you can see it in the air,
in the emerald green carpets
and announcers writing invitations
in foundation hand,
all inked in crimson.

even on
the slumped shoulders of
scientists and poets
toting epaulettes
on t-shirts.

in the bricks,
held in place with pumice and porous stone-
there’s that fine and coarse aggregate
refusing to crumble and weather.

Over there
that one is speaking Portuguese
to a lamp post,
telling it all that is known about
the heroic epics of the Donghu people.

Across the sidewalk
one is drunk,
stumbling and smelling of ***,
muttering obscenities at the gutter.

it’s always raining pamphlets,
and in the margins
they say to make sure
that you keep your windows closed.

I thought
you could explain
the philosophy of vacuum
and Spinoza
through chattering teeth
and lips too numb to form labials.

In winter;
whenever your face
began to freeze
I wanted to remind you
about occasionalism and
quanta.

I wanted to tell you
how your eyes
could be heat and god.

If everything is political
I suppose I’ll distance myself
from everything;

I’ll go back
to become rapt
with Eleusinian mystery,
and begin dancing among
pillars and fluted blocks
at the propylæa-
suitless and light.

The pattering of peoples steps
was the only music
I ever wanted to hear
anyways.

that pharmacy could be
a tree,
spitting small colorful seeds
down the throats of kids
that look at concrete too often-

a tree
with budding fruit
clipped and stuffed
into a sunrise-colored cylinder
by a man
dressed in a cassock,

and I could be
a catechumen
waiting pliantly
inside the trunk,
whispering prayers
to the wood above my head.

A.C Hume called injury his own;
he became the ambassador of
the olecranon,
and died a pedant mending bone,

how many fell
before he entered abduction
and set his stern hands
on ailed elbows?

how many could tell you
what such an injury was called
before he laid claim
to the fruits of misfortune?

sometimes I think of
Charles Bukowski
reading one of my poems
and saying “this is *******”

or an old psychiatrist telling me
that in mania,
all work is more meritorious
than it seems.

occasionally,
when I watch ****,
I can’t *** for similar reasons.

So I ask Bukowski,
that ugly ****,
If I can raise him from the dead,
and play puppeteer with his corpse.

In marble faces I found
a fluttering that pushed blood
into every cavity inside the you
that wishes to be not.

I threw prayers
into ceiling fans-
laying limp inside the gulf,
to know that dry wall peeling back
was all to greet me.

Just ashen fluff flying endlessly
into rotaries,
and an inquiry turned to bird song,
something about windows
and deception.

It’s all cliche-
it’s all cliche,
the dismissive reiteration
of a phrase that piques the you
begging to be not,
coiled in skin,
wishing to be a limping diagram
of human musculature.  

it all grows dimmer
when you realize that
the horizontal is redundant,
rareness becomes
a beguiling piece
of parchment filled
with scribbles
imparting nonsense to the eyes.