#14

Sky darkening morning.

Thick with unsung rain, the world

withholding sorrow is sorrow.

#13

Reading about a horror film has given me horror.

Mind as weapon against itself.

I can’t not think of it.  I have no visuals.  Visuals might be better.

My 12-year old son explained to me why The Exorcist was scary.

“It’s so slow,” he said.  ”You never know when.”

My problem with the movie: “I never knew that…”

Only reality has done this to me before.

#12

A window is a painting someone has forgot the painting in.

Keep it shut, the inside air is better, because of filters.

The window is a filter.  All filters, windows.  Soliloquy, sobriquet, or jism.

Failing logic, I wish someone would respond to the earth–I have been wishing.

Wishing is its opposite.

Also: projects to correct the self end in incessance.

Yet another thing, my sisters, we can’t keep having.

#11

If the thoughts inside my shower made it out, someone would commit a crime.

So I double them down.

There must be a jumprope song about hating flesh.  ”Miss Susie had a bellyroll/she named it MiddleMe/she washed it up and under/then toked a bit of tea.”  There: I just wrote it.

I can sell you birthday poems.

I can sell you crackerjack prizes I’ve saved.  That’s a lie–I don’t save anything.

Days like this I call Black Market days.  There’s a feeling that selling something would be the answer since commerce is the divine everything but all I have is a small filet and the devil is never behind you when you need the devil.

I am not so sure about consequences.

Lately, being legitimized doesn’t make it safe.  No one is monitoring the goods.  The marketplace is a marketplace of unmanned stalls.  We cannot sell, we cannot sell, we cannot see.

How can I offer myself to johns without bodies?

I think I keep growing so that I might make it to the other side of these words.

#10

I lately have been feeling like George.

With my fingers, and back to the country’s foundation, curious.

I feel tall of stature.  Of reputation.  My teeth are trees.

I can’t imagine camping in snow.  General

is not a title or description I’m comfortable with.  Taking

a wife, I would not take a wife with slaves

no matter her wealth.  Nor would I wive the man

with the yellow hat.  I would do differently.  I would

keep Lenny further from harm, for example.  Go

by Geo.  No I’d say to mobs and zoos.  Less

great, maybe – I’d try to be.

#9

Coffee. I have this friend. She is on the phone twisting. No cord, just throat, wrung like a coarse cloth against itself. Crying on the phone is catching it in a thimble. I used to think the divots were holes too tight for needle tips. Phones keep shrinking. And language as we send it through. Abbreviated. I wonder how tall she is these days. If she might be being held by a blind mole. She sounds some way down a dark tunnel.

#8: at Morris Arboretum

The trees were where the trees were

managing to be, managed–

dreamt up from other countries and implanted

like lies in the ear.  ”A tree museum,”

she said and I thought zoo, as my animals

gazed at the weeping ones and ones

for fortage and thought up all the wars they could

plan (gingko bomb, chestnut shot and sumac

trap) beneath such excellent protection.

The cultivated tour ended on a ramp

into the canopy. A sculptor had there fabricated

a nest for bird-lookers and inside it three

eggs large enough to hatch children.  Mine sat

like mother pterodactyls. Mine, fiercely

brothered, at any threat will fly into a thing

barbarous and keen and like me.  I end

wishing for more trees and time beneath

to retreat, to walk back wounds and worries

of infiltration, of what is natural, what

grafted — these contorted knots of mine.

#7 “She seemed to be expecting a bird.”

She got lighter as she got heavier. On the phone with well-wishers, her voice was clipped and salutatory. She dreamt of the feathers that had lately been discovered fossilized with their dinosaurs. She saw the no longer gray-brown immensities plumed, colored like old Sunday funnies, and shrunken. Waking, she looked out the window where the traffic was pleistocene. She herself was megafauna. A ground sloth–they were North American. She was North American. She paused often between rooms, admiring both the doorframes’ regularity and her organic refusal of it. When she gave birth, two weeks later than anyone wished, the world erupted and the lava sang blood. She knew her son would scale the darkly glass of Tokyo or Wall Street. His clingy fingers were barbed like a spider’s. The spider that ate the bird.

#6

If I find it in baskets, is it wind? Pooled at the bottom of self, will good swirl upwards? Can you catch tornado like a cold? Can you feed it fever-candy? What about chocolate? We will postpone knowing we are inside one another forever. Woven in, a backwards drain.

Death is caramel, is atmosphere.

#5

Easter is a trick of the light.  The eyelet dresses are like leaves. The shoes shine like polished money. This is all that rebirth is: childhood. The first, last vampires. The sun on their faces.