peu de collaboration

19.

Leonine moths on the window screen and what
he may have noted, the dalmatian dog walker,
Korean cargo a-bob in from the harbor
where fleet formations (old bandit ghosts) break
 
with sleepy nudges. Between islands the tight-rope
sways in unconvincing ease; the quiet’s been never
perfected. What’s eyeless in the wall feels out holes to
rooms, for light to cheek, the tea & tins of burning
 
leaves, our make-up made of what seeps out.
These aren’t tellings of spare parts, but guesses
spoken from a wicker chair, a victorious reclaiming of
 
kinder prizes easy to forget on windy tarmacs. 
They name it a routine affair of love. I call it
a part of the old anatomy, bony and flesh.

18.

All those nights with the on-lights and windows open to the world,
conductive surface a sheath for wandering charges.

Soft-spoken alleyways & shaky letters so boldly burning—but distant, but a hum of
uphill activities, or the wrap-around porch of the addict house

So full of lasts and the casual recognition that comes with last-chance landscapes
and long looks at the sidewalk where one is tracked by ghosts

And how the ghosts thrive on years of sleep so broken.
My folksy fold-out bed, drawbridge pulley chain,

Countertop of blueprints, wormy apples, a carriage with a slight catch
and a lot of people cheering somewhere through the trees.

How precious are the later hours, but also the mornings, for photo face & slacks
and being out of sight, behaving badly, a skirt on a hanger

Ever-crisp and right, the strands of an assigned poem poking out
from the side of something barely real, waiting for you to walk me.

17.

Lightship, daughter of the same
fishy father I’m from, tailoring
a suit of beam to fit the world, can’t
see the sweet gum tree was there,

the headless bird-keeper who waves
down the laughing gull from a storm
sky. I’m mayor of my icebox and
the copper-topped mast that in

silhouette resembles a giraffe. I
prop my blue milk-glass on toady
modern turtles, while crocodiles air
their tongues by the railway in the back

of a livery cab, awaiting the millinery
and potholders I ordered by portable.
The shrinkwrapped platform tennis
court I got last year fits crosswise

on the lightship deck. Still, as I’m stuck
here under contract, I repine for a stool can
swivel with the swiveling beam I’m
paid to maintain but will not outlast.

Coal Miners of Science Fiction

The greatest of workplace hazards: Matched beat of metronome rush & quarrelsome con-men in pleated war pants Yellow rebel dancers and would-be geezers balding with children & always with stamping feet. Then there is team-building by method acting & South American gospel — Either may assuage the ivy league laborers on line with lighters & rain. Not one minds the busted barricade, the lusted-for university gelding cuz the Atlantic is just one artery between two, hazing a spate of tormented lackeys when chocolate vanilla swirl is refused at lunchtime. And of course there is the issue of hot potato in a mitted toaster oven, the aging democrat who commits debit card fraud for costume jewelry half-off, for a rise in temperature, for the former daughter of wolves. His team snags her a discount ticket to India. His boys alone are the ownership society of ripped vinyl booths in U-hauls, of seven orphan children mute and grabbing at nothing with scabby paws and bowing deeply in loose-skin suits like this.

15.

Out of the orchard all apple-y at night
with the meteor-sports boys pick up
when it wouldn’t be fun to be mean.

Nothing’s free without a ladder, a woman,
and a looking glass a man like me once made
in some Italian tower to view the country

folk, one girl in particular, on the father’s
farm. No such country is. Her hair, smells
of fruit and grass, like trees in triangles,

a tapeworm dropped in a glass of wine.
The star fell on my house, but the tail
had no head. The almond-growers came

to see if they could help. None would
survive. We piled them one on top of
the other, told their wives less than

what they had to know, and left some
bottles of water so they’d have some
cool plastic tubes to love. Unable to speak

English, they made it harder than has
been revealed in the books. None wanted
to be my wife. My favorite said I wasn’t

her type of hero, so I took back her water,
which she burined in the staging ground.
The king had a winner-take-all attitude

and saw this all in black and white. He is
in yourphotos, which you can’t see, as you
are not one to see what you do not fancy.

How love is

According to Japan’s
grass-eating men:

A televised life minus
counselor or door

pizza shark, domino master

dancing a dance off
and with the window open.

Carry fire in boat
bladder emptied at sea

quench this two-state affection
on our own.

No rip tide, no net
loiter the drought

of plain speech
and the wanderings

of extravagant fairies.

Evidence-based medicine
will eat you every time

and a script to defeat what?

When breath is unable
to accommodate

the words of a weirdo
the dark fades

and what it means
is the end

of plaited hair
and rope burned hands

the same as a lazy shadow.

Atonement leaps
from drunken faces

but the grass is complicated.
The forward of this

is an ugly baby
is an onion wind

is the thumb
stamping fruit

and it unites us.

UFO, kettle lid, haircup
and a christian foot solider

buried in a hollow log

with the alphabet of
traditional ballads

too smelly for tongues
to seek & spin

just a bit of bark action
anyway, and a nest of drain hair.

Abstraction second-guessed?

Roger that.

Transplanted islanders will still catch
a monsoon wedding in fantastic rags

duck by trial
or a feast of Norwegian wood

the feet itchy
and rainbug-laced lashes for all.

Hey, focus.

All of this is
Latin for seashore bath

child-speak
for hearth.

13.

We fevered bravely in the false business
of digital image-making, trade school
pity for those IQ’d naked; as you came
into the too-cruel world on a horse fly,
wooing me to the semi-real career
of sweet pies (moon/potato), constantly
making up black/white stories with plastic
rats choked in bags, while the cowardice in
your life misplaced the puffy face of the
bland midwestern enemy, spartan-wild.
Black salt and sea quests and the rosy rub
of he who fingered down at dawn: boogey-
up man walking tiptoed the well-planned ave
(and of course the rues) to the exponent
of carrot juice and ocean life spilling
the slow secrets of mitochondria,
their miniscule glow on the grill of you—
a fleshy floppy figurine but not
unlike Newark or yard sale notebook sets.
Your silly nilly turns the collies free.

12.

Even stoned, on water would be grim,
boarding cruiseships to the southern seas,

to fungal states. I would like to buy this
mushroom, not this bell. Were I to say
toadstool, the Dutch would get it, but here
the natives make us specify, pears or other.

But you went on, said the mantle
made me the asshole. Filaments
leaning, probing the charts beyond,
I was left dangling after one conversation
I felt fed by some connection, two bulbs
dim above a billion sleepwalkers.

But her chapped lips or whatever
rots are always before you, so pretty.

Man made of ice, the color of milk
where people go once, you bathed
my house in your knowledge of
gardening and left a bag of stolen
buffet bananas in a mound of
soot. It was beautiful, but then I
had to go and find a profession.

11.

Each junky find
one more surprise

another’s handmaiden
behavior

ached lace
in tubs of lye

yards of clothes line
spread thin with petticoats

down pillows and aprons.
To brooklyn and back

or for those
hell believers

born to sad men
with damaged anatomy.

Her titties, what a joke,
foots webbed are gross

would you say so?
Be a freedom fighter, lad,

interesting fool to the glassy masses
in tube-socked get ups

the winter posers in 
summer tights

with shady sunnies,
her defense cones

dripping with amendments.

Let us set
loose upon the pigeons

like babies on
a brown rabbit

tumbling hard
against idaho potatos

or something twice as grotesque,
reminiscing about

our fumble foods
carbon bedsit

foodprints in the damn sand.
Give me more

of your tired politics,
another cliche

or a shot of whiskey
where hat dancers circle

some quinceanera girl,
glorious in her milk thistle

dress detail.
It all makes us cry,

you in your cheat-free
cover-up

we in our unconventional assets
hollow to the touch,

blue and brown eyeballs
rolling into one another,

phylum leader
a dog called siesta

cuz the monkeys
are still pooping

in the bathroom.

24-year

love the new best deity to all call dead,
it got hard to guess a man’s age, father’s most
vexing, and mother hit puberty in hospice.

The locals’d never seen a street, some of
them slippered, others bikini’d, strollering their
five year olds on prime time for the cameras.

It’s not your daylight. Robbery’s possible
only of possessions. —Feeling kind of dehydrated?
Evacuated of the fluid of beauty? You must

have excreted it back at the art museum
bathroom of memory. Whether ‘tis just to leave
these details out of the report or just a new

garbage heap to build a park on, we’ll never lack
of props or babies in slings at quick-breakfast
vendor carts. All the captive hearts you ate

you soon found out were similar to your pink
little goose egg. If not for the Puritan streak
your Australian half oppresses, tenement-

stacked in a fashion similar to old magazines
masking rat traps, you’d be just another Yankee
shouting for men to raise another southerner

from the stadium’s hypogeum. This won’t be
the last Chinese taco joint opening before
the end of the day, the parasoled ladies say.