Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Being Born

III

In vivo. It was only yesterday I began to see.  My scenery was alight with bubbles, blood everywhere.  In a moment of panic, I realized I hadn’t thought about anything in seven months. Seven months!   Two hundred and eleven days poised like yeast in hardened amber, inching like a Rottweiler towards its fearful reflection.  Seven months in a great speckled confusion: puttering and humming in that light that sees dark in the way of the blind.

II

A delinquent spark, a locative urge to urge persists.  Cosmic inevitability: the fate of conjoined leaves, the phases of the moon, fission.  The ontological chain reaction of reduction leads to a hole in a starry field: a paternal answering machine of confession—dryly received, forgiven.  Baseless suggestions every moment fulfilled (breathe!) and the tendrils of the mind, now dancing, dance and dance with the faith of two ears at a ball with two bands.

I

People talk to me at the bus stop and I realize, as a dead leaf blows by, tapering into a seed, no one is there.

Saturday, February 25, 2012

South

It’s true that I’ve been somewhere, though it happened only in a moment.  I was at my parents' home in Chicago sitting in the yard.  It was summer and I was twiddling my thumbs at the gates, watching the water from the hose, thinking of some great thing.  There were two roads.  One went east and one went south.  We slept under a big oak tree and at night went to see a college.  In the country there’s much land that nobody owns where you can picnic or even sleep.  In the morning we bought apples.  The land is remarkable there.  We slept in a football field by a mill and when the workers stopped for lunch they walked in bands to a gas station across a yellowing road.  We had fried chicken there.  At night there were hills.  My aunt lives there all by herself; her husband once shot a KKK man.  It rained for three days and we stayed in a motel and watched rain sweep across the road.  A creek ran behind a parking lot.  We shot bottles there.  A sheriff dropped us off by a reservoir.  He said his wife had killed him.  Before noon there were clouds and trucks with pine trees went down the road.  Water was in the forest.  Oil floated around trunks and the wind blew.  The water spread out and boardwalks led into the trees.  A kneeling barn sat stately in the water. 

Friday, February 10, 2012

Controlling the Bath Temperature with your Toes


I look at two silver eyebrows. The left one is hot. The right one is cold. A tarnished snout juts out and below it there's an abyss. In my left foot there’s Jupiter. The right holds Plato. In the tub the whole body is given to dramas. The first act mocks Copernicus (it was written by a Pole). The second act begins slowly; the workers are divided and their revolution is failing. The third act lingers; a port city on the coast of Spain has been raided by Celts.  The carts are empty and the fishermen sit idly in their boats, looking at the shopkeepers.  There is snow on the ground, which is unusual for that time of year.  The moon is out. The curtains close. I’ve barely had time to clap before I’m roused by a stern knock on the door.  The water is overflowing.  A voice asks, “What are you doing?  I stand in a panic.  The water recedes and I notice for the first time that it is cold. 

Saturday, February 4, 2012

Homelessness

The form of man sits with arms hung around himself.  Holding to the street the constructions of all things Man.  There is nothing there that has been not been placed.  It walks along the street towards some train tracks.  There are trains and cars, people with their arms hanging out horse joint drunk.  “Offa ma laaaawn.”  Sent away fasting from some townshipsGod only hiding: cutting what is not food from food, bringing few crumbles, cutting for the cutting, making the day faint.  He is certain in hiding two things from us: oil and floating; in parking lots oil sinks under water: tires: rises.