With Eyes the Color of Nutmeg and Safety

Here there is a metaphor solution and an actual
storm.  I could have pried out another

scenario but didn’t.  To be alive in a

    gale,

which needs to be
    dusted.  To

prepare the chicken
dinner, mildly, as previously, as if

in any other kitchen.  You chop vegetables.

The chicken is tangential
    not because of direction or actual
amount of heat—

you seasoning the meat—

but because of fierce pulses, hair scooped

all over a face, a hat blown
off, just one moment.

    And one wooden
slat pried away from the hatch. 
I can see the olive

trees on the shore who castigate the wind.
We try with our anchor. 
We hold ourselves to marks.

These aren’t some kitchen stairs here.
Night in the ruin-boat, which

heels.  To-and-fro.
To- and-fro.

Poems without a title

&

Here comes the screen to free

a wingspan wide enough to reach

me in Nebraska.

But with all that great falling in

Your thicket of fading jay’s

and distance

where’s the calm?

You thought to think

 anything unmade doesn’t harm

 but what have all

 your unmade bricks made for you?

‘A wasting’.

 The sound of Oklahoma

unshapes its face

and sheds

So dirt is held down barely.

A few black clouds raining age cover

the slim distance between

 the whole earth and Gold

 the only color.

&

My skins a shade today

A halved sadness.

A displaced gray and white

 Turning mud to muscle

 And bone also

It turns

 to wood

to clay

to a vase of ate foliage

and then to I don’t know

rage I guess.

&

You hold it.

Then you hold it

and then you hold it

and you hold it and

I never hold it.

I have nothing but my hands.

This collapsing.

I do love you Russell

Your endless engine. Your shifting windows

Wet from the road with your half man

half kicked to the mud under the hoof stomp

of the whole godddaamn hemisphere face.

We are the least difficult of men. All we want is boundless 3s!

And rings

&

Fuck the world

there’s a headache to swallow

and this beard will smear

the entire unfurnished plainness of May away with a kiss.

I put my mouth where I can see it.

a rack of teeth’s

an animal’s landscape

where I stuck a deaf song to whistle  away the weeks

I wake to what I meant

In some unused way

With all these muscle of endless edge

unmanned unmyself

I lift up my hands.

I will leave this place

Hawk my hair

And respond to God: The Sixth man of the year.

CUTLASS V

1. Michael.
2. Matthew Truslow
3. Jenny Drai
4. rachelise
5. Alisa Heinzman
6. an antler
7. also
8. sars
9. Joy Von Ill
10. d.hu
11. justin ryan fyfe
12. JESS!CA
13. Ruth
14. k
15. Joel
16. Jason D
17. Alexis Robinson
18. PHC
19. dylan
20. Kelsey
21. mandibles
22. Thomas Flaherty
23. REGICIDE

The Tag End

And living-rooms aren’t lava suddenly one year--- the bales stacked up for a children’s maze--- unicursal, cul-de-sac, spiral storm. hints at one junction asking: are you stumped yet here? So felling a tree just for that, I too was just that... but later, driving a nail by hatchet you didn’t know if I was, making any sense that way--- in the look an optometrist gives riving apart the lines. And waking up, I cracked a joke: your arm’s in my rest, I said, watching you sleep. And as the game goes, unfrozen is someone passing through you; frozen is someone’s touch. So open your mouth to drown or not to drown the trick is not touching what’s everywhere. This love-seat leap, this ottoman isle and our hints are folded neatly at the junctions. Run through it while, I say, god knows where it’ll all be tomorrow

If you had said “ninja,” I might have fallen in love with you.

It's so obvious. Look:
This is cutlass ivy, two-three smoke stack alleyways have come together. Twenty three plus eye-zero plus zero-vee is thirty eight, which is as close as I care to smell. I have to go to work. I have to make eggs, and buy eggs. Have of thirty-8 is seventeen, so then if you add two back in and add the 4 to that...

You're left with 23. It's so obvious. This cutlass is eating itself.

This cutlass is a perpetual sword swallower.

Look: The cat might be a whiny little bitch, but she's right.

I say: bury the cutlass.
The cutlass: a fun new toy.
The cutlass: a fun new way to love someone.

Mother, our mother, my mother told us never
to run with anything sharper than your ear
not to love them.
How do you know what's sharper than your ear?
Imagine I'm eight.
Imagine slicing with your ears,
loving with your slicing.

Turn your ears to plowshares.
Turn the soil with your ears.
We're made of dead things; we should return the favor.
I'm mostly dead things from Nebraska.
Here we go on about burying again, about berrying again.
About floating, with wax berries in your mouth: an unsettling sun.

If your father says "you're dead," you can't listen to him
anymore. You just can't, Sara. You're still so covered
in dirt from your berry picking.
Knock the dirt from your ears. Knock your socks.
Learn how to float, keep the learning just a little bit longer. Your father says
"if I ever find the man...", but he's just mud.

I'm sorry your father's dead, or he will be, or I'll carry his skeleton forever, blinking. Blinking something noble, scrawled in my face, in my jacket, under my desire.

Any fool can scrawl their name up a tree, but it takes a special kind of fool to build pyramids in Nebraska. It takes a special kind of fool to desire a hot sun, or, we're all fooled in one way or another.

I don't know. Maybe your father was right, or maybe he wasn't at all. It just seems like I might need more trees. It seems like I might need endless trees, up trees, up trees. A Winchester Mystery Tree! Wax lips! Wax teeth! and other endless amusements.

I tend to make up amusements. I tend to slice things up like that. I think I got a little bit of real blood on the last one; it's dismembering all these imaginary bodies with my bloody hair that's the hard part. Organizing them. Arms here. Livers here. Toe nails in that corner. How to attack it? One part at a time? One body at a time? Let's make charts and graphs to examine. You do the slideshow; you're better with transitions. I'll be the straight man.

I think there are several men, some women. I think "dying is a part of the process of living" is very zen, but also very much bullshit. It's about realized consequences. You can have as many theories as anyone, but you're still dead. I think dying naturally is when each of the plural me have arrived and expired. Obviously, this is interrupted by motor vehicles and firearms for some people, but I don't know. Maybe not.

I think I'm evaporating by breathing this air. I'd like to think I'm going to leave a mark. I'd like to think I'm going to leave a tree soon. Like I'd fall from a tree and rest up at it from the grass. Damn sure is a big tree. Can't believe I was ever up that branch. Can't believe I'm here and breathing now.

The air all feels about the same after a bath. All you really want to do is smell nice as long as possible; to see if you can make it to the next tree still smelling like apple blossoms. It's tough to argue with smelling nice, with that cute thing you do with your nose, with chewing gum. I wish you'd stop smoking. Stop burning when you don't drink.

Let's try something new with glasses. Try a different arrangement, if you will. Something more comfortable than a one-bath-room-no-bed-room-tree. Take some kerosine and an lens. Make a clear spot for resting knees, knees, knees, and coming home to. Don't you worry about my blind eye; it's been like that for years.

Like this house, for instance. Do you think it remembers how it used to be so many living things? Every strand of wood muscle fiber is taciturn, curled into this living room shape, this kitchen shape, this had to keep warm shape. Clearly, a failure. Clearly, a wax pyramid, shorter and wider every summer. This is how life is.

I used to think my home was a safe tree. Now I know the difference, and I make plans to escape at night. I make plans to fling my body between every tree in the neighborhood. Sleeping in parking lots, waking up to the no longer hum of the lights of dawn, grease on my cheek, gravel pressed into my ear fold, the smell of gasoline in my hair, the dull ache in my hip.

After all, 'the fuck would I want a regular coke for, when I can have one with cherry?

Morgue Blog

Good morning I’m going
to murder.  Spent the weekend
hugging.   My best work dress
already has a hole  And
you should really stop drinking.  
Stop smoking.  Go
on a health kick and fuck me
in the hallway.  When I think
of Obama, I get breathless.  I’m sorry.
We didn’t let you listen
to rap at the party.  Put in a piece
of gum.  Now
put in another piece of gum.

MORTUARY ACE

hello, the dead

hello, non-muslim feeling
bad about his skeleton

hello, the pressed into boxes

hello, the trussed up in sacks
the roped up like hams

hello, skulls bobbing in boiling pots

hello, sparrows wrangling over
scraps of lung

hello, patented spring-closure coffins

hello, coffins outfitted with
cast iron corpse straps

hello, patchouli and cardamom
post-anthropology
well past the gates
of cadaverdom

hello, blue silt wriggling
beneath blue skin

hello, mirrors

hello, wax casts

hello, carrion
carrying saline messages

hello, eleven seconds
and still blinking

Hello beryllium hello carbon

hello   neon   you   bright   noble   gas

Chemistry's   one   thing   wanting

and   wanting   forever

I   have   a   spare   something 

or   other   in   my   jacket   

in   the   pocket

by   the   lake

You   know  desire's 

required  to   even   exist

take   this   brown   ledge   holding

my   dumb   stained   mug

take   your   eyebrow   I   thumb

as   you   breathe   to   death

We'll   never   be   better   cowards

gulping   after   ________

and   failing   to   share   a   mouth

like   how   Becky   in   her   mother

taught   people   to   breathe

and   in   2007   

she   crawled   in   my   face

like   how   I   knew   god   once

in   1988 

and   learned   to   tuck   

into   some   large   thing

MUSEUM

anyfool can hide
in a tree

or be burried, be burried, be burried.

any mass of alien slaves can build a few pyramids
in the desert

but if you're melting because the sun
is hot

goodbye!

Maslow Was Right

Wax bodies with string on the insides of their mouths, pulling lips into a smile,
disinterest me in enjambs and endstops.  But endstops, I like those.
When you walk to the edge of the woods, and see the tree that you used to hide in,
because you couldn't handle another tea service, there is an end to that.  When that happened,
I felt like wax.  Maybe you will feel like plastic, that is deader than wax.

Clarior Fama

14.
And I wondered here
where is Tupac?
And where is Paul, and Becky or complicated people she hangs out with. But then
I think I figured it out. I think Kyle's most successful writing
is the stuff I can hear him reading
because to me, Kyle's reading/
voice is a big part of it. For me reading out loud/
voice is a big part of it. I am terrible at this.
I kept thinking How do you read a Cutlass
like a song stuck.

13.
Let's put a-
way each, in it's neatliest

or, alternately, take out each box of,
remove the lid…

Should say, there are things that amuse
moods for being amused.

I don't occupy amusable space lately
except privately, tho I lol plenty

not much fooled outwardly, deeper knowledge
of place in the immediacy of leaving

unlike the deepest that comes
having never strayed.

I wonder how you are doing and it's amusing
to think we were marginally.

12.
Orphans full of fire
gotta surround a childhood with candles
play in the wax and melt. There
is the making
and there is the burning
of an object, a useful thing that is
anymore, purely decorative

you make a thing
and a thing is used;
mostly things i use
i did not make.
A guilt can follow.
But not in art. All art
flies in the face of this guilt.

11.
I shy away from making definitive statements about art. About poetry.     "art is ______" that kind of shit.   that kind of thing.                  But I think I can make that one.          Even make that one to your friends maybe even.      These guys             grilling, you could tell em.             But the effort to make it interesting           makes it hard to focus.                  I am your girlfriend on drugs at the stockmarket.  I have a poem

due but every day in May is a race this time.        To leave on time and I'm often awfully late.    Every day                  in May is probably my favorite                 in Nebraska. At least growing up. Anymore May turns to June and April and March take on what I favorited.                   Anymore I favorite
rather than favor.        I look to leave                  looking.        No real departures. Whatever I may
do to the poem,                  the poem's still mine.

______________
0. EPILOGUEapologia

I wanted to write
this really epic Cutlass--

        which would respond most immediately to Paul and Kyle 
        in content, and with a form that directly addressed
        Kyle's form visually and numerically as well as interns of having these kinds of
        "movements"
        because I really wanted to focus on this idea of how you read a Cutlass
        in responding to these two poems because I usually use the two preceding poems


        to most directly influence what my cutlass
        will look and slice like.

        But also since I read every Cutlass
        as it's forged

            with the aspiration, usually somewhat selectively disregarded
            of the entire mood, and the cumulative voice
            should inspire my production

        I also wanted to have a section for each preceding.
            Kyle has as many sections as there have been cutlasses, did you see that?
        I don't know if he responded directly in any of them
        but man I gotta say, these are the flights
 
        the detectivework amusing me through
        through a poem/Cutlass's alleyways
        and parkinglots, magic art is/does

  is the work I hope
  goes into the candles I burn.

but it couldn't be done in 3 days
in 2 cities :/
[exit, tap-dancing, stage right]

Scandinavia

1.

I've delayed my writing you, you

land. Of dreams filled with allergy

's extension to eye irritation. I haven't

eaten in three days because of my

courage—the gift of suffering for even

more vomit. It's always one eye.

The right one. My right one.

2.

That single fucking bird isn't really blue but

is about to die.

3.

Its final call. Its death song's enormity

emitted through a minor chirp. A peep,

perhaps.

4.

The final knowledge of true language.

Dying. The inevitable, hesitated melody

of life's sustained, droned rhythm. The

kill, then, song, ripped from the body,

pulled through the throat, and out into

the air.

5.

Miss as in error. A failed attempt at

failing. A woman, a yell, wearing exactly

what you wanted. Give me your hand

to speak through. To lick your palm.

6.

Thunderheadless for approximately

two years. Abandon one shoe once

in your life. Sleep in the other one

for thirteen years.

7.

A missing letter, then,

I am a friend to one of you.

8.

It was raining walking inside you someday.

9.

“This is getting insane,” you said in your

text. “I love you,” I didn't reply.

10.

I never saw your hand

-writing.

11.

To remember you before ever sitting in you.

To forget so many things that have never actually

happened.

To disguise my face with my own face in your

winter mouths.

To exist in your breath to steal you away.

To bury a lock of your hair on Lesbos.

To grow you back to where you were you.

To fill a desert with ice picks.

To insist on paying the bill.

To open a container containing.

To fall down again and again.

To disappoint you on a day like any other.

To whistle.

To walk home in you.

To hang myself with a wire.

To fail. To fall and fall.

12.

Corrected teeth uncorrecting. A gap

made from too much space. A tooth

or two extracted. You, still,

smiling when I smile like

like this.

13.

I forgive you, shamed head. Vietnam doesn't

forgive you. It forgets you were never really there.