‘It puts me to work . . . puts me to work.
It puts me to work . . . it puts me to work.’

The song has been repeating for an hour now.
I used to really like the end.
Something like forty-five-minutes-ago.

I wonder if the battery will die soon.

I wonder not if I will die soon.
Preoccupied with galaxies and spirals and the little spot of condensation
Forming and unforming as I breathe.
With the frozen lake I feel cold enough to be skating across
In these baggy shorts and this tattered t-shirt
From a Nirvana show last century.  

The battery doesn’t die, and Cate Le Bon comes racing around the house again.

I close my eyes and sigh.

Lecture twenty-three of first period of the last semester:
Today’s topic – “What went wrong with Wall Street”

The professor’s trying to connect with the class. He’s trying to have us look past
Sagan-like hair, black pants poorly paired with brown shoes, sleeves stained with chalk, an undeniable excitement in his voice when he says the word “canonical”.

He’s trying to get us to see a forty-four year old father who watches The Daily Show before bed, someone that’s hip with the times. He says something about Twitter and that singer in the meat dress. He references Charlie Sheen.

He draws a graph on the board with three lines
red: Normal
blue: Poisson
green: Cauchy-Lorentz

And we’re all thinking it- What the **** is that green line.

He begins.

Cauchy-Lorentz:
fully defined by two parameters;
x-nought and
gamma
mean;
undefined
variance;
undefined
meaning
­graphs drawn in green have fat tails
meaning
a summation of green graphs with fat tails- a summation of par bonds will default with some non-zero probability
meaning
Lehman Brothers should have taken statistical physics

That is his joke for the day. Only students paying attention and students who bother with current events and students with a sense of humor laugh. It’s a small subset.

The kids in the sixth row aren’t listening, the ones in the Greek lettered shirts with their pledge names on the back and their laptops open. Sixth row is just close enough to look like they give a **** but far enough in the back so the TA’s can’t tell they’re checking their fantasy football teams. The TA’s sit in rows one through four.

The joke is for the kids in the sixth row. Anyone in the first through fourth, the ones considering graduate school in higher dimensional theory or quantum chromodynamics, doesn’t know what Lehman Brothers is, least of all a par bond. A joke about spherical cows? Laughter from rows one through four would interfere constructively off the chalkboards, but that is not who Sagan-wannabe is talking to, and the kids in row six aren’t listening.

They are watching Sunday night highlights, ignoring green lines and fat tails because, let’s be honest, they’re only here to get the answer to the question on the homework that they couldn’t find online.

The sixth row has taken what they learned in the lectures before this, the semesters before this one, the first days of classical mechanics, where they learned the universe is governed by predictable and definable laws, and given a set of initial conditions one can determine an outcome.

Salary|physics degree:
fully defined by one parameter;
sophomore-year internship
time;
ten years
mean;
one million

The sixth row Facebook’ed their way through the undeterminableness of quantum, the green lines on the board now. Their laptop screens hide the fat tails describing the bundles of par bonds they will be selling upon the completion of this semester.