Silver CarWhere are you going Alejandro, where
Because I too would like to write
someone elses poem, gust to the margin
The gash in the turf full of pale grass, pink flowers
The bits of plastic the sea has placed just there
And the skanky brash construction paused
straggling along the ridgeline before it descends
to this feeling about blonds
that thankfully protects me from all other feelings
Thus do I maintain my sleep, a cloister drawing me
swiftly past the silver car parked
lunar by the horses. With both wings lifted
it is emitting a music of seriously sullen faces
of children posing with guns for a student photographer
who is growing increasingly nervous: his tears
and his pain thumping are making her all wet
he hopes: Do not smile, Alejandro, do not smirk
until weve passed them. Where do people come
from? from their habits. Keeping them so faithfully
all along. The brown eyes filling again
with a fierce private happiness behind the smoke
both strong forearms on the scarred table, or their bare
straw-colored skinny arms scalloped open
over the balcony railing. How his intelligence rinsed me
mixed with lust, even if thinly, tinny. Resisting
as if hatred were an excavation
I am always tunneling steadily toward my freedom
You Are Not a Bird
The officer dipping in and out of you
I guess having a good time. Excited
by a certain fast ripple in his reflection
Become an object, come on!each one has
its lacy train. The enormous breasts
and white tiered skirt, and the relaxed gait
of her boyfriends scapulae under his thin shirt
Their luggage rattling on brick, they are too many
They write in notebooks. Their joy sounds
like choking. Their faces so young and ruddy
and lively and stupid. You are not a bird
Each one is meaningless. They are a bird
collectively, the bird of you wasting your time
With such fair calm she surveys her work
A bearded someone rides by holding a bottle
shrieking, he seems to be enjoying his Sunday
Two dogs flanking him, tongues out. Is it tiring
to be weightless? Try helpless
Ring the bell and stand aside, they will come
to the other side of the wall and push
the wafer through on a little tray and pause
and ring the bell. Like G
shoving all his anger inside piety
as waiting for no one slowly closes
My John Wayne
Every time you crumple up a fantasy
you feel better, so why not
Make your best friend a saint, for freedom
And because you want to fuck him
The cashier with the burned hand
and bad English smiling tightly
New skin coming! New skin
coming!”a gleaming at the base of
the fingers like pink spit, webbing
The truth, freedom, Sure
I say floating
inside my John Wayne body, my ghost-
buffer
Sure it will
Under the greenwood tree
their passing hidden. Footsteps,
laughter. Is it a scar or mirror
that peculiar brightness crossing a face
involuntary. Discussing distances
and I watch them, sealing and unsealing
There is so much pressure on an ending
not to. Just like me
All Dread Is Trying To Be Kind
I am in Damascus dreaming of Vikings
The way they place their tongues
to make their songs about big sore hands
and ice and kinds of hot baths
Hey, hey, and white towels all around
The soft sea-sounds are humming
down their cold fanned grooves
The Geography Channels helping
George is making chicken and cleaning
my coffeepot and calling me a liar
when I say I already cleaned it
All right, I am a liar. I want to swoon
into a fit of possession by sled dogs
like a premonition of an inappropriate lover
on the horizon. Hard bliss of snow
scouring at one mortal. The table is now
yellow with bananas and apples
George says he has discovered
he is old. Whiskey or wine?
Whiskey. My body very warm
with skin abounds baking all the tiny
bricks inside each wren, for pity
Pharaoh Glimmer
But you wanted to go into something
you called a glimmer”
But it was really more like shame
But is it so different writing in pencil
It is, because the sound
You straddle the puffy blue mat
with the white line drawings of a woman
on her back. Like a Pharaoh swimming
There are the parts of your body
that are something wrong
Days you can call back into being
These are called the future”
The unmarried sisters are washing
the cracked stone courtyard below
Jingle of women, your own
fletched No hidden in a city
you walk through foreign
without singing. Your armpits fern
-rank with lust. Your hair with smoke
Everywhere our breath bequeathed to curtains
in the quiet toss of crisis spooned
along nights back like honey, cold
Hadnt you better lay back down stung
with imagining the brides of Spartan soldiers
shorn to look like conscripts waiting
in thatched huts for dusk to fall
floating and drubbed like branches
in the dim foam of temporal bewilderment
with soft hands and rough clothes
I hang my doubt an opal
lamp among fruits. Reality
flows into all the spaces, how
strangers test our pity. Someone thinks
I am for sale and touches my arm
more insistently. How much
the limbs perceive, cooled and viva
After kissing I sit feral, waiting
for my played skin to become audible
A crouched white traitor. Ace
He is a sort of wall that I could bask on
Art thou. Yeah, well. Fetch me then
Lurking from all attempts not to think about war
end in my body white strong strange culprit
in the mirror far iron tang of well water covering
my deep heart at sea, a child lying on a carpet
I am shorn in extremis, shivering to die
I love the small field, the smell under my arms
His backache, his three of shrapnel, small
pink mole-nose of each nipple unsquashing
when I take off my bra a joy similar to panic
I felt watching him listen to music, and why
these young voices should shelter
wealthy efforts at mucho damage
Untidy with breath, gaudy with pleasure
for a little stitched while, or steadying to take
a picture of a shattered doorframe. Splinters
in silhouette. Always a train
moving west. Etc. hair messy
abject face. Ratscape. Breadspace
when rage relinquishes my chest
and fulcrum-calm of dear. Waking
I strip off my warm shirt like a country
settling doves. He doesnt know what
I mean. Well then Im the short gray
dog trotting alongside language
An icy noon. A man enters
the restaurant, unzips his leather jacket
Can or cant go from each
bed with this cup of asking
to catch the rain inside his chest sprawled
little country crawling forward on its ribs
Thats what we like you to think, we like it
when you thank us. I want to be every cage
disbelieving, blinkless. I inside the narrows
of red brick, brick dust there, of mens chests
Breaths pounded open, sun-tongs through hayloft air
Workshirts in cigarette ads, full-page, glossy
My unbound hair destroying everything
and deeply. The list of errands helps somewhat
to give me edges, but only briefly
Then an absence gashed with trees
You must take care of yourself
You must rest and work in plain gray pencil
above the unenchantable sea faithfully
consuming all entrances to itself
A face tipped up at the behest of rain. Quietly so
it is the least real voices that most own me