ASPHALT

The weather belonged

To a strip mall that day

Cars doors closed

Life behind

Thumbprints of rain

The air has blood

The clouds held like gauze

A fundamental thing

Jo and I saw

An egg fall loose

& whole onto concrete

Like a sky

So serious upon impact

Why it has stuck with me for

Six years is to say

I bare resemblance

Is to say I notice

The doubt in reality

Inside a Chase Bank

Which also feels like

Getting fucked

Inside a Xerox Machine

A teller cues me forward

And my feet move

The way a body trends

Towards a photograph

This also accumulates

In the Starbucks line

The migraine

Of total light thundering

Through the torso chain

I wonder

How many seconds it takes

To look out

Over a landscape

And decide

It is no longer worthy of

Event

The geography

The day

Just a space

We’re concluding while

Always stuck inside

The parking lot

Black horses

Chasing each other around

As pollutant sound

Perishing the background

Filling with birds as

Little riots

Night is much a shape

Of smooth earth

In the dark

The traffic light

Bled out far and wide

So the rain

Gleamed like innocence

On the road

FUZZ TONE

This was always about making music &
This year I’ve failed to meet the lord
Failed to bury my stranger
I sucked on mercy as a subject &
let the sun punch out the rest of me
When this piece of life feels “finale”
and the edge is every which way
I could look back
but what difference does it make?
When everyday is a birthmark,
a surface-scratched alabaster Sunday–
brief coffee, little appetite,
The opaled earth
A radiator screeching below a window
Another birdsong to come alive to
My sky was out in the open
so I could be all the words
Like a public good
When the locals talk
If the ghosts don’t
What’s a phrase for
when a bruise looks like a bruise
when a squirrel acts natural to the animal
when a landscape holds the landscape
Other days, the rain hails so hard the drops
look like white sparks in streetlight
Yeah, living in my life looks like that—
caught dead with birds exiting the flesh
That beginner simile of life, same as
that simple simile of death
So it is true that I die inside each poem
and so it is true that it is also a lie
Living a life that is so desperate to be furnished,
yes definitely, that’s what I meant
when I said I want to be alive to the outskirts,
on the raw edge of the lake
with a wind that never blows
in the right direction,
my foot in the digit of a date,
a historic register shining like a varicose vein
My life becoming public record
My future, that warehoused heaven
I am waiting for the world
to fit back into my breath
The serene distance
That twisting love and all its earth
The great big tilt-a-whirl

RAW SURFACE

I got real sexy
at the university level
The sober lyric
The verse’s pedigree
Poets calling on it
rendering it
in the spinning discs
in the beams and
pillars of light
the statue of the sun
the temporal lark of night
closing the diagonal
angle of the heart
whatever that could
morph or make
visible, did it?
Did I become a poet
just to think about it
Is this your story
Is this your interiority
When you’re out
moaning something
over her collar bone
in missionary
that meant
the very thing it did
Why not say it
just like that
Did you think that
the light that measures
the room of years
would remove your hands
of their propriety
That the lyric would
suck you off spotless,
The accessory of sky
as an association
would congratulate you
on this self-gratification
What did I mean
when I said I entered a poem
and didn’t come back
Was I lying
What is the price
of all this reflection
all this exiting
and entering
our bodies
if its solar glare
distended hue breaking
and burnishing
the voice in a language-less
color keeping us
from saying what
What did the metaphysic
make me
My body, a plan
an impervious surface
a silo of repletion
of sky again
The convenient convexness
replacing the human
organs its all just air &
repetition churning
about the sky again
I want to awake
into the rumors
that make me
alive I guess
I want to be
fragmented
into the feeling of
staring into my
mothers eyes
as she began
to hate the cultural
text of my body
& gagging not because
I have sex with women
but that I’ve taken up
the job of men
Gagging just as I
have begun to hate
the Lyric
The lyric is not
the bloody pulpit
The dog licking the window
and calling it love
An embarrassing end
staring into a mirror
repeating yourself
to yourself again
Let the wound be visual
visceral let the wound
be the wound again
or just shut up about it
Outside the corner store
below my apartment
I heard some shouting
I saw a body hit the pavement
and another man’s fist
the tapestry of blood
and his face
The scene
was direct
plaintive
just like that