rock paper

these book
are yet wrung, done
by brown things--trees
and rings
aged
within are thin
strips of paper
stripped of
ink-and-inkling
towards completion
via
isolation, i think
the preservation of things
impermanent:
tar over amber.

this clink clink
of buildings will be
imbedded
into the brain--
grooved things
gather in groups, you know.
while other
countries
build with stones,
we sleep at home
under
painted paper.

on ways of order

basket weave

belies

the nature of

one's thinking:

warp

and weft

are less

than instinct.

I'd rather pile up

things

in sieves

and catch,

erratically,

what comes

tumbling

through.

if this is forgotten

it's probably
because
the texture was less
touchable
than it ought to
have been.
the notes were
most likely
misarranged
and that
mark there
is just
experimental.
each leaf is brown
because of
improper watering;
my bets
were hedged
this season
and
these words
were not
recorded
in the proper order.
and for all of this,
forget me.

berry picking, if i remember

green things
recede
before they
ripen.
pink
approaches
in places.
tart starch:
i cannot make you
ready yet
for tongues
or other
muscles.

bug

cockroach wings
articulate things
i didn't know
needed sharpening
am i any better
thin
crisp snap
crackle pop
a bug falls out
unblessing breakfast.
milk is thrown away
as muddy water
tossed
down drains where
insects live
enduringly.

if you're six

a box
a string
a carrot
a stick;
in objects and in aim you must
insist insist insist.

proportional

papercuts might
be resolved by
enlarging paper's
edges until
sheets of pulp the width of sycamores
slice bloodless
slits in giants' thumbs.

markmaking

nothing
i did today
in collusion with the train
who, with unsmotherable suspicions,
counted
my missed misdeeds
and skips of unintentionals
relentlessly.
box by box: graffiti exegesis.
their edges scatter fast
and quiver
blurringly into an air
that seems,
for now,
like theirs.

i feel a little

like the
o in oatmeal:
a ring, a hole, a bottomless bowl
and barely wide enough to hold it up
(the matter that it's made of).
there'll be no singing,
or secret gasps for breakfast--
this morning,
i can only warble.

overkill

"don't you dare" 

is the creak 

creak creak 

from ascending stairs.

the thing you didn't say 

when fingertips appeared

perspectively 

near your nose.

now it's

dead pests, 

break and shake 

shake shake 

with double dog tag accompaniment.  

on the third or second story of a 

whole house,

there's nowhere to hide

a shredded mouse.

pea

there is

more than just this

gram of green

stacked under

mattresses.

i feel it too,

tiny lump to

my plump rump

like pluto to 

the sun.

this viridescent heat is vegetal

and swelling.

it's no hindrance,

princess:

atom of affection,

planetary love.

sometimes tenderness is just another word for 

our persistence.

front

everyone lined up
in regiment
today
sits sorry slump
and hungry looking for
their head.
what's the hangup
yesterday
so big to hang a hundred hats on,
now fedoras fall in thuds,
their bodies soft upon the floor, 
cotton come
of raw.

resurrection

an experiment has gone awry
inside the cabinets of my kitchen.
you won't like it.
the color and
innateness of its fur,
a zombie bread,
stuck between
alive and toast
and yet it never had it:
the moistness of a nose
or barely breathing there
like panic.
pity, not repulsion,
for a thing that fails at being fit: inadequate.
i want to stick it 
up my shirt
and run 
like ruffians
undo its black and blue
and fear of further slicing
with a soft kiss,
lick,
nibble.
teeny tiny bite.

morning walk

1

it's pitch perfect,
i bet,
the sound
of spiderwebs
when plucked by
tiny pests.


2

he skips every
second step
habitually
until
he spots a turtle,
boxed of my childhood,
and forgets tradition.


3

disappearring deer
plunge through
thick air
like knives
slicing pudding.

in Athens, Greece today

in Athens,
aids poured fluids down protestors' faces.
having come from bottles,
its consistency confused me.
was it white?
or just the light that time of day?
dirty pipes?
calcified?

it wasn't water
spilling still
indecently
and weeping:
milk, my husband tells me
used to neutralize the tear gas
in their eyes and mouths and noses,
only known by knowing
that the face of pain is frank
on wailing men,
inflated babies.

i'm left with nothing but
the color-lack-there-of-ness,
thickly sticking;
rolling eyes and
phantom pageants:
white
compassionate as clouds
and down that
didn't come from death
but plucking
like a mother,
duckling grooming.

even puss appears productive--
sturdy nurses fight infection
in clinics haunted by the ghosts of former ailments,
in sheets they're almost cheery on their missions:
seeking resolution,
though,
it's nearly all resolved,
except those holes,
where eyes can just be seen
to be secreting.

...

at Acropolis,
the structures
summon bones
and memories
of toga-ed mothers,
infants fixed
upon their nipples
mutely nursing.

behind the brain

behind the brain,
i've decided
to store the things
i keep forgetting.
how fitting
to have them
there
out of reach
and inextricable.

on making things

all the things
i've failed to make
paraded me in sleep,
a weariness in ways
and waves of shame
about them.
faraway,
they stayed dim,
but brilliant,
face to face,
they felt like
some mistake
i never mended.

in summertime

the signs of it are this
smell and this delicious
wetness.
this wildness in the air that musses hair
so mischievously deliberate,
banning vanity by sunlight,
wash even wet things in sweat:
the grass, concrete, my ass upon it.
stickiness will be
our currency
rattling around
in pleasure's pocket:
tintinnabulation
reigns rampant.
seeds will be
spat out to crack asphalt,
nothing breaking bad.
i want to shape space
as potters do but less deliberate.
this will hold no liquid,
holy hole-y relic, this
memory not yet
done drying.

blackout

in this darkness,
exactness loses traction fast.
what is dimmed is most dimensions;
what's revealed is tendencies,
tending to engender tension in the line,
addiction.
this step there's the last one, before
the one you don't know where.

what we need now is just a little light that's
brighter than the moon we've got tonight.
i'm looking for a name for shadows cast
by shadows.
you're in them.
and even so i see your skin,
the surface of it, topographic counterpane.
over there, a laptop's stirring
miles of piles of animal eyes
open onto cartoon forests,
launching soundtrack's crickets' creaks.

in electrical asylum,
well-lit fluorescent, tiled,
we buy the things we think we need and leave with:
apples, cream, and cokes,
a bag of ice to keep the things we think are needed kept
in tact
not knowing
this
is what we're meant to store,
this profound profoundly boring blackness,
daz-zle-ing-ly charged with
almost dangerous devotion.

the carrot

don't believe them, dear,
the dogs outside your door,
their humble panting.

they've eaten meat before
and know too well
what licking leads to.

i've never been a mother though i know
the tone of grumbling stomachs--
sudden barely there soprano.

see their ribs like empty bridges?
that's a sign of bones
outgrown agreed upon dimensions,

a holding place in floods of hunger--
pathways past their purpose so
with assholes calmly open.

...

the traps i built in childhood
failed, but sometimes severed tails
of unknown species.

they got away, in part
but strangely always left the carrot.

the only thing i know's that
where brains go, our bodies bear it.

a love poem

the skin between
your thumb and
finger seems
stronger than it
ought to be.

i pinch it,
pretty dish,
wish i was
cream in it
or candy
or the sharply focused
circles at the end
of paper towel tubes:
brown and stiff
potential.

coyote

i thought i saw him

twitch a bit
there
under thunder's trundle,
but think that,
thinking back, it might have been
the wind or
this one
pickup in particular

(loads bear them out
sometimes towards the shoulder).

i'd like to prop him up against a rock--
a ragged table,
rigor wrapped in fat
i'll call it this:
still life with boulder.
i'd do it,
too.
drive alive
and dead
together
threaded
just
like
tug
o'
war--
banned because of perils to the hands
and arms
and shoulders.

MY pain

i had an ache i couldn't name.
like southerners who call all sodas coke,
i called it "pain."
propped along my collar bone,
it rolled in motions of devotion:
the chest the head, the heart
and shoulder,
fissures gripping ghosts
of order.

it spurred a thirst for normal names--
the classics!
broken bone,
a bloody nose,
a papercut, a sprain!
each object wants to own its own objection.

this
is inadvertent, this.
an accident of malady,
my stubborn, mum mistake.
i can't relieve you any better than
a baby, changed and wailing;
the hurt has swelled as big as infants' mouths
and ranging.

the wrong one

when i said to throw out that
i meant the other one,
the one that's all in tatters.
leave it to you
to keep the one
that's worn,
whether or not it works.

unmade

the bed's been made
and unmade twice
already today.
getting into it is a bit like chewing soup.
and yet, i do it,
don't I?
place a head upon a pillow, one ear up
for swirls of sounds to channel into,
tornadoed.
everything is amplified.
fighting for the loss of will to fight
is dumb. i know.
and blind and deaf, god willing.
but better that
than leave it up to my mind's mouth.
briefly,
sleep forgives you what's yours.

on size and stumbling blocks

i know why
dogs go under logs
on tracks in woods when
paths are blocked.
i'd rather duck than hurdle too:
proportions prevent it, though.

in the distance, everything is handy
in imagined hands.
squeeze a tree,
pinch a boulder,
cup a cliff.
the nearer you get,
the less you
hold.
and wedging
between hedges curbs
agility.

big butts and ovoid heads allow us less
than the flat collapsable hips of puppies.

clearly

glass melts
under duress.
and if the window burns,
the frame goes first for sure.
but wait
and plates will shatter.

don't doubt what isn't shouted.
fire may burn bright,
but water's clear as crystal
and puts it out.

linear

the problem with a line
is not its length,
but its tendency towards completion,
i think.
what works best is unencumbered ends--
a refusal to embed.
with one foot fixed and not the other,
tangles mingle into knots like leashed dogs that
circle owner's legs Magelleanly,
ankles tethered into anchors:
plant the flag
take notes
summon awe like scholars.
for all the dashed lines i follow solid,
i can't help but notice
how unseen scenery seems
like all the places
i've already been.

red

i think i know why red is red

and quick

to stick its anger

in our brains.

everybody talks about

the rubies,

and thinks about

the blood--

each bead better

at it

being hued,

separate from my skin again:

pools setting traps

for tracks to radiate

out from.

we are carriers of the most

unwatchable warnings,

terriers taught to catch

bright balls

and dig up frisbees.

my airedale found a heart,

buried between fence posts;

hardly human.

if i catch a rat and shred it,

will the pinkly flashing throat

clash with other colors,

tacky valentine?

better to be blind,

squinting organs

and each

exit sign

into the sparkle of a rock instead:

cut,

trapped,

and compassionate.

it's awfully tricky to

remember what to do here

with the sound of

rushing blood

pacing space between my ears.

demons

it doesn't matter much
when i say
i hadn't heard
their scratching
on the door
this morning if
there's still shit between your toes.
our consequences carry
timed intestines
and unclean teeth.
i may have demons,
but at least i let them out sometimes.

change

there is
a container of time
before the birds
chirp
each morning.
its walls are slick--
unclimbable--
we can't hold on
to anything that
isn't there.

when it fills
it fills
up
quickly.
a whirlpool flip that
builds as light
constructs
a space beyond
the opening.

hollow air becomes
commodified.
each cheep
rings cha ching
cha ching.
a copper sky pours
out the
day pores open up
to drink in
liquid stillness,
and oxidize it
green again.

i could drown in
this gold dawn.

insistence

dogs want robins
even if they're
yards away
you name it:
instinct i see
startling complexity
in this
this breeds
insistence.

whether we
want what
we can't have
or want it all
i don't know
how it goes
i do know
every inch of it
is built of most
miraculous
feathers and
bones framed
for flight.

perspective

on impact
I heard a crack,
but thought I saw
some small body
resurrected rearview.
I couldn't tell if it was
Him or just some
tattered twin
of His.
they say their brains
are fabricated
for the obfuscation of eagles--
thinking up instead of over--
they never guess
three points could
summon thunder so succinctly;
poor pee-wee slant!

I think I know the
fear that made Him freeze:
that irrevocable knowing of
what a thing you never knew can do.
I can't quit picturing
the ribbons of His innards,
tightly trussed and
still cascading.

things the canine wants:

a rock
a stick
a razor, fallen to the bathtub floor
the last remains of 3-D glasses previously eaten
the pin
the pencil
pen
the girl
the squirrel that jumps
the rubber toy in chunks
the chip that fell
the drop of salsa following
the piece of broken glass
that thing, you know, that twists around the ends of bread bags
the bread bag
the bread
the boy upstairs
the man inside
the book you love
the book you need to read
the article you haven't finished yet
the list you wrote and can't remember
the dental floss
the needle
some thread
the sock that's clean
the sock that's dirty
the pillow stuff
the pillow
the couch, the rug, the living room, the kitchen, closet, everything upstairs
the bee outside the window,
the cockroach scuttling under cracks
the thunderstorm
karate kids
familiar women
unfamiliar men
the thunder
earthworms
dirt
the memory of meat
the treat
that cat outside
that cat outside
that cat outside

tangle

i cannot seem to undo
anything you fasten;
a rope i need revoked
on alpine tracks for
want of climbing higher,
(can't go forward, can't go back)
a corset blocking
breath of atom's ribs.
i cannot unclench
hound's tooth's takes
or disentangle tweed.
sometimes, i think,
it's best to
pay no mind
to things you can't
untie.

wisdom

old womens'
ways of scolding are
akin to kinship:
befriending to the bone--
they elbows eager edges in,
essential to deliver
criticism's ichor.
splits in hips
post-menopause insist
an understanding
of the fragment.
but understanding isn't empathy, remember?
"stream of consciousness?
harumph.
i guarantee it never seeps as near complete
as my incontinence."
concede, they're far too tethered to their tanks
to want or need
a lecture on technology.
lifeline alert and hearing aids
announce advancement.
still, she wants to show
specifics so
her blighted hands
rise sink
to ear for emphasis:
"see?" she points,
"too small to see!"
as clouds of dishsoap whisper:
"not even her poor fingers can stay straight."

on how the mind remembers when we age

in the brain
a stone and scrotum feel the same--
round and proud.
warm sometimes when heated,
[astral]
[somatic]
[bodies]

also:
velcro can't unstick itself from velvet--
genetic l's bond like elements.

science says we file in piles--
infinity of brackets,
[bric a brac]
stacked like fractures in the surface of the skin.
i think its less like files
than filaments thin
enough to bear air,
and dense with chemicals
linked like tenements.
a kind of net, a
[trap]
perhaps, a
[lace]
a
[template]
{dish}
as seen from over head
or petticoats,
[spiteful]
{tight}
{full}
[hide]
that ties together out
and inside.

oracle

a double yolk
should feel
oracular, today
it plummets
heavy-handed dense.
I want a twinning to mean magnetism,
splitting,
twist, and tug
together of
all coupled things--
lovers, brothers, cells,
wedding bells.
if yellow's to be golden;
doubled yellow better
ring like the
cling of
jackpots,
rainbow buckets,
an amber plop of honey.
the sound is flat
and flesh instead,
that white spread
and slap of surface meeting surface.
heat in-between is mean
and unalterable:
the cast-iron is cast-iron.

instructions on an ant

1. allow an ant
into your kitchen.
a hypnotist,
alone and
whirling-dervish on a dish.

2. find his nearest friend.
connect the line like
dashes between dots.
constellation makes a milky way.

3. course its
quivering contour:
equator of cabinetry,
circumference of crown molding.
neither latitude
nor longitude,
rather, path
of most
mysterious
resistance.

note: it will slip quick into a slit,
swarm a sweet,
or stop along a wall.
once sprayed,
a march becomes a monument,
speckled necropolis.

on the floor: filth
on the counter: skeletons impersonating pepper.

appetize

the air is unexpected

cooler than it

ought to be

and crisp like

crackers

dipped split-quick

in lemonade.

doors open into

orifices of intention:

freshly dentisted mouths,

mint tingeing

memory of bacterium.

when scented drifts

of chicken

shit visit

from plants

in the vicinity,

I could give

up breathing:

Anorexic of the Air.

but today,

it's toothsome,

trace

of chicken

tracks

along the

sheet of

its whipped

breezes.

NO

drawing: age three

(bone, hole, mouse/cat/dog, dog with teeth, liquor?)