with Dorothea Lasky
I am angry at you, Death
Death, I have been angry at you
For such a long time
And I still am
So angry at you
For giving me too many things to take myself away from
Hollow out the time of them for the sake of it
Metal bowls I leave the fruit in, but they change eventually
I don’t want to ever not change, but I want something constant
Like the ocean
I don’t want the ocean to ever die
And yet, you steal the saltwater from it as a lark
You take the seabirds from it one by one
As you glance at them casually, a party
Of seabirds raining down
My breath labored
At the light of all my birds
Raining down on the ocean.
You know, one day, I will kill you
Before you have a chance to
Do anything anymore to the people I love
Leaving them awry in the summer sun
Or bloody on the pulpit
Leaving all the people I love bloody on the pulpit
And raining down with things I cannot contain
I cannot contain you but I will kill you
So swiftly one day in the morning
I will enter a room and there will be so much
Folding of the Spring that I have created and made
My life into it will be like you are dead once and for all
How will you feel to be dead once and for all?
All of it happening to you like you have no empathy
I don’t think it is that you have no empathy
But moreso that you are so wild
You cannot stop to consider our feelings
On the day I will kill you I will be so wild
That I will not have a civilized moment to consider your feelings
I will act upon you in a reddish smoky haze
Because I am more powerful than you ever gave me credit for
My limits exceed that of other men before me
And I have prepared for this strike
My whole life
And when the time is upon us
I will do the thing I have set out to do for this humanity
As you creak under me into the earth
A groaning, lepered thing
A fallen thing we will all learn to forget forever
I had one little book
I had one little book
Of a boy thrust in the snow
Now I will think of him forever
In his quietude, the warm December lights of the inside
And then January, the quietest month
With its green smokestacks
And the purple fog hanging over everything
I walked from the Green St. Station
To my house on the edge of the park
And no one knew
That I was that little boy
I never told a soul I wrapped myself
In reddish towels and laid down
In the middle of the floor
Til time came to me as a convincer
I was silenced only by own regret
That I had been born this thing
We all look upon
And I look upon
The many things
That are encased in glass
Dear Love, Friends, and Animals, like you
I do not want to be in glass ever
Instead, you can leave me in the snow
As you pour water slowly over my bones
Flowers will grow from me eventually
The flowers, they will grow from me eventually
If you finally learn to be silent with me
If you finally learn to leave me be
Deadpan 2
I don’t care if the system is corrupt
I will continue to donate my organs to history
Take my heart, my brain, my brainhole
Take it: veins, eyes
And legs
That have wrapped around the trees of summer when I was alone
I didn’t want to be this thing as clear as day
Anyway
Anyway, I wanted to be
The purest clump of sand in the palm of my love
Where is he? Where is that clump of sand where I am held?
I can feel the love of my soul surrounding me
But no hand upon me
And in that
I place the hand upon myself
Oh could I look upon myself
Sweet slumber of hands on me
Yellow seagulls above the olive green pools
Orange sandbars in the blue-green pools
Quote of the day: *Don’t shoot me please!*
Shining out in your wild sentences silences
Like a sin of these structures bursting an
Ecology bust every ought how will our
Culture survive without New Orleans one
Wonders there is no way to lyricize so
We disaster culture crowns its remnants
Revenants and ruins politics the hyper-
telic claims siphoning the dead for whose
Use a force no “nature” has seen that open
Which is us our subsistence while we keep
Fucking each other up the silence sentence
In this repeats a structure of every police
The maximuses of exiled wishes we are not
Sure what they have said those citizens the
Levees themselves in broken articulation a
Variation on a variation of a theme by Will
iams I’m sorry we didn’t reinforce properly
The levees of New Orleans the oil we suck
ed from the Gulf made us rich we suspect
The waterfront real estate of the 9th Ward
Will make us richer sincerely sovereignty.
Veritic in songs stars cycle
Disaster cuts the vision was
A distance we could feel but
Never know audience to the
Perception of words as we
Were hearing them float
In the lights that dream of
Distance the way tanks dreamt
Us blood flowed like crude
From a bird’s appearance in
That light under it a night of
Floodlamps and checkpoints.
Under it that night song permanent
Tanks don’t turn here and veins don’t
Bleed yet flesh vanishes from flesh
A proposition about fire the light be
fore a thousand arrows flew thru it
So it seemed Lear floated on those
Burning stairs a ghost if eyes were
Ever certain and they are not would
We see ourselves again in reflections
Of other eyes could this heart Cor
delia be true if eyes didn’t just take
In light but threw it out into world
What I alighted under it singing oth
er kinships in this dark under this
Dark lamp by which our straying
Says everything the dead who never
See me speaking for them won’t save
Us spirits what work I can’t intend.
How will we know anything
The snow that surrounds us
Like an endless color I knew
We are simply a diadem for
ced to rule ever forced to
Rule by these objects with
These objects like the body
Was an object you said you
Object to this that we should
Be cremated so that they ca
n’t do anything with us when
We're dead those collectors
Of curiosities and culture
Other experiments upon un
ruly bodies subjects all this
Makes me think of our dis
agreement about some lines
I wrote that “the dead do not
intend anything” though I
Meant this as a question ab
out their powerlessness.
What exterior was I felt
Inside it your patience
The blood folds these
Worlds were one single
Information the way
The sunlight hits us while
We are here in bed no
Subject but in this ob
jective no other outside
In the lips begin it is not
As if we are outside them
Or inside them merely
When they touch and
Feeling begins somewhere
Else the lips begin to kiss
Like mirrors touching
Making no reflection but
One we can’t see this is ca
lled immediacy so love is
What we subtract from.
