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I hate you truly. Truly I do. Everything about me hates everything about you. The flick of my wrist hates you. The way I hold my pencil hates you. The sound made by my tiniest bones were they trapped in the jaws of a moray eel hates you. Each corpuscle singing in its capillary hates you. Look out! Fore! I hate you. The little blue-green speck of sock lint I'm trying to dig from under my third toenail, left foot, hates you. The history of this keychain hates you. My sigh in the background as you pick out the cashews hates you. The goldfish of my genius hates you. My aorta hates you. Also my ancestors. A closed window is both a closed window and an obvious symbol of how I hate you. My voice curt as a hairshirt: hate. My hesitation when you invite me for a drive: hate. My pleasant "good morning": hate. You know how when I'm sleepy I nuzzle my head under your arm? Hate. The whites of my target-eyes articulate hate. My wit practices it. My breasts relaxing in their holster from morning to night hate you. Layers of hate, a parfait. Hours after our latest row, brandishing the sharp glee of hate, I dissect you cell by cell, so that I might hate each one individually and at leisure. My lungs, duplicitous twins, expand with the utter validity of my hate, which can never have enough of you, Breathlessly, like two idealists in a broken submarine.

Hatred and vengeance, my eternal portion, Scarce can endure delay of execution, Wait, with impatient readiness, to seize my Soul in a moment. Damned below Judas: more abhorred than he was, Who for a few pence sold his holy master. Twice betrayed, Jesus me, the last delinquent, Deems the profanest. Man disavows, and Deity disowns me: Hell might afford my miseries a shelter; Therefore hell keeps her ever-hungry mouths all Bolted against me. Hard lot! encompassed with a thousand dangers; Weary, faint, trembling with a thousand terrors, I’m called, if vanquished, to receive a sentence Worse than Abiram’s. Him the vindictive rod of angry justice Sent quick and howling to the centre headlong; I, fed with judgment, in a fleshly tomb, am Buried above ground.

Pray why are you so bare, so bare, Oh, bough of the old oak-tree; And why, when I go through the shade you throw, Runs a shudder over me? My leaves were green as the best, I trow, And sap ran free in my veins, But I say in the moonlight dim and weird A guiltless victim's pains. I bent me down to hear his sigh; I shook with his gurgling moan, And I trembled sore when they rode away, And left him here alone. They'd charged him with the old, old crime, And set him fast in jail: Oh, why does the dog howl all night long, And why does the night wind wail? He prayed his prayer and he swore his oath, And he raised his hand to the sky; But the beat of hoofs smote on his ear, And the steady tread drew nigh. Who is it rides by night, by night, Over the moonlit road? And what is the spur that keeps the pace, What is the galling goad? And now they beat at the prison door, "Ho, keeper, do not stay! We are friends of him whom you hold within, And we fain would take him away "From those who ride fast on our heels With mind to do him wrong; They have no care for his innocence, And the rope they bear is long." They have fooled the jailer with lying words, They have fooled the man with lies; The bolts unbar, the locks are drawn, And the great door open flies. Now they have taken him from the jail, And hard and fast they ride, And the leader laughs low down in his throat, As they halt my trunk beside. Oh, the judge, he wore a mask of black, And the doctor one of white, And the minister, with his oldest son, Was curiously bedight. Oh, foolish man, why weep you now? 'Tis but a little space, And the time will come when these shall dread The mem'ry of your face. I feel the rope against my bark, And the weight of him in my grain, I feel in the throe of his final woe The touch of my own last pain. And never more shall leaves come forth On the bough that bears the ban; I am burned with dread, I am dried and dead, From the curse of a guiltless man. And ever the judge rides by, rides by, And goes to hunt the deer, And ever another rides his soul In the guise of a mortal fear. And ever the man he rides me hard, And never a night stays he; For I feel his curse as a haunted bough, On the trunk of a haunted tree.

He does not think that I haunt here nightly: How shall I let him know That whither his fancy sets him wandering I, too, alertly go? - Hover and hover a few feet from him Just as I used to do, But cannot answer the words he lifts me – Only listen thereto! When I could answer he did not say them: When I could let him know How I would like to join in his journeys Seldom he wished to go. Now that he goes and wants me with him More than he used to do, Never he sees my faithful phantom Though he speaks thereto. Yes, I companion him to places Only dreamers know, Where the shy hares print long paces, Where the night rooks go; Into old aisles where the past is all to him, Close as his shade can do, Always lacking the power to call to him, Near as I reach thereto! What a good haunter I am, O tell him, Quickly make him know If he but sigh since my loss befell him Straight to his side I go. Tell him a faithful one is doing All that love can do Still that his path may be worth pursuing, And to bring peace thereto.

Off Havana, the ocean is green this morning of my birth. The conchers clean their knives on leather straps and watch the sky while three couples who have been dancing on the deck of a ship in the harbor, the old harbor of the fifties, kiss each other's cheeks and call it a night. On a green sofa five dresses wait to be fitted. The seamstress kneeling at Mother's feet has no idea I am about to be born. Mother pats her stomach which is flat as the lace mats on the dressmaker's table. She thinks I'm playing in my room. But as usual, she's wrong. I'm about to be born in a park in Havana. Oh, this is important, everything in the dressmaker's house is furred like a cat. And Havana leans right up against the windows. In the park, the air is chocolate, the sweet breath of a man smoking an expensive cigar. The grass is drinkable, dazzling, white. In a moment I'll get up from a bench, lured by a flock of pigeons, lazily sipping the same syrupy music through a straw. Mother is so ignorant, she thinks I'm rolled like a ball of yarn under the bed. What does she know of how I got trapped in my life? She thinks it's all behind her, the bloody sheets, the mirror in the ceiling where I opened such a sudden furious blue, her eyes bruised shut like mine. The pigeon's eyes are orange, unblinking, a doll's. Mother always said I wanted to touch everything because I was a child. But I was younger than that. I was so young I thought whatever I wanted, the world wanted too. Workers in the fields wanted the glint of sun on their machetes. Sugarcane came naturally sweet, you had only to lick the earth where it grew. The music I heard each night outside my window lived in the mouth of a bird. I was so young I thought it was easy as walking into the ocean which always had room for my body. So when I held out my hands I expected the pigeon to float between them like a blossom, dusting my fingers with the manna of its wings. But the world is wily, and doesn't want to be held for long, which is why as my hands reached out, workers lay down their machetes and left the fields, which is why a prostitute in a little calle of Havana dreamed the world was a peach and flicked open a knife. And Mother, startled, shook out a dress with big peonies splashed like dirt across the front, as if she had fallen chasing after me in the rain. But what could I do? I was about to be born, I was about to have my hair combed into the new music everyone was singing. The dressmaker sang it, her mouth filled with pins. The butcher sang it and wiped blood on his apron. Mother sang it and thought her body was leaving her body. And when I tried I was so young the music beat right through me, which is how the pigeon got away. The song the world sings day after day isn't made of feathers, and the song a bird pours itself into is tough as a branch growing with the singer and the singer's delight.

In the error thinking of non-intervention with you. A red sun (don’t look) pokes through. Staging development and the cutting loose of its facile integrity its disproportionate personal non-response. The wince. The shrug. The belated semi-acknowledgment of owning just enough to take part. In the era, thinking of you will quit my job in one year to get more done, work harder to insert myself into the fragile extension of space between us to get something done. In the ear thinking after you.

Just wasted and taking it. In life I rally constantly. Effort is what we breach. And accountability. Honed limits do you require ruthlessness or subtlety? The # for that delivery service I could find. My instinct is to agree with the collective. I’ll flip over their indoor/outdoor reversible rug. But my feelings & their representatives the passing sacrosanct mob cuddle stirring expedience are mine. Gradations of default tenor. Anything but more instinct. A proxy of determination in a cosmic discharge salon speaking freely of cost’s elephantine deployable former charm. I’m micromanaging nausea. The dishes are twilighting. The dairy scythe elevatrix skins my shining teleprompted sporkdom. As poor specimens go, the trail left inhabitable trails. Arkanoid as meditative space, if we travel by dragonfly. I cling to thy moving perimeter. I want payment for all instances of being caught on camera. We all should. Mutually assured destruction overdosed on civility by comparison. Babywiping lead paint dust from my soles. I’ll read entrails for omens, action figure entrails.

my name is Alice Elizabeth, so am I Allie Sheedy of the movie Short Circuits thus angry or Elizabeth McGovern self-controlled? This question is posited on a television screen where I can't quite identify the actress shown—which is she? I am Allie and I will continue to rant. ____________________ My voice rises in real life often— because I am 'passionate' ... that's a convenient word. ____________________ I'm still in the forest, darkening wishing I were 'nicer.' Hardwood says, You should stand up soon I'll help you I say, I have cramps I say, I'm using my period, to get pissed off and to Know. ____________________ I dreamed, last night, about an immense Dead Seal below the surface of the water in a harbor pull the curtain down. For months you would not break the spell for eternities you have not done so, citing economic exigencies; the whole thing is a mess. I might rather be dead than doing what it takes to keep the seal under water whale-sized E is for seal. For spell. For suppression. ____________________ To take part in you is to die is why one dies Have I said this before? ____________________ I am Alp the Dizzy. ____________________ The dead seal isn't a person, it's poetry the seal the hallmark of selfhood, dead grotesquely large and richly hardening. "Hardwood it was someone like you you drowned the seal" "No I'm making both you and it 'hard.' " ____________________ And I'm still in the forest. ____________________ And I'm still in the forest Money's more the real live poetry abstract symbolic imaginary trade your life for it and trade it for your life so you'll have something 'to do' Sink the whale and sleep all day in the real world, up and functioning more fully imagined and dreamed, in society's than in your own, imagination? I'm standing I'm standing up Hard I keep being Hardwood myself, dark and hard. ____________________ Initiating a new 'broken symmetry' (spinning to the Left, like a newborn neutrino) so that we can have a new consciousness ... am I doing that? Yes I think so. ____________________ The forest contains a French restaurant every meter or so ... difficult to fast in this dream vision. We're a very unpopular group today We've shot off another great bomb and we've shot down a terrorist, an Arab, young, before we even found out what he "knew." ____________________ Tell me something beautiful, bitter because we are somehow bitter, forever, a taste included in origin, in love, in you. So I don't have to be cloyed. ... soul's waters are reticent sly swamps. It had nothing in it, that swamp; because I didn't know how to look for the parts of its obvious whole—death is minute, flavorful parts—which are said to spin as I'm said to walk, moving while else mostly unconscious of that. ____________________ In the new consciousness

And the fourth river is the Euphrates The first day was a long day and the first night nearly eternal. No thing existed, and only One was present to perceive what wasn’t there. No meaning as we know it; difference was bound in the All. On the first day, water, on the second day, land, on the third day, two kinds of light, one of them night. On the fourth day, laughter, and darkness saw it was good. But when God laughed, a crack ran through creation. On the fourth night, sorrow, staring away from heaven, torn in its ownness. No evidence then of nothing, but worlds upon worlds, underwritten, overflowing: the worlds of fear and of longing, lacking in belief, and the pitiful world of love, forever granting its own wishes. Out of dust, like golems, God created man and woman, and cast them into chance. And man was subdued in those days. All that could leap, leapt; all that could weep, wept. First of all places, Eden; last of all places, Cleveland; and a river flowed out of Eden, inspiring in the dry land a panic of growth and harvest season. The newly formed creation took from flesh its beast and from each word its sentence. And early loves and hatreds blew from thistle to thorn. Each thing that God created, he placed before man so that he may name it: cloudbank, hawk’s eye, lambkin,

Hobos wail a garbage can against the cyclone links. The monkey puzzle tree droops its scaly tails above our heads as she sets up near the zoo’s bonobos, humping happy in their cages close to chimps ripping off each other’s ears. And in the cloud reposing on the sky, cut by an