No land has ever claimed me,
no person, no people, no place.
I am always standing between burials
and the nearest tree
holds all I can know.
At the spring words bubble up
and trickle down in banderoles.
At first I had to read them
till the grass smelled sweet
and the bugs bit home.
Getting old means reading them
while the hill of my choices
grows. At the end of the field
a deer measures the meadow.
She is so small today.
What words can you possibly wear.
What can I bring you, I
so without kin
I have no hands,
no apparatus,
thus offer my persona
as medium,
a wager: assuming
there’s something past myself
or perhaps a way the particular dead
with whom I’ve walked
have shaped me in some unlit land.
What land. I cannot even say it lies
beneath the creek
because the creek can never be mine.
No creek can ever be mine.
I take what I should carry.
There is a clicking sound when I stay still
like a gas stove failing.
I defined by misfire.
I defined by naked love,
love without relation, I
have piled miswords
on your desire. Now
I’m asking for forgiveness. Not
the ordinary kind,
puckered with regret.
I am asking for a kind
of eternal endurance,
like a child who jumps across a chasm
and does not want to jump back.
Keep me clicking, please.
Skimming while the bubbles break my feet.
In the field the deer finds grass
at just her height.
But not because she wants to disappear.
Something’s breathing to make those holes
while the woodpecker strikes a pose.
I have to believe the right world follows.
I shout each time it comes
like the sun shouts a highway
over open water,
hoarse and bright and wrong.
"The poet is of no party." BaudelaireOur manifesto is an act of substantiation.
We reject all forms of futilitarianism, in whatever disguise.
We believe that comedy is the song of the village and tragedy the song of the goat.
We believe what is written in the books, but now we want to see for ourselves.
The single idea, beating on the same doors in vain.
The analogue and the invention.
The death cell.
The first permission.
Though we watch the stage for things to happen, though our minds wander.
By ourselves in the green field, playing our diversion.
Though the story begins with the loss of a home.
Out of the machine, we shift restlessly in our seats.