Sometimes I am in the center of all things intentional and accidental.
My conquest lies somewhere in between its execution. When this happens,
I am ready: I will wear a white shirt. Keep mum like a leaden chapel.
                              My eyes will be red like surgery. My precision of stasis,
                               impeccable – like mother gutting fish in the kitchen,
                               or a door unhinged by my father. Each exploit

drawn   out of the mundane. Hearing the sinking dreaded music of shovel excavating
   the Earth,
   taking the image blurred. Clarified like clearing of a throat is my reckoning
   of a dull Wednesday. Rain descending like a flower. Bathes the world like soiled
   linen where we are cut from uniformly. Sometimes I am two abysses in one place:
  the gap of the ground and the horizon, sometimes cut-rate like pothole.
                   I know a day exists and can neither be decent nor loutish. In this frame,
  I can be sepia. Whitewashed like wall, hewed like linoleum on floors.

   In this center   I can be the forever grass
    when all things expire by morning

  washing me with dew.

Help me shatter this day. Our bodies make
transitions unbearable. All of us here hiding secrets. By design,
we are silent. It takes me days to fully sing.
                 We think walls are our doing, bridges our undeniable shame.
  There are things following me: the bird soaring, another one flat on
   the roof, and the other atrill on umbilicus of powerlines.
  This day is composition – let this day atonal. From where I sit,
  daily pursuits key in difficulties – eyes closed deep but not aslumber,
  are purblind: gauge me in this order: feel the world scabrous like Braille. In a world of continuing
  breakage, what is there to hold together.
                If not, a debris pattern. A held rigor in suffering – there is that
  crisp, sweet taste in the air again like some air winding out of ***.
  Look at me through dappled windows as reflection of an oncoming storm.
    Help me splinter this day. Placate my tremor of, and fasten me dearly
set beyond the grooves of this day. I teach myself a coruscating example – to reach for
  and break. To stop you climbing, plodding your way to a conclusion,
   waylaid you in your place and summoned your fiddling of chance – the duration is
lined by obeisance towards an endorsed situation issued, not accrued.
                  We are somewhat conveying this burden to equal our weight. Must we
  be afloat, what hoists our rebellion? What must we be
       to endure,    to witness these wondrous beatings ballast our gravities,
          no warning of, and against reliance. Is our being here what we determine.

All bleached. Sweating a spindrift. Senses dumb like a blunt arrowhead.
It is time again when liquor cuts like paper. I have weak means,
weaker skin. Wanting to strip home of stucco. Fails to, is white like clinic.

My measures to fret an end: books unopened, left yellowed. Some old cigarettes
my mother keeps a keen eye on, does not hurl in the trash, permits me
accepted death, the body taking a toll in this house. An empty wine bottle
corked to contain the drone of this animal. Pills I do not understand, only
touch the symmetry like a wife. My own shattered histories throbbing,
operating in the hollow dome of this

   some words when fated, do not reach their fathers. I have
many sons by this. My laugh bends like metal. Celan bellows trust the tearstain.
Body curled to a note impinged by conductions of this electric music. Listening
to myself confess as walls watch my back.

There is no reason for the wind
to maneuver

propagate cold in this province.
sullen this progeny when they declared

it so. The hue of it stark, dispersed.
What the hands pass on

as something with limit,
an azimuth reached.

The found body in tow, what season
limits this chance? This serene boy

catching up with a sullen, walled-in image
handing over a bent shadow

to knife this life. This economy of utterance
for I have no duplicate of your town.

I wait for it to arrive in this segment,
when time becomes impossible

a task to endure. Falls away, never settles,
searching balance – grasping what you speak.

What of her, bags packed and then unpacked later on
when they denied you of entry. You did not make it past
the deadline, or before it was purely yourself necessary to
incidence. You intersect, moor yourself to the center
of transactions – the force and shape of it, your tired image
sauntering past weathered windows.  The sound of tickets
being torn caused you trembling – doors held for body,
    hinges a hand-signal, error communicating through neglect
you didn’t listen to him, because he did not tell you
of its necessity. You were a day late as many others are,

almost a bullet hitting,
a crash postponed,
death by biting the barrel.
      Two lovers hinting at each other through open windows,
  hands are doves waving, parting the evening, almost this
  paled technique of fate to put you in a place you do not want.

But what to realize after, when all of this is nothing but
a disorder. They cleared the throat and gave you something
to remember: denied. Loose without a threat, even.
   A sensitivity so endless felt through volumes of people
  walking past metal detectors with smiles plastered, framed,
  crawling deep inside the mouth of it. The idea of   towards

a destination that is now far within reach, beyond the order
of things. You are one brash mistake away from assault.
That promise of a waiting bed in another country. Let alone,
the taste of the land burning what leftover Sun there is in the mouth,
  made you lose sight of, and now it is raining all over the city
  without umbrellas.

Ad astra

1
From the city I know you were from,
building up the perimeter in summer – it was plenty searing.
Must when I found the town already, triggered and almost accomplished,
searchable signs for searching parties involved like grass on the lawn,
scraps on an empty lot – when in summer it got very hot
and your salt smelt of the sea crushed in between my territories, start the word.
Flesh deems it so in frame, walking with us this very evening crafted
   by a waking remoteness.

2
When it rains, build this city from here on – relieve it of its terrors.
The memory of an old cathedral being burned down to the last cross,
the volume of prayer genuflected within pews, or anything that was hieratic. Rain in the
afternoon was what your entire ocean meant to me, crossing its span of promise,
   sure of its weather. Rasp the skin tight like gears fine-tuned. Borrow its heat when
   it drizzles. Do you remember my face when you pass by familiar pavements, stalls,
   hospitals drenched in prognosis? The even flutter of a bird? What does this question seek
     but your truth – like an elastic map stretched to infinite directions.

3
Here is where you were named darling. Taut your name had it belonged to someone else.
Sharp were your features. Your definitions smooth. Your textures visible with difficulty.
                       When you wore denims rising from the cuff of your knees you showed
  me a blotch and other fraternizations. Moles as variables. Your body as graph. My senselessness,
     somewhat a trying delineation. Thousand fingers mesh altogether to formulate rescue,
   mind a garden of salvage enough for two. Or underneath the sphere of a body,
         neither rain nor sun could stop to flourish me completely. Yourself full of
  symmetries – the universe cut inside and out, trimmed to lasting – ubiquity, inhabiting the temporary.
         I transact with this darkness yourself containing light, like a window to your home
when you’ve moved on to a different continent, I myself staring right into as if the whole space,
    in search for a singular glint I could make up for a cluster
                            to make an elusive thing such as you walk backwards, from the entry, just before the guardhouse, to meet me.

1
Defined by an intense need to
apostrophize and to tether, dictated by nothing

but your definitive space’s lissome address,

when visited, opens up to a closing, or sizing a gap
if syndetic, and reaching out for a retreat a frail gesture
    meaningfully pursuing a link, a strain  that is

2
When you were alive because you felt it, subscribing
to a phenomenon, granted by a sovereign of our difference

     unconsciously at first it was statutory to a fault but then conceding
to it and accepting, fit in this meeting as if too relaxed

    that it may sleep   or  bear noise even – your incidence of me sees clearer
than any lens, and when fond of, you will
                           make out of my clenched fists, when put together, a diptych with

    your   hands  taken into, receiving constantly the burden  of days

3
As destination of a truth
   that is  if you listen that  there is  something  inaudible in  this
       reality – your dream will make an apparition out of   its   center,

said when it is too comfortable to even slouch at a constant day,
        setting this faculty tranquil the face of  a punctual  eve
  somnambulating through   towns triggered   by   dim  white light,

   forcing windows    to  contract,  the   body somewhere  afloat, contacting
         the precision  of something  as  rescue,

your   life  seen   with  value  when   peril  touches  your  deepest  parts,
            almost daily   in this location   as if  you  were shorn out   of
                           difficulty, looking   for   me  to   halve all of this.