Saturday, October 20, 2007

THE 6th

Every impulse travels,
plucked. Oh, Mahler,
we're fucked.

The memory was solid,
fluid, singing,
individual--until
it was remembered.

Now only a wisp gradually coming to being through thicker
and sentimental representations. The hair on the gut.

How did we end up with Hillary?
How did he get an English horn?
An answer or two
just as faraway at Just as far away as
mornMourn.

Bells out of tune, thanks and the wind.
Once this idyll could be sung.
I think
today

softens it

gets it on the way

Friday, October 19, 2007

wingra marsh
birdless I
consider nearly
starving
but
too late
for cattails
and
at least
today I
think
for
anything part
way save
these leaves
the shade
ugly old
gold wishes
it was
go
the whole
mile my
heart no
roots but
all the way
to the ground

Wednesday, October 17, 2007

APOLOGY TO THE NEWS (an improvisation and very rough draft)

It's sad what stays and what's unsaid.
The unsaid sings and we with mouths
closed away and far from home (the context
where it would have meant)

They say it plain, we cannot recognize. Because, they say it plain,
of money tied. The past is said, and unsaid. Effect is Armenians.

Verizon said, without court order, turned over and over. What fun
to be direct. To thicken skin in word The weather comes again
To hurt and lovely long I took the lamppost for the moon.

The modernist impulse: is it simply rage become a civilization
stretching back three thousand years? And only after the fact?
The fact as bell we drool on 'til the tone no longer sounds
through human waves that lap us as we drown?

Our region the reality of error
Washes up, three lakes
Hot Midwesterners grope along their shores
Hot tendons in the autumn night
Tracing this town in messages that ring
Up the hill, the hill, the hill,
One wished
To join them at the trampoline
But saw their coldness as a theme
Their flesh mere syntax draped in bars
(Good old mahogany, brass rail,
grilled onions
or impish satisfaction came to fill
a space for lives that nights alone of course
they say so openly:

Take anything that we can give
Because you need it, need or freeze
Keep your pumps and open wide

The gap no metaphor can fill
with headphones on to block out final pleas
today I slept while engines tore the trees
between starvation and the blogging class:
he took the broken pent-a-meter
and shoved it up his ass