Trying

A man who, in what some might call, overcame in fact very little in getting to where he might possibly still be, unless something has happened to the form of our receptivity, in what some might, in whom they might, in what'm, some might, excuse me, I'm trying to read the cards, in what some might call a tragic reversal of the stereotype once prescribed for this fledgling nation, a man what we believe is not capable of preventing you from writing about him, a man who can only act in response, not in pre-emption, and how not different he is from any of us in that way of regarding a person, but who so many careers hang in the balance, I mean we are trying to go from memory now, but words are lonely on paper, and they wrangle you, a type of insect restricted to fires, constantly apart and back again, that how he would like us to describe him, and are we just kidding him into being, or does he not need any trying, an actual partition of physics, driven by motives we cannot, the very, the very person, and as currencies do this or that, do everything they possibly can, a man who believes he's transcended the very world he doesn't realize that he, a kind of overnight man, and isn't shy to blend rap music and also his private sexual times, free webinars, driving all over the sky like a car, yes, we know that you're closed but we just need to elbow in through the door here, yes, oh a relief to, a man who theoretically is not flattered, and so we can talk about him forever, feel pure tunnel freedom, a man powered by ignorance, an awareness vacuum, who must avoid the seeking wind or else change into another metaphor, a man of multiple bickering genres, an overdescribed man, a distraction from the grave realities facing the youth in the following nations, a man quite different than you're imagining, but not so different, an n plus two man, if n is the vision, and two is just what he brings to the party.

Sensitive people

KEY

girl → otter

crying → floating on the water

safe → dangerous

house → lakeshore

sensitive people → venomous flies

what hasn't been explained → apprehension

feel ashamed → think about the flies

STORY

The girl is crying. But crying is safe here. It's safe because the house is populated by sensitive people. Sensitive people can detect what hasn't been explained. They have a special set of antennae for that. Do not feel ashamed, girl. To feel ashamed while crying would threaten your happiness for the rest of your life. Crying, if you don't feel ashamed, can be good for you. But you do feel ashamed. You've gone and done it. The sensitive people are coming to you now.

Hardware

Stand in your garage and strike at the metal block with an axe until you have hacked off a small pile of shards. Do this with several conductive metals, such as copper and aluminum, until you've created a mulch. Lather the mulch with a silicon gel, and then transfer it to a bucket.

Smear the mixture over your dead electronics with a wire brush, or, if you must cover an especially great volume, connect it to a high-powered hose. Collect batteries of all types, and begin firing them into the mass. You may want to hire a pitcher.

After three to ten days, your dead equipment should begin to sizzle, and a vibration will emanate from the pile. At the first sign of this activity, no later and absolutely no sooner, drag your mulch in a heavy trail from the pile to your front door. Within a few weeks, you will awake to find the electronics lined up at your threshold, waiting for your instructions.

Lines Written on a Key Largo Bridge

Your shirt shone moon-white
on a night without moon
(we’d seen the stars rise instead)
and the gray in your hair fluttered
like fishing lines hooking the wind.

I hummed a song you didn’t know
as we ran our feet through the surf,
and even for the time of year,
the warmth of the waves surprised us.

But you didn’t touch me until later,
when we sat on the bridge,
and only then to point out a distant freighter.

“We would have missed it,” you whispered,
“had there been brighter lights in the sky.”

I looked, and felt self-conscious –
the ship shining
its obviousness so vainly
on the horizon.

You wouldn’t let me hold you.

I drifted then, buoyed through the night and stars,
everything departing and you
becoming a distant shore.
Only the smell of the sea grass
reminded me that I, not the ship,
was the land-bound, fixed point.

We stayed until sunrise
and drove the car home slowly.
You were afraid we’d crush crabs
blinded by the morning.

Border patrol

He raps his nail against her rooted tooth

Wipes the slime that gleams along her gums.

Bloody lace surrounding lacy blue

Where the eye rebounds against his thumb.

Quit, she says, you're making all the scenery shift–

But could there really be another dream,

Besides a woman-wearing thought in his?

Its own incoming light and faulty wings

Close-behinds and, buried under oceans

Evils held in place with incantations:

Certain words there are which can't be spoken,

And he is clumsy, clueless, lousy with impatience.

But oh if she could know the dream he draws her skin across:

His unhopelessness is a pessimist, her sighs like fragrant songs. 

On Feeling Tired

I’ve grown tired.

Veins, and cartilage, and unknown cells
quivering with the fatigue I’ve taken
upon myself.

Even the days grow tired with me -
birds singing carelessly for neither
pleasure nor doom … but for silence, and a moment’s rest.


Picture by Sarah Folkman

Evening at Applebee's

"And this," you said, "long beach at Haat Plaa Muk,"

Blond of your brown right hand becoming that damp

And trash-dappled sand in the air above your mug.

"And this home I," pointing at a callous on the puff

Beneath your little finger, probably a place

With nervous chickens and broad fluorescent blossoms

Bobbing in the yard. The light surrounding your face

Is the alien green of the grass on the screen the TV

Looks through to the bar, and about a nautical mile

From the curve of your hand you are carving a double-u reef

Where the cuttlefish teem and the scattering moonflashes pile.

I swam in that water, renewed my interior flesh

Which mixed with that air and that cool and that slippery food

And reverted to gray in the blown static spray of home I had left.

Memories

Quivering fire

Mirrored in a pool of wax

Glows devoid its heat

Despues del adios

Es dura la noche y larga

sin tí,

como vías ancianas de un ferrocarríl.

Y es como un grito vivir la tarde

(algunas con nubes,

algunas rociadas

de sangre);

y al levantarme - mañanas frías,

sol de madrugada -

escucho quejar la espiga,

llorar la guitarra.

Refinery

Evening Anagram

-To A.B.

Another day goes by;

useless, all that I have said and done,

standing near you when you looked away.

The light – and the light looks brighter on you

in the evening, just when you begin to mind.

No - but the light begins to fade when I walk by.

Life flows, though, as the Greeks and Donne once said.

Another sunset, another moon without you (I’ve seen so many),

never to see one (as though that would happen) again.

Could you understand, then, if I told you?

Everything would fall upon me, then, and everything would fall

because you couldn’t understand.

Unless the skies would breathe it,

tenderly, as though they didn’t care,

leaving room enough for the merest escape,

everything (I guess), then everything - tenderly -

returns to you beneath the night-light, and your hair.

Twenty, II

They were two men and they fell in love for one night.

A secret romance. Neither gave the other his real name or age. They traded false histories as they would business cards – the older man claimed to be a doctor and the blond boy said he was writing a novel.

But their hours were scarce. From the bar’s dance floor, to the fumbling for apartment keys, to the bed covers tossed aside, to the towels where they scattered the refuse of their love, the men could feel the minutes pricking them like careless fingers.

They saved their words for last, when the dawn came, and even then it wasn’t enough.

So instead they spent the last hour of their passion sliding hands over each others' thighs, microscopic hairs swirling round the mazes of their fingerprints.

They parted ways when the sun peeked in through closed curtains and demanded to be let in.

Later that day, the blond boy would say – when asked about the dime-sized bruises on his neck – that a chick he’d met at the skate park couldn’t leave him alone. In perfect detail, he’d describe breasts he’d never touched.

Being Sunday, the older man would pay penance in church: twenty dollars slipped into the wooden coffer.

He’d then leave, quietly, awkwardly, as if he were slinking away from a former lover’s house.

(Photo by Sooreh Hera)

Spring

Water falls in syrup strings

From icy roofs that were.

A jacket sleeve hangs from a crate:

The hobo bares his shirt.

My desire is a little light

In a house of ice and snow.

I feed it New York spectacle,

The fire for to grow.

Yes, one more thing ...

I feel like riding a balloon.

I've never done that.

I should put it on my list of things to do.

When I start that list, I'll put it on there.

I'll never make a list.

I'll never ride a balloon.

Warm are the still and lucky miles

You have a camera

You have a camera you point at the screen on which I've distorted the things that I've seen. It takes what it finds and scrambles the lines and routes to a screen that I point to with mine. When my camera's bent all the light that you've sent you capture what's left with your misshapen lens. When the sequence repeats to the hundredth degree we have authored the movie I'm living to see.

Malinowski

A name remembered or unremembered through student halls,
it may be that his portrait still hangs in some collegiate junction.
Somewhere, his voice remains, perhaps behind book-littered walls,
muttering the complicated elements of origins and functions.

I read him now, as though I would read the accounts of some explorer,
Remembering his life because it will show up on an exam.
Because the times demand it, I shall forget it all tomorrow,
Like the scholar’s footprints on Polynesian sand.

He’s gone. Used up, his esophagus closed some time ago.
I look at the sunset — part of him remains in the book between my hands.
Who else would hold it? The sunset makes me wonder, though:
is his savage-sounding name still remembered in far-off Trobriand?

Lorca

Solo luciérnagas
soplan en la noche Cordobesa.

Dejadme aquí muerto!

El sabor de naranjas
en los dientes
y de tierra en la lengua.

Dejadme aqui muerto!

Y el suspiro de las aguas
mimando mis
cabellos

Ay! Ya os es dicho que me dejen aqui muerto!

The Lighthouse

Behold the strength of the lighthouse —
a savior of men, of their industries, of foreign wares,
perched on cliffs that long have stood the swell.
The insecurities of night have never touched it —
a guiding light, an angel to the water-blind,
the lighthouse stands — the sailor’s hope,
beckoning the tide-wearied home.

But imagine —
over countless days (how many?) the workers toiled
to secure at first the beacon’s monstrous base.
Bones, marrow, human waste all sprinkled
in the chaos of those endless days.
No guiding lights had they;
the sun, the moon, the stars, the elements —
to these the workers clung and prayed.
In the distance, darkness and the rattling of the sea foam —
by their side, not even the comfort of fire and home.

So did the lighthouse come to be,
standing sternly now over the seas —
in darkness finding its own light,
now stands in darkness to give others peace.

Complaint, against a dull day

I’ve had happier days than these.
Seen better sunsets, better seas —
tasted better wine in better places,
have grown accustomed to more pleasant faces.

And bad days? I’ve known worst —
have cried into the earth, and cursed.
Walked endless deserts, endless miles
to see Misery come my way — and smile.

So who are you, TODAY, to try to change my life?
What do you think you bring, what joy, what strife?
No, you come to neither hurt or please —
I’ve had much greater days than these.