FRAGMENTS OF THE FIRST POEM OF THE NEW YEAR

The cat I’ve lost
fortunately
does not exist.

Fortune,
where money
and fate meet

(to eat
me?)

Most of what there is
happens

Most of that
is in-between.

This is atypical, and probably also a mere draft.


A kind of cake that repels
Cicada song moving in waves
A thick rosewater syrup
Across ravines of sycamores
Crawling in crates belowdeck
According to some stochastic rule
Arriving behind glass
Above the peeling bark
Polished nightly
Locking into another pattern
Before the doors are locked
Cascading away out of earshot
By wage workers leaving the strip mall
To cluster at dusk by the river

You arrive on Route 101
A few blocks from the cramped house
From the affluent towns to the north
Where your folks live
For one seventy-five
With a garden full of squash
Since two bucks is too much on principle
Where feet swelled with beesting
Or 41 from the south
Turned out to be yours
For two twenty-five
And the new subdivision
Since two-fifty exceeds means
Means that sycamore, song have fallen away

98

Oh magical software
so indispensable
so fallible

please
do not show me
this wizard
again.

...

               chick peas, seeds,
               ginger
                    : I eat nouns
                      like air

          
(substantial at the ends
                       of the day, a window
               to look back from

                    
—some green
                                 (not artificial)
                              for once

                   and not again—nation
                  supplants its principles,

          
“change” from act
          to thing, an export

                   
     as want or
                    bombed-out haze

     

full of air is empty,
     but lungs
            crystallize,
           don’t refract

             
             words are corners
            or fenceposts




something is clear?  then
it can’t be seen.
             what’s known
     is noun, then gone

improvisation 5

every grip in the form of a stampede

     how do you drink her well
          
          on one condition of stapled knees

     our artifact is getting in the nero



amiculate isn’t
     
     we’ll not overstate huge fuss
     
          organs like wow

     tractorfilm napalms the hero



cannot whizz through a comment

     bad tropicalia in the sack

          vow to bottle and sell

     in the back of the night



where’s no-nose when you dream

     ok I got a frisk of it in julia

          who?

     yeah I think so too

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).