unconventional entrants (miniature #6)

If we are talking about vulnerability
the pads attached to wires and the windows
of the first floor
of the building next to this one
are yellowed and dusty.

Experiment with short line/long line/short line and no punctuation

Two years ago
while I sat on the fire escape of the red building
where I lived

the fire escape thought
platform stairs platform stairs platform mechanism
for lowering stairs

Two nights ago
I sat at a table that thought ashtray slurpee cup water pistol
freeze pop wrappers

under a sky
that was seriously considering heat lightning as something to do for a while
after college maybe

The electricity
in my nervous system has always kept this inventory as a levee system for the regulation
of certain impulses

words for the sound a bullet makes, in order of how familiar with the sound the speaker wishes to appear

bang
gunshot
pop
snap

Summer poem #2

The couple painting the next-door apartment knocks off
at two AM, squalling out the door, disrupting
the ambiguous domestic scene of them painting
through midnight, with all the windows open.

She has tattoos on her upper arms.
When the pizza guy came, she called back
into the place, "Do you want lemonade
or ginger ale?" I take it on faith he answered
and his answer balances her
tattoos: She has tattoos
on her upper arms, and he has an opinion
about whether he wants lemonade
or ginger ale. Both of them have masks
for painting, both of them wake me up
with raised voices on the way out,

and I imagine it is me
                                     arguing
with my father for the last time
before the things we have in common
compel us to mutual silence:

"Why are so many easy things
not easy? Why is it that for a thing
to not be easy requires a sort of whole-world
involvement, a weighing and comparison?"

They are making some sort of decision,
carrying paint cans that will never
say "thank you" or wash dishes. Their hands full,
an almost-empty pizza box thuds
on the porch. He says, "Are you going
to eat the last piece?" 

How the self gets in (miniature #5)

His wide mouth pursed,
                                         spat ochre over his hands
against a cave wall in France.

If he will let you,
                            touch him
on the squarish divot of a trepanation
scar over his brown eye.

LSPWVT #3, Body Poem #4

I need you to stop leaving body parts in my apartment.
I opened the odd-shaped cabinet
where I keep old T-shirts
and there was something thin and slick
in there. I think it was a spinal cord.

I've gotten used to the teeth
clicking around in the sink
when I run the disposal,
the flash and smell of hair
when I turn on the range.

I'm reasonably certain these things aren't yours
but something about them feels human,
as if the dowsing rod of my DNA could vibrate
with strange pulp and keratin.

How do you choose them? I have yet to see
anything straightforward, like a leg
severed at the thigh; instead,
you placed the tight, unreadable scroll
of an achilles tendon at my pillow.

I should be, but am not worried about the gore.
I always expect an optic nerve
with a little invitation
to plug in, see what a corpse sees
but you're more subtle than that. You know
my fixation on sounds,
and indulge it with good words:
orbital, tympanum, neuron.
When you left me a nervous system,
it was beautiful. I turned the lights off
and watched it flicker in the dark.

Still, I dread the point you're making
about my language of self and other, the literal way it
looks in,
stripping off skin to unlock the jaw for speech,
uncovering dull, wet muscles.
This can only end one way; you bringing me
a particular nothing, the sum of all these parts
for which I will have no name.

More love for WCW

Over the tree behind the neighbor's house
there is a star or
a planet or a very, very slow
airplane.

I've felt for weeks
like something is going
to happen
to upend my most careful plans, and
this is
it;
this is what is happening.

The Snake, Cool Animals Poem #2

The snake sticks out of the water like a finger
waiting to tap on a desk. It looks at me, in to my waist:
the Worst Amphibian Ever,
strikes lazily.
Suddenly there is a frog between us. The snake
kind of crunches it--the frog's body actually shortens
between its jaws, dying
only as much as I would.

I am some distance back.
I didn't do that; my body did it, kept me safe.
"What would you do
without me, eyeless fish?" it asks. I don't know,
don't know. The snake says nothing, turns a nonchalant arc,
dragging its frog-leg beard.

True or False, pretentious page poem #1 (not to be confused with the rest, which are pretentious sound poems)

Wolves howl because they can't make rope;
the sound of it is a sound-rope.

In August 1846 the moon
skipped one of its phases.

I have touched every object
on your bedside table.

The comb and mirror
represent the moon.

when the moon forgets you in the city
it is for lack of wolves, to shout their rope and haul.

(unnumbered)

Some nights I just run downstairs
to the vending machine
of wrong choices, and keep myself up
pushing button after button.

Holmes' Love-Song to Watson, Miniature #3

my dear friend, I do not need London
's yellow light at evening, my violin,
my syringe, a hundred kinds
of tobacco-ash, the strangenesses that cross
my doorstep, my glass, my hat, or any thing
like I need your energetic
amazement.

Miniature #2, untitled

It’s like holding a small animal
in my chest; the feeling of a tiny heart beating
furiously, or what a tree feels like
in a thunderstorm, something that
was just supposed to think, really
and not-move, and is now trying
to do both of those things
very
quickly.