CIRCUMFERENCE

1
Crazed by circumstance. Varied shades seen
on tree trunks, surfaces which could mean
anything, except that thinking of
someone clears an attitude with soundtrack;
in the world, silences follow disasters.
Politically, nearly anyone is a lack.
Nearly someone. Make eggs to fill in the
holes. Said things, which once forced
reorganization, now merely encircle a
situation. Crap. Can’t help but
respond to cuts in the landscape. The poem’s on
strike, scabs leap from credit cards, to staunch whose wound? Phone
to ridicule the insistence. All service is a
pustule in style. Justice got too complex
for our return policy… but what should you do, then?
Ask another question.

2
In this mud of images I thought I saw a deed
quantified or sparks good. Tried to bring
lungs on a window of some transfer; 21
enemies thank you. Commitment twists
pulsation, growths on the truth, or in
time. Information’s a green break in
south Texas. Amplify masterpieces’ legends;

focus mandibles. Plaster hurls gifts
at fields of broken home. Stained sequences
of chloride domains.
Cool. I hurt an eye. Mess with fish.
Lives in a phrase; on a liner note,


3
Between the hum of cicadas, the hum
of heat. this is not secondary, only
sandwiched by the unusually high
intensity of business as usual. think
on a dancer’s toes to see acceptance
as a hole. your hand, its sigh. where’s,
if a train makes the windows sing, the
connection? knowledge measured against
sudan, anticrastinate. toothy
is the parent which conveys,
pinched in its every repose. letters
which can’t quite outweigh


4
Grant drop, roaming cilia, for knots in the
cradle of thought, and I shouldn’t have to
reminisce that we need this retort by mourning.
It jumps from side to side, imitating the supervisor,
so we don’t have to cart our needs
all the way to the slightest detail to have
a good time. As long as you’re up and over. Voicelike,
your rings from the past, in a kind of bone-crunching
exterior improvement impossible to see from inside;
eggs on the installment plan (for blink standing out
housetrap, opening night, a racial, his observations,
her enumerations). Regard (maybe a bad idea) that
could mean a wasteland of quality, which is why
he didn’t want to cough up the risk
of debtorhood; somebody cut these loops! Nonetheless, the argument
triumphally bends the racetrack into a sphere.
Which is what you’d expect. “News this bleak
has just got to fit.” Archive encrusted with intention,
as if anybody needed it, anywhere else but quiet.
But that’s only what you’d expect: something
showing through, a fine texture of memory, frayed.


5
hundreds of silences move across a day’s space

overwhelming velocities of leaflets
rock the query

time of the racinated cube
half-dressed in the sense of half in uniform

preserved in gelatin, dazed
by the absolute, darling, endocrine smile

looks like curtains, fends or feeds
off don’t-hurt-me doo-dads

muscular contingency of a belabored spontaneity
work marks: pants, phones (lines

barely move in a wind) different
shadows on a landscape

what’s in the radio? change “flies”
to “north.” take up an income bracket,
creative liquefaction, the president
the result of generations of elaborate







field of static obscured by rain
the body furniture


something else got in there



This one was recently published in Mirage #4/Period(ical).