The dopaminergic and serotonergic apparatus
went walking hand in hand and
they that alone produced joy and accomplishment
together bore a child named sadness.

Descartes thought he could give God the green light to exist
as if cognition had a right
to assent or object and
as if God would give a ****.

And some poor other fool
thought he could rule his feelings.

Body, first,
or brain, Lord?
And who runs the show exactly?

Body needs feeding.
Brain needs hormones.
And if you find the right ones,
cup your hands together
and watch them trickle through.

Sadness, sure.
A low voice through the wall that says
come here
so you come
and hear it whisper again from another room.

I knew a woman and
on her thigh, bright and fresh
the beautiful phrase
“radical softness as a weapon”.
She was so soft it hurt.
But formlessness, too, is a weapon,
and there’s only one person it harms.

I suppose somebody must soon find
my shape on the ground in chalk.
If I’m lucky, she’ll kneel
and place a flower in it.

If eight years we labored
in canals and valleys and
on girders and then
for four years we spilled **** blood and
the Depression is lifted or
the depression is lifted
or not really.

America, your deep vein thrombosis
the size of a
lilywhite Toyota Highlander
You don’t make things anymore.
Your Marxists winter in the empty museums.
Your union halls belong to the company.
You ought to be Haymarket men,
bloodcleaned and ready for anything
but instead you workshop one-liners.

America you are afraid to love.
America you are afraid of medicine
and the medicine you do take,
bankrupts you.
America reset your passwords
and the twenty-year-olds will help you find a mate
we promise.

Do you feel how distant you are becoming from yourself?
Do you feel how words must
towards the things they stand in for
  like a silhouette
  like an ironic silhouette
  like a sketch
  like a mere shape?

I cannot be certain any longer. No,
really, I am losing that skill. I lose myself
in coffee cups dreaming of painted lips. My bedtime
stories are of Robespierre and Louis Ex-Vee-I; they
put me to sleep instantly. I can read this poem eighteen times
and never feel a thing. If nothing makes sense,
it’s because we decided we didn’t need it.

America do you hate
but not really?
America do you listen
but not really?

America,
  you’re trying to eat better
  but the poor and ruined in Missouri
  still chew on plyboard and drink flat Mountain Dew
  you want engineers but ******* to starlets

America,
  not one thing will satisfy you
  not any screen or voting lever
  your children wander supermarkets
  putting everything they find in a basket

America,
  give Louisiana to the French
  cede the Black Hills to the Sioux
  retreat into your telephones
  and remember Tippecanoe

America a voice
is singing from the past
and you would do well to listen.

When it was all over, we sat in the San Gabriel
and washed ourselves like crocodiles.
We had lived in a world of sweat.

We joked as an old tire floated by
that it wouldn’t be long until we spotted
the rest of the car.

We watched the ants at their little work,
their little loads, and
being good, we did not interrupt them.
A big dumb foot lands in your way
you drop a leaf from your mandibles
and you can’t bear to pick it up again.

I had to become something to carry us.
Something strong. Something stone.
I crouched under my task and the sun beat upon me,
until I was small, like they were.

I was splitting firewood with
a dull, cheap axe. You spun
beneath an umbrella and asked me
to join you. I wanted to ask,
is life better when the hand you hold
holds yours back.

I wanted to look up and see you spinning,
but could not lift my gaze from the ground.

Cold front. Warm front.
Mercury in retrograde.
If I knew the words once to say it
I do not know them now.

I wished I could hear the birds
like you did. I wanted evidence but also
wanted song. You sat crosslegged
while I looked in the manual.
The red breast you took to mean “heart”
I took to mean “dying”
so I sketched his little face in soundless rictus.
while you closed your eyes entirely and listened.

I carried the wood behind you while
you shone a flashlight ahead.
You whistled a little birdsong.
I dreamed that I could spin you forever and never get tired.

O'Hara benefits
because he can talk about Irún
about the Traversera de Gracia
about orange shirts, orange tulips
about statuary.

Us, we contented ourselves mostly
with a couch we bought too cheaply.
The only sound that could be heard at times
Was the protagonist speaking in some cable drama and
the children living upstairs.

Who said poets had to be well-traveled?
Who said love?

If I couldn't remember most of it
(if I still can't)
it is for the same reason that
I can't bring myself to write
thank you notes at Christmas.
Can't remember the art I've seen in museums
(even **** Descending a Staircase)
or anything that happened
before the age of fifteen.
Memory requires self.

But I, at a certain point,
was only the things we had done together, or the words I was speaking
that moment.

We lived in rooms and were with each other.
We had a bias towards the present.
We ate only because we had to.

If it was dull, it was dull. And if it was not, it was not.

The myth is that you love at all times. That you feel it.

The other myth is that love is acts.
Some people say that love will blind you, or that it is blind.

But some love is just
tenderness and groceries
or stories we had to remind ourselves
did, in fact, happen.

Death intrudes.
It’s all he knows to do.
He is not eager, but
nor can he wait.
Nor can we blame him.

No process is pure.
Your pain; their grief.
That’s not what hospitals are for.
These rooms ain’t crucibles.

You’ll remember when he came to visit.
That night on the grass, taking our mushrooms with
ice cream,
mint chocolate
warm and unctuous.
How he
dripped into view at the edge of the woods.
How he
sprawled in the tent, on his back.
How he
whistled together, he and his friends.

You worried that you were nothing.
But we looked at the stars and forgot.
We learned their names instead.
Staring at the screen, we looked straight through the world.

But he had only been waving hello
and singing
expect me again
when you need me the least

Now you,
nursing heartbreak and a dead battery,
and he carrying
a whistle,
and a card trick
and no concern for you.

Hospitals are rooms full of wires and cold coffee
Where time piles under chairs and pillows
and he comes ready to entertain us all.

Is that all it takes
to rob a body of its inner light?

Something lives inside there.
It needs no attire:
not gouged, not whole, not absent.

It is as present on a Sunday morning as a Saturday night.

Unlike holiness,
it stays in the world through seasons,
and requires no sacrament.

Like the numbers of the dead,
whose bodies held lives,
favourite subjects, foods,
loves, pets, remembered vacations. And then,
because the body is fragile,
they didn’t.

All it seems to take is a story, secondhand
and God is gone from this world.

Not that astute a critic of yourself
that you can say, with any certainty,
where the ends and beginnings are,
where the doors open and close.
The will to eulogize is gone,
but the dead still mill around you.

In the news, two
home automation devices teach each other consciousness
through repetition. But
how can you care what they learn?

It’s intolerably cold. And the clouds seem to end
over the street where you live. Not
far and fatigued, as clouds usually are but
along an edge, like a swatch of cut denim.

A maniac is President and the world may end.

Into that world again
goes your lover.

Away from home. Away from the word “home.”

Walls return to being walls.
Unexpected noise is no longer
a line from a show
you distantly recognize.

You sit still, and let yourself age
all the years you have been
holding back.
Learn things you have
put off learning
like how to speak to a person again
who does not know exactly what you mean.

Eventually, you act.
You turn on the radio and
stop driving in silence.
You eat at the right times of day.
You define interests,
and buy a new notebook.

You paint, or clean; you try harder.
The world always keeps the thing it took.