"The poet is of no party." Baudelaire
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.
Let's Mean the Universe
what do the stars write all day while the sun
keeps us from reciprocating
I imagine
let’s imagine
they’re sirens
of an emergency that’s time
and though they have taken the solemn
aspect of mute
facts interrupted
at best by dust
it is possible to shift into a faith
that they are blaring
that there is something to be said
intermittently as best
to fuck with mandatory forward
and be ourselves
and by us let’s mean the universe
If So, Winter
one night vortex cold
a tree under streetlight
turned to brass tips
like stars
pointed out on an astrolabe
o Aristotle
or my love
the pain is a crown
can’t you feel
every resemblance on earth as intended
and therefore vagabond?
Hercules Furentes
It was actually before
Hercules went mad that he
needed to get past Atlas
Mountain to get the Geryon
cattle (of the sun) so he
tore Atlas apart so the
water burst from Ocean
and became the inland sea
aka Mediterranean
that was
all procedural
When I look down on the Chicago River
or the quarries beside it
toward O’Hare
it’s easier to see a monster tear
the land and water down
than think of decisions
and wages (garbage)
just as
if on a nondestroyed Earth the future
entities are astronauts they’ll
imagine myth on a mono/cosmic scale
unless it flips and a swarm
of lights appears and children think
the stars are workers every
light a thousand
workers each
swirl a common concert
I
blame Hercules the entity
the literal historical Hercules
We are crazy • we are dangerous