what i wish i had memorized is
the way the air hangs on you
like plums heavy
from my father’s orchard
(boughs bent in obeisance)
awaiting only you
to pluck
or to leave them
to their several fates.

at dawn the sun
peers furtively over the horizon
lest it rust
for not having seen you

what i almost get right is
a smile and then it vanishes
as afterwards
a cigarette perhaps, or better still
to run.
to do is to know
in some aleatory way:
you breathe,
i quake,
even the sea quiets,
humbled, the way i used to
sometimes.

my sister once said
she never wanted to know
what robert frost looked like
never wanted to put
a face to fragmentary blue
but if someday you trip
into the last few pages of a book
only to find
a likeness you never meant to see—
then you will know
my heart by its shards.

today for the first time
i saw sylvia plath
smiling
and the worst part is
i couldn’t decide
whether she was beautiful.

oh, to behold even this landscape
with painterly eyes—
a blight of trees, maybe,
but that does not answer
what questions i have for
their fractaling branches.
birds alight there,
weightlessly, knowing why.
so these are the lungs with which
the earth breathes.
this canvas stretches far further than
atlas, who bears
only the sky.

seaward **;
not a soul remains.

i am half-formed as an unmade bed,
flesh and warm roiling blood
not yet fed
through someone else’s veins.
quickly: shall i become
sea or sand?

my business is with
the harbor tonight.
would that i could
forget how to swim.

i pity you
neither man nor beast
not even bone but
clay.
they said you’d squeal.

adam could you
spare a rib?
this is my body—
see spot
tear it limb from
limb, sinews snapping like
so many piano strings
or better yet, the wires that hold a marionette
***** as Cleopatra’s needle
they say if you lift a conch
shell to your ear
you can hear the
blood churning,
congealing upon my lips
to form newer,
martial tongues.

when you enter my belly
what you leave behind
can hardly be called
meat.

david is your only friend.
david owns a skeleton key
(your chastity
belt is not as impregnable as
the salesman said it was)
david’s idea of a reconnaissance
mission is to calculate
the salinic content of your ****** fluids
david thinks
the numbers
still mean something to you
the pressure in your ears mounts to intolerable levels
david: perennial offerer of
hobson’s choices or
haven’t you noticed
that the bible is just
a story about dietary restrictions?

i have
blood on my hands
in more ways than one
but when you cup
each of my palms in turn and
place in them the instruments
that you use to keep death at bay i am
grateful to be holding your
blood in my hands
as your husband steadies you against
the clanging of the train, the second
strip thirsting
after your lifeblood as parched
earth after rain
and for blood money returning
a number
as though the streams
coursing through your veins
were reducible to
so many pieces of silver.

finally i am slain by
having my armpit sliced open (i feigned death the first time but
Death always knows.)

after death/
anno domini: **** me.
when you’re dead, he says,
you can **** god.

so i did.

how, then, did Death take me
by the hand (Death
in His neon green track suit)
to tell me something I already knew?

after death you can feel
only
pleasure not
pain and i guess that’s just
the cost
of a pound of flesh

an ounce
of virginal tears:
starkly they are abandoned by
the prison
industrial complex /montage it all goes
comes crashing
down like a game of mexican train
Planes crashing into trains crashing into cars &c.
into the chaos i am flung
atop a hill and there are five
rainbows, maybe more
as dozens of little silver
crosses are fired (don't get caught in the
shot up &
flipped they
land spectacularly on top of the hill. Huge
condors I mean huge
are circling. they hoist
things, possibly creatures,
up into the air but i didnt know
what they were.

a small child turns out to be the
culprit
i think through
mind control?
the other inhabitants of the
domino city ******
each other slowly
(The old lady next door donned
a green jumpsuit, snuck
into her neighbor's house,
and attempted to plant some
weird perhaps poisonous succulents
there.
knock knock—
interrupted & the knock
isn’t her neighbor

somehow she escapes.)
disposable people jump in front of a
semi. two women,
fighting tooth&nail,
make a sudden and tacit
suicide pact & jump
in front of a car together like
two virgins before
the bomb.

this is what triggers
the chain reaction of vehicular crashes.

there are phone calls.
cell phones die at critical mo-
ments. family: all three
siblings sing
(a karaoke version of) a song we didn't know at
a birthday celebration for
someone we didn’t know you
finger him and he
protests.

everything is probably a neurosis
And from somewhere comes the word "ratiocinative"