Sea shell sings its whispers. Who knows how
but an ear.
Good music. To where, to how, who knows but
spring ear. It's the sort of song
one tries
not quite
to go to bed with; but before the eye closes there
is the ear. Warm sounds but
water is cold. So late,
so soon, and here. Bottle it. Throw it back.
Throw it. In your hands, a remaining. There, singing
as stone. It keeps itself. Rain for many
years keeps it
going
and it goes
as a palm with its old shape after the fact,
the throwing, the song the song the song the song. Thank you.

So long as there is time
something will happen. On this earth,
small and interesting place,
constant new statue,
glaring eyes from a corner (ambivalent eyes
perhaps calling for a maybe, perhaps
making eyes at another body as soft screaming). All
summer the bugs buzzed. Like your hands.
You are there again.
As ghost. As ocean.
I went to a beach once and the sand
was made of fishshells. I went
to a mountain once and the stone
was made of smaller smallfish. Somewhere
else the water sings and you will
sing of me, and the birds. And your mouth,
how clear, how blue, how real,
how small. Like yours. Like hands. Like fish.

I'm not angry I'm calculable. I'm a fathom.
That phantoms
are things that people would wish in themselves
alludes me.
We can talk past midnight and our hairs will grey
and our all else will dust. But if the brain remains
then we will have achieved something. And with a computer, too--
as if that time Jesus ascended-- we can travel somewhere
that is not a country and it won't be strange, it will not be
new. It will be as the same thing as everything else has always
been: chance, calculable, a fathoming-- something called for a while
ago by that first big thing with all the light, that first wiggling thing
splitting into two (I skipped a few seconds), that fish
walking, that ape talking

this. Will you
talk to me as if called for? It is not hard. It is any
such kind of speech. You open your mouth,
a sound.

I.

Same image: Smash a skull, pour out the mush--
isn't that a person? Or is that just some smooth thing
--skin for a jellyfish!
--gummy wrapper!
--used ******!--
that we might have figured as an infant without legs?

II.

Same image: pink-wet brain. Send some
pulses to me. Is it beneath me? This thing
that sings "this thing"? This thing
insisting these words? Persisting
in carpal-tunnel clicking wrists, knowing
itself by coughing up stuff
I didn't know I had. Send some pulses
in that machine that maps me. And
thinking of jellyfish, of a gummy wrapper,
the ******.

III.

Same image: we kiss.

The window creates a square on the red carpet. This is the sun.
It is not in space. It is not even alive. My eye is though,
breathing heartlessly, it attends to each as bean-sprout
splitting earth. As the young ways we were taught to grow
in science classes. The dying of it when I watered it
too much. There is too-muchness everywhere. With you
my watering magiked a desert. The sky
is good today, so good that it has even created its own
on a carpet. The teacher's foot steps there.

Song, give me the words to destroy myself. Not this
body, this broken music that wishes only for my peace. Why not
the lightning of genius instead? The cool stare of the man
as lover, loving me. As flower,
instead we mirror-look. Mirror as water:
with water, flowers; within water, bodies; within water,
the girl. She has no words. What singing she has
is this body, is this thing I do not want, is this air,
is the address I flare to you. So, to me. She is the genius.

I suppose that's how they live,
like suicides. I dream often of them
without this body. I resent
this creaking, of course, but you
once looked at me in that way
I wanted. When I look long ago enough
sometimes you still speak. It's the heights
and the grey that gets to me. The stairs,
and the stares I give down to them
when climbing more floors. This cocooning,
I wonder it. Its ending.
To leap undiscovered for a few seconds
and flutter. Couldn't.
I'm living. The child's pretty silence
of match-playing, that light, that living, that
no-reason of everything looking
like this at all: this strange
clicking, the pulls of the iris,
the lens-widening, the swallowing
blackness the center of a looking that
I once thought was new. Like it,
the skyscraping growth of any tree
deciding against earth, I look pretty.
And short.

She's as spry as a slice of
young ginger.

My brain invents a new kind of sadness for me.
I wrap it up in newspaper and carry it
somewhere. Debone it, then grill. Wish
that it could swim, watch it swim
back in me. Certain kinds of meals you cannot share.

Weird, long, scary parts of you...
Those hours... Take notes
of them. Dream even
when passing by these old walls.
And paint them...

There's this bell that rings redbrick on days I stay in.
This bell that rings sings to me as a clubfooted horse.
Brassbeating hooves are as a chest at nightfall: Russian dolls are as real
as people: Everything is all alike as the "and"
and "and" that Bishop feared. There
is nothing in us from catching fishes then returning their swim. There
is nothing in us from drinking from seawater, from moth-tear, from
the moonlight that creepers in there when your mouth
     figures itself
as bell or foot: I should wake up. I should wake.  
I should, I should.

(after Sarah Manguso)

The darkness of your eyes is a curious darkness.
I mean when I close them. Old dances are equal
in distraction, like the shifts in subjects in a song.
That's just the different voice in a choir, I mean.
I mean, I mean to mean: Meaning from the random
statistical patterns of this... "world"? Is it right
to call everything "this"? "World" seems to mean "here" and yes,
with "us". Like the positivists told the scientists, "yes"
this thing with our eyes-- expansive eyes,
microscope eyes telescope eyes large hadron collider eyes mathy eyes
--these eyes are "I". Would I be comfort,
--and yes, the substance of that word and not the action
that entails the substance being a thing that can be
--would you be comforted by the thing that sees
being the thing that sees you as you? Imagine
some other singer singing that no other such thing
exists besides ourselves. Is that comfort? Is that
a person or a poem? Is everything in that the same? Wonder
with me back to empiricism. Knock on the table
and think of it not as Idea (that beneath our own
that we wished to wish). Wonder
with me on this song, back-of-the-envelope
calculated tipsily, alone, at the edge of a party
--okay, the party of (this) life. Wonder
with me, there, here,
always. And open
your throat.

Often as if a moth ran into the room like that--
wing-legged athlete-- defeated
by the lamp it saw bubbling though my window...
My mood swoops down as often as this,
totally normal but unexpected. The mind is a machine
(and you knew this too, Descartes,
given how you placed the souls of us
in some specific spot of our brains;
we know now that that gland has to do with our sleeping,
our souls have more to do with sleep).
When the gears of our minds turn they sometimes creak,
and you get words with such unfitting-- the moth
again, whose parents never said before they bashed
themselves clean into night-light, you don't
have to do this, you shouldn't do this, please
do not do this and so they did this. The moth
does this as stuck gears, beating and beating itself
against the light as my own mind fails to mind
itself, and the sudden grey of it, familiar as
the glittering powder of its wings, particles floating as
a possible music of the world.
Then I flicker my eyes back to my work as if to say
how boring, I've seen this episode before.

I want to leave. You
are not what I want
to go. Listen, or wait,
whichever your ears will let of me.
Wallpaper has music.
My walls are empty. My eyes are
walls. Your eyes are
--well, you know how letters combine
to make all sorts of things? You will never expect
them. Sometimes the letters will make new
things. New things will be
spoken. New things will
exist. Like this. My walls are empty. My eyes are
walls. I want to leave
you as the ringing after a person shouts in an ear. Because of how long
ago, your voice.

My feet smell the deliciousness of long Thanksgiving. O! plain footsoles
wandering about carpet-jailed stairs like violin strings'
gravity encircling a soul. Hum a-long enough and you can conjure whole
oceans in my eyes, whole masses of water that don't exist
where we were born (hey, landlocked love). Outside in New England it
sometimes snows.
Today it rains.
Anyway, I am a magician. Look here. Can you see
our landlocked love from the shore it does not
have? Like the Pilgrims
finding Indians not from India,
I find me
not from me but from these smiles, our people, these feet,
sinking and stinking of some small peace and walking sockless
up and down a small warm home. And tomorrow,
Harvard again, and someone has snapped my wand
and killed the sparkling airs of incantations I had.
But wait! Isn't this proof of a person who was once
something not transplanted, but rooted earthily into a couch
as brown dancer? I'm waiting for movies
and the seizures of memory there as our minds' own lenses,
and that empty feeling here remembered as good enough reason
to greet us, draw further breaths, comb curls, chew and walk and talk
of the cold outside (waiting endlessly for the landlocked sun), and talk
of the bitter pinpricks of our still-life skin.

Bishop described lichens as "still explosions" and am I
to continue to try my mouth around her, or this, or you?
Call sometime.

When she left again I touched you between your legs because you
kept me. I wanted to make you feel good. It was a hot day
by shrub grass and wire fence and orange dirt. When
did her airplane leave again? We were
at the edge of the school. When she first left, you
and I had exams. We did well in them. When she flew
back in to visit, you and I were finding each other's mouths
again. My first time at her house
when the power went out--the power always goes out
at home-- I tried to find her with my arms. She did
not let me. You said yes. Some other day you were happy
about how smooth your legs were. I asked did it hurt.
Bodies were so new then. When we were born we first found
ourselves with hands before words. Hands inside legs now. You
kept me. I'm sorry. You waxed your legs
and you were happy. So you loved me. I loved you,
your mouth, your legs. I wished my face
could make you feel good. I hate my face. My hands
were a short time, and then new, and you were also new,
and afterwards, class. Why did you keep me. I think of you
as air, as sky. As earth. As ghost, as person.

Oh yes, but this song is for empathy. For the grasses'
leaves' greens being yellowed. For when winter  
says, "Hello": A song as this might add to its start with an opening
chord or two. Oh (yes), but this song is for me: Hello.
A greeting is an affirmation of one thinking thing
to another. I greet stones. Tie them to my feet when
I jump into my own blood. Drown for a bit. Wait
for a response. The stones don't say anything. Flowers
do sometimes, inspiring a heart to do a little lilt
within itself. So much to speak of about flowers: Thick yellow grasses
swirling around like the sounds swirling within a severed ear.
That's a good painting.
But that painting is yellow. Blood is red. Water is
blue, or the sky is
blue, or our minds make them
blue, so where should I jump? Upwards towards the birds
or downwards towards the fish? If human embryos look like fish
then wombs might be oceans, but amnion fluid is yellow: Like
sunflowers. Was Van Gogh a yellow man if he had a gun? And am I
blue because words
sometimes sing?

Southern hospitality. Biscuits. The delicious
slur of various r's
into meandering sense-making
when mouths open, blonde-wide and
future-fat heavy. I love this. Then
all of a sudden in some history the r
goes hard, ******.

Less the collapsed wound in the chest and
more of coffee, pen-flickering some things
achieved in a college library. A hope
of a future as endless learner. Online laments
that universities are now nothing more
than degree mills: notice the rising tide of shadows
in students' minds as they seem to notice this
sort of doom as noose as tie at middle-age. But for now,
before that moment returns where sleep is preferred
so much so to waking, where anything is preferred
to waking (but the thought of that final jump
off the corporate tower
is yet to find you)-- some slight work here
in this library like a normal person
with normal fears. An uncollapsed chest
like a star within its lifetime, swallowing nothing and
twirling planets all around itself, long long
before it swallows itself
and its own light.

A hand on a throat, where if all fingers touch, the throat
turns to ash. The villain of an anime I now watch
clutches the hero with his middle-finger aired
before the vital moment. I jump
on holiday off a cliff
and my chest stumbles with simulations. My body angled
poorly as I could slap headfirst. I was warned that my feet
should sink first if I merely fall. If I dive, my fingers
should first touch the water. I am depressed
the months before. College student, America. So far off, so cold
from the landlock of my birth. And the summer
study-abroad, double-abroad. In Italy
I was watching the Creation show itself on old ceilings
in marble-rooms, looking for some culture
that might have been ours if not for the pillagings that brought
gold and bodies to shape that gold into buildings like this. So I jump
and fall. And shiver emptily. It is the same feeling as the nights
on the bed thinking of futures without this self. Thinking as if
I did not exist. Ignored emails from therapists. And here this
feeling!: it made me want to live. So I jump again
on the higher ledge. My friend afterwards asks if I'm okay.
I'm shaking slightly. I'm without words. I laugh
with the same absence as any birth. A baby's confused cry
without tears. A long way down. What blue-green water,
as if dug for in the earth and sold for courtyard dances.
It glimmers all over my body, frizzes
up my hair as my ****** curls soak it, squeezes it down my face,
down towards my neck like fingers.
The villain walks away. The next time the hero sees him
he should be careful. He will have decided to **** me by then.

We're still bothered by our births. So, science.
Leaving college English classes horrified at answerlessness.
Calculate me.
Here's some simple answer on a once clean page.
Blank slate, painted with the codes of all
life, thought; numbers.
Before sleeping, once more a wound appears with a roar,
the sort of roar of the wings of an ant:
bright particles shoot through a double slit
and our comfort is misunderstood as the pattern
on the wall behind in front of us.

.              how disapproving. to hear chords as yours,
I thought how clean as a viola;
               well, then as smooth as looking through a person.
I thought this blackness was opaque.
               so why sunlight through my ears when I hear
your ******* like water through a straw:
               notice: in my country, drought-heavy
cow-full, dust-bowled, bare-footed, large-
               accented-- skinny-boyed, big-thighed sauntering
girls-- what words: girls, boys-- notice:
               in my country water is desperate and
mottoed. we sing for it as god. when it
               rains mothers cry. your ******* is a waste
of water and a waste of my skin. transparent.

(o lightskins!: post-colonial nymph-paragoned
sibylline demigoded golden Greek-statued heroes--
               how full of **** y'all are!

and I Hephaestus...)

A road runs down Harvard called Massachusetts Avenue as if
we own the whole state. Because we do. We took the land
from its people. Violently. And who is we? Ambulances
burn red nightly-casual outside the window of this pale yellow
building opposite the smaller university hospital. The red
reminds me of a different kind of burning. Of bodies.
Wonderful cremations of us down that tree over there next
to the libraries that now belong to us. And who is us?
I am reminded of the burning because the red is part
of the white and the blue and the sirens and the men
launching out of their cars with faces saying, in strange
tongues, strange indeed, And who
are you?

I am the expanse of purposeless selves before me,/
summated like the stickily-shaded colours under/
a calculus-course curve, whose trajectory marks me across one axis/
to the next, just as I am the small drops of cloud squashed/
into one another as an ocean I now glare at, whose sands/
meeting the horizon are later stewed into the clearer edges/
of a mirror so that this glare may continue. There was a myth of a man/
who projected himself into a pool of water until he thinned away/
into anorexias of young girls with camera phones pointed/
towards their white faces. Snakes eat their tales sometimes./
Narcisuss is a poet. White girls are poets. I've swallowed them all/
into my large black mouth. When I speak: soft-spoken integrations,/
meagre, selfless, hollow-- filled with stagnant historical airs formatted/
cleanly now on a word-processor-- while my hand reaches across my navel,/
bored, digging: then a birth there as my spine cracks across my bedsheets/
with my lamplight flickering as candles once did,/
and shadows wall-dancing with the idea of ancient meanings/
now lost but never once there, self-defining, self-signifying, self-pointing,/
self-shaking self-but-not-self./

How do the nights go? Chillin' down there with the white folk/
Ne'er be a token given I'm golden so I might just bolt:/
Usain; when I'm lazy talent swishes down the drain like bad milk/
Ain't cry o'er **** that I spilt, rose from the concrete ne'er wilt/

Narrowly lost my mind sometime ago in this flow/
like slave boats from the Gold Coast with wood creaking dream-songs of lost homes/
I was drowning in unconscious streams of different scenes of this mind's scenes/
I seen through the scenes of green trees turned to yellowing leaves.../

(for children)


(1)

I heard a big word once. 'Armamentarium'.
It's a word with old parents. It means things
like medicine and how doctors feel your chest
for beats that don't quite fit. It means red
and the things inside your body that need
hands to help you. My hands help by wandering.
I tap my hands on tables, I comb my hair,
I pick up flowers, I hold up faces
of people I love when I feel blue. But my favourite
is red, because it is inside me, beating.
I learned a big word once. It was my name. I said it and it sang.


(2)

If you peel me you will find songs
as thick as grapefruit. I am red inside.
I take some time. I am always late.
I am best in the mornings but at night awake.
I'm from a place that is not as green as here.
Our grasses are yellow and say so with the wind.
My mirror is both my best friend and enemy,
sometimes a lover, often a bully, either way
hands are caught. I like to read. I read
so much that I think of my skin as grapefruit.
I don't even like to eat it. I just like the red.


(3)

Planes have mouths. They swallow people.
They fly them away. They spit me out.
Sometimes I do not know whose stomach I am in.
Inside the planes I dream of reds as dense as
roses. When the planes land I give them to
me as myself. Let me explain this better:
my accent is a grand liar because my
country is blue. It never rains there
but when it does you will find my mother's throat.
I croak with such dryness that the sounds turn to words.


(4)

When I see me I see soil. I grow roses
in my skin. People who don't look like
me first brought those kinds of flowers
to my country with ships. Kind of. We do not have
oceans. They must have walked so far for me
to speak with things they then planted. People think of me
as oceans reflecting the sky. I say I want the sunset
petalled perfectly into soil. My skin. When you see me
you must adore me because of your planting. I am not
your garden. I bloom.


(5)

When you hear words do not forget that someone
taught them to you. Maybe your mother
who read books about cats in hats to you
at airports. Maybe your father
and his stories of his childhood with feet
twisting through thin sand as roses dancing.
Where I am from we do not have soil
for those kinds of flowers. My father still grew
and my mother still grew me. Peel my skin
and you will find that sort of red beneath. If you ask me
where it came from I won't say. I will sing.

There's light outside. The blue-blazered man speaks
and I listen with my pen. All the warmth within
my head emerges as if called upon
by private hands. Wind whistles through the large windows. God
is singing low-mood like hormones like a child's recorder practice.
What is literature? we ask.
I don't know but it looks a lot like me.

                                                                             He says
the earth is lost in the future. Predictive
post-apocalyptic longing. Fragile
bones as flower-stems within us. We walk
like jelly. Strange to think of it now,
stranger yesterday still-- and tomorrow, the eyelids
slip away to the night: closing bud-codas.

        Repeat-sign, where are you?

The earth will turn to fire. Our revelations
are gas-large, cow-heavy, burning engines
zooming across cliffs. I drink
because to think of this is not the sort of stumbling
I need. I need arms
and wine-fog hiding them (as children's games). I need a mirror.
And I would want the birds. Them too.

the wine-singing ceases its crescents as the grasses' leaves' small leaves are blown/
by wind. the wind paused by sunrise. airless and plum-coloured. my fire runs grey-dry. i'm drunk./
and well? doesn't poetry arrive here then? imagine my wordliness!: i know things!/
claiming them on some soft days as if the end of time will not yet have happened yet, grand/
as big children in bell-towered schools and the word that is taught to them there. meaning that/
the affront of the word is not something that should compel a throat opening. my throat opens/
without expectation of an other entering. through. and then what if not surprise when they do?/
and after when my tongue turns sarcophagus?: a song?: singing/
black! like mirrors and black! within it saying how here we go again with how the sun did me/
before i was born. how sturdy and taut this sunned-skin is. how apple-mouthed and coffee-bean. here we go again,/
i watch the cars go by my window with great longings of elsewheres. and fear. the red, white and blue flag-flashes,/
passing by glassily and hologrammed in front of me as the question of when, the question/
with the gun, here,/
horizoned./

click. icarus./

Go, small song. Make yourself
known. Stretch your arms as sunlight,
glow. We humans’ leaves’ greens need you,
so, will you love us as our ears do you?
Wonder with me, throat, as you say
your notes and lengthen their dull to
soft nevers. The crowd still hears you
tomorrow, the last song before the final
closing of the eyes before godless sleep.
Coffins vibrate with your enthusiasms,
corpses know remorse, finally, like a
cracked ancient bell with some something
left. String me as *******
screaming in pillow fields. String me
as hazardous Lazarus sinewed neck-string
plucked as flowers, as slave-ships docked
upon the shore with gentle endless thud. We’ll
keep singing spirituals forever, we’ll keep
saying things about skin. We will win. Win
like mirrors lastly seeing smiles. Come with me
as stars die and are still witnessed. Inscribed
as pride in a mother’s voice with small
black boy joy, with tears, first cries, blood,
water
and the mother’s song mountain-heavy
and living.

Nerve cells are assumed things seen
       assuredly. What then are our
eyes? Thinking things
      whispering maybes with
light, guiding
      us towards hopeful
touch, threaded
gently with needle through an other's
      slivered eye: we
return to looking. Silk-curtained. Through small science
glass I have you. Here,
let us speak with colours. Blink for me.

I am a quiet poet! Which is to say a frog
without a croak. Imagine a huge stone
leaping from space into our air without flare.
I'm like that! Did you hear that? No.
Punctuation doesn't speak. Professors sometimes
say "space" and "time" and sometimes "heart" in
reference to the bed the clock the beating. So
I have not much to say of the sky. It's blue
and sometimes not. I am surprised with grass
and here how it isn't yellow. The mirror
and my blackness in it shouldn't make me blink. But I do
click refresh. And where I am. Is my mouth
closed? It matters very little. Well, the ground on
which my feet step. It is also quiet. It screams songs.

Hey there, white pill.

Can I swallow you?

(If not

let me know how

it means

to sing a song as sky-mirror).

It's... an issue of access. I suppose.
Can you imagine how my hair curls? Into my skull
as a soft collapse outwards. Each one is named "me", as if
wonderfully parcelled as phrenology. If you grasp at me
here, then
I become something else. Or simply shoot

me and see
then what happens to my head. I mean that I wish
to be considered
as the way that we look
at lavender, and how our eyes emerge from their beads.

Your pupils are two bees buzzing towards the night.
Focused, stumbling whirrs. You see
that I am scared of your looking? A sting
is a question of when; and with it, your vanishing.

Museum. Utter me as wind
with mouth-*****. Consent
to it as deer in headlights, smacked
all up on the floor, smacked
give me some more. Head
-crash gorgeous a finish. Love.

Drink we me! Regale me
with song! Breathily
transform me as seed
and meter. Ruin me
as ancient crumbling
tower. Marble. Pose
in certain frame and
snap and post as private
adventure. Swallow.

Wherein the body is dead
and the mind floats for asylum,
what do the loud knocks expect
upon the door and what shall
the skull
do with such reverberations?

I will always remember you, your
blood just happened there
and my mind was you
all along.

     Have me before
     they take you before
     your black is washed
     away again by histories
     and before the moon
     buries you
     in the nomad opening
     of my tap
     song swallowed
     exquisite and clear
     along my throat. Have me before
     the seasons end and the next
     golden man on screen says
     we must secure our borders
     and soon, instead
     of turning your boats
     away, they will fire
     bold gunpowders, as if
     in another grand campaign
     of their castles
     and silver.

Wherein your mind floats
away and all that is left
of your vanishings is a body:

I will not know what to do with that
but hope for the flood to take us all, arkless.

Leaving is such a terrible thing. 'To do',
but 'we did' is the specific. Magic
floundering into pale paper. Here
we are.
In the end our only violence is dumb. We could not
know each other as much as I thought. We would not
do the things that they do in the movies. We did not
hold each other in such ways with sparkling angles. The good
camera and smart sounds from our mouths, written. Carefully
in such scenes the music would play as if to imply. Beauty
is something else for us and it did not look like that.

Everything is amenable to a pen--
so nevermind this sudden splash of water
on this page, nevermind it all, it is
something I ought to have been able to make
for myself back home-- if I so desired it,
and finally, I'm glad that I no longer did:

You see,

travelling is a game for me. It is no
urgency, no need. When I was younger
how many times was I told that: it would be
this way? By teachers and others and televisions
that to leave home
would be the great mattering;

Let me remind you of the Acacia trees!

Nevermind this sea! And its constant blueness,
their imports of me and those who looked
like me; then their denails of me and
those that look like me when finally
the depature of their self-righteousness

A funny thought:

In RPGS they're NPCS:
In role-playing games they are
non-playable characters:

when you walk your character
to them and give a little click
upon them they might talk and say
something of their


                                     lives

the question is, is what happens
after you switch off the video game
console. Are they always frozen
in their space in that time or is it
that the need for you to journey
keeps everybody so still in your head
that you forget that they too have

                                      lives

When I return      I touch the soil
    I used to think so much of the sky     the soil
in my hands how much thirst is there
    I could clutch it and save us all

                     the rain

might spill out of my grandmother's mouth
    if she strains her wheat-dry hands
long enough of all the liquid     blessings
of the church she crossed      again and again
    and the holiness would clear my grandfather's

                   eyes and

                   the rain

would spill out. I travel much
through skies thinking of the soil
the soil looks like earth clay mud
red rock heart
brown stone
cool coal mould
dark black hiding cavity gold
water sold concrete brick houses                            
                    acacia trees
the soil it looks like          me

and the things that made me:

I cannot take you seriously america

what are your bullets supposed to do to me?

And europe?

Your columns? They lean!

      much unlike my grandfather's back.

Have you see the man handle a *****?
     The shovelling he could do? The cows
and goats he can end? The snakes
      that fear him? These are my hands.

Imagine the thought that this soil is not
enough.
      Look at my hands. Look.

                                    What do you perceive?

I see everything. All at once and never.
     And still it is yet

                to rain.

Scale me.

Certain fish, chosen
to this pixel colossus,
what will you say if
I ask you to be near
me, and your blood is
drained clean from bone.

We can tell:

that the Jesus who we crossed was just some dude
–we hooked him up to an EEG–

and it turns out his pulses were the same as hours
and did not differ statistically at all

but his blood was a bitterer red than some
but you would think that if you hadn't seen it before.

And yet
      after each dopamine pill to heal us in the full
      after each brain scan to show the sad to zap away the next
      after each visit to the white coat to say what is what tomorrow
      after each quiz and calculation that says what you are in the future
There will always be the same sound so unnew and still,
     "I love you".

Promotion counter with free drinks.

Pretty white Italian girl, costumed, with saucer.

My hands are empty.

I go.

The man at the counter, costumed, I ask him:

How much for a shot?

He says it is free.

May I I say?

I don't know he say.

Why not I says.

I don't like black men.

Why not.

You know why.

I don't.

I get the shot.

                            We laugh.

I get the shot.

                            We laugh.

I get the shot.

                            I hear

the others are looking for me outside.
                          
                                                                ­           I'm sorry:

                             I hear

my friends: are looking

                                                        ­                  for me

                                                            ­              outside.    

I drink the shot.

I laugh I drink the shot I wait in line I type on my phone while the others my friends wait for me god the line they are waiting for me while I type on my phone while they are waiting I am the only one here how can it be what an awesome place this country is what songs what statues what music what marble what ******* people that push in front of you in the drinks line I like this song a European house music remix of the song I know ******* ******* ******* ******* ******* ******* ******* ******* ******* ******* ******* ******* are these:

the types of songs You wanted me to sing to say that this is my skin and so is the Muse happy now?

White girls in Italy.

Moi: "Sorry, I'm next in line".

Sorry, I'm next in line.

Sorry, I'm next in line.

Sorry, I'm next in line.

Sorry, I'm next in line.

Sorry, I am next in line.

Sorry, I'm next in line.


The hissing swoosh of the flush after the cold metal swivel shift.


Also,            ****. You.

I am no good at talking to things that are not myself.

The crystalline brown of my eyes sings certain songs.

And my coffee breath makes such certain impressions on the mirror.

And my coffee skin makes such certain impressions on the mirror.

In the former case, that mirror is me.

In the latter case, that mirror is you.

I have no idea of how I see myself, or how I should see myself.

But I know how you do. I know your lisps, your staggers, your stares.

And the way you vibrate sometimes to see someone such as me.

"The **** is wrong with you", I say to no one in particular being myself.

But I would scream it to the world at large if they would listen.

And yet the sounds would carry to no where but to some gaze of me.

That glint of me in your eyes.

That glint of you in mine.

And we are not talking at all.

We are only kissing ourselves by looking.

We do not know how it tastes.

(What happens when you give a monkey a mirror?)

You see everything and then it is gone: lightning
in a dark moonless night: you before everything
it all happened at once and then never.

Knowledge is such: even
if you know that
something is true it will
hurt nonetheless. Acceptance is not

freedom

from hurt. It is
something else that hurtles in the sky,
something else completely.



I love myself.

The thing I did was weeks ago. Bones
bend more slowly though set quicker: I
don't like the way your eyes eye across
the room. I wish I could configure
myself to think, "Yes I will never forgive
myself as well", but instead I think "actually,
given another quick thought, I don't think
I **** wit y'all no more".

the one time there was no light
a second of absolute blindess
the pit of fear, hard like a dried pea