All mountain chains are
their origins in movements

Now North America has movement
that has
ridges, the cordilleras

simple as this makes it sound,
there is more to it:
a crumbling effect

America was drifting
against the Old World,
some Atlantic detritus
that came away
with parted company,
its origins in the encounter

framers and confounders,
gold-sifting pitch-shifting
plagiarist compounders,
dreamer cells --
all stragglers and strollers;
trollers, ex-tollers,
frontier comptrollers...

was a pupil for a day,
gave two eyes for an A,
said "I'll tell you what I see just
tell me what to say"

2 fore thoughts 2 free thoughts
of sons of freed slaves,
think tanks and barnacles abound:
I see twenty-six characters in need of an author
to try me line by line
'til beseeched and swayed
I reach the antithesis

poetry is dead
as the air
it walks on --
good as dead
to compost heaps;
the heat reserved in sunlit stone

To what, and what for?
To wit, and wit's end—
as sayings go, attention's spent
on lines
between lines
out of lines of best fit:
a new line of credit to pay the mind's rent

always turn your wheels in the direction of the skid

If what I'm feeling abides by a virtue
Then I'm in tune

We're at the scene of a crime gathering clues
So get a clue

a net of fine mesh was at once broadly cast
o'er the mind of mankind who was caught up *en masse

the gilded or beguiled chic
draped on strings in light of day
collecting heat

a ping before the pang,
now the server knows my name—
i sang lines of lang syne
in the digital age.