Human Gestures

The crust of my left face is facsimile, a drop in the bucket
Early works making way to late / in the longer light of day
What’s this feeling? Held in cattle chute, wanting to learn
so much about one thing, to the exclusion of all others

Humble lattices of smoke
Humble noun
Sticking your foot in it unable to find the word for the dead
who haunt the edges

Uh oh, she’s back, she who does it, humbly, magnificent speech
Keeping track of time to lose it when a soft breeze descends like so.




Subcutaneous Word

Not what I see, exactly, lace threading glass shows me
the straight stuff. The future I arrived to hated me though.

Ah, it was a conflict of negative emotions
Ah, some glazed surfaces crossed you up and over

When I was a child I dreamed of an experience of spaciousness
A deep breath followed by another, where there would be light
but not meaning. Where there would be a rest from meaning.



I Don’t Ride My Bicycle To School

How can I explain to a pedestrian the joy of riding my bicycle through 
the drippy streets at night, my single headlight bobbing, the light sharp
on one side, cuts through a tree having a dream of itself, everything 
tethered to its twin-dark, thoughts cast a shadow, shadows cast a word if you
lower yourself to a hush, the word is ordinary like a word, is cabbage. 
Sometimes smoke. 



Childhood Study

A wet whistling sound through leaves, I stood there, I looked up
feeling her gaze, face the color of grass, heavy black on her eye, one hand
higher than the other, a bent wing, they say her dress moves
when we sleep, the sentence swarming the angel, the story of girls under
the angel’s wing, the magnanimous music of the angel on earth, the black
of her eye roams, her mossy copper foot.

I’m afraid when I see her because I have never cried for real, I’m like the others, 
I come afraid and circle her, want to touch, want to sit upon but don’t, want 
to abuse her at times and do, cut and saw off her fingers, tickle her eyes, bring others 
to rob and chop, only at night, in the soot dark. 

In silver, beige, scrubby sheen, all words aluminum, clean passage, a freaky
chlorine light, stuff and it’s locked up real good, wind at someone else’s back.