poetry

just because you woke up thinking how (not) funny it would be to be hit by a buggy

Notes on Seroconversion

Then & only then was it made clear: I was to be no different than the rest stepping out to toke menthols at the curb, standing tall & slack-jawed as we joked about our aging forms—this fresh stretch mark, that odd crash course—did you know there was more than one way to snake a drain? to sump a pump? to earn one’s crust?—eventually snuffing the butts to reenter the song & hall with an edged finesse, as seen in certain sub-sects of eels—the swarm of us, looking just as lithe & cosmopolitan beneath the stroboscopic lights; fueled by syrup & ice & salt on the rim & in these stolen seconds, when the self-loathing lowers its pitch, who wouldn’t be convinced they could exist: bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, not subject to bad trips or high rent or low T cell counts or tear gas or squalor— who wouldn’t be convinced, utterly convinced, to live might always feel

Feedback

Because what isn’t

Fed back? A time and place

For everything, my mother said,

But everything is A time, a place,

If you know to trace.

I carry my own face

And my mother’s,

And my father’s

Graceless shape; Both are overlaid.

A boy, I tried to rail against

The sect of men Who pick up rage but fell

Among the ranks anyway.

A boy, I was made

Effective in a lowly way, a ditch

In which this country’s scat

Falls fat.

When you’ve seen the image

Become word, the word

Become image again, “In the beginning” seems A useless trope.

Don’t speak to me of ends.

I’ve seen the legislated ditch

In which you’ve dropped

The dispossessed and young, hoping

We’d choke on our own

Mass. Why would you think that

Would last? Grown, we’ve come

Into our own, we’ve seen it all

Must be overthrown—

We, the people, the rank, the poor Muscled things

The ditch spits back.

“My idea of abstraction is white lightning”
Jack Whitten
Halfway between Gonyon and Ophelia imminent splendor. It doesn’t matter what I don’t know.
Clouds creating a blue fissure in the sky, whose grammar whose sadness hurries forth?
I want to speak to order: soybeans, corn, wheat rows browned to torpor.
Mercy. Protozoan, water-shorn, hotly I listen in the pines for my green name. Whoever can
stop reasoning, stop. Is it too much to ask tobe remade I who’ve just begun?
Adagio of light, copper-hued diadem
hanging on twilight’s hem, Virginia sun— I’m yet released from the
sharp language of being: make me anotherby morning lest I stay
in this vestibule wholly unmade

self/hood   Wearing today the diacritical preconception of otherness Approached thusly and code-ified, solidified in…

W 177th & Broadway
All night you eyed the man I wanted to be;
my jaw flexed tight. Anger slipped into
desire. Easily he would rise. Easily you would
disperse, pleasure made into light:
what you want under him,
I put on to amuse— I, your worked
supplicant. Yes, love is looking away.
My desire greened in your dismissal. Was
technicolor and twilight-made and never
turning off. The city air hung humid
above our charade. What need I could fill:
to transubstantiate, to unravel?