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All sons sleep next to mothers, then alone, then with others Eventually, all our sons bare molars, incisors Meanwhile, mothers are wingless things in a room of stairs A gymnasium of bars and ropes, small arms hauling self over self Mothers hum nonsense, driving here and there (Here! There!) in hollow steeds, mothers reflecting how faint reflections shiver over the road All the deafening musts along the way Mothers favor the moon—hook-hung and mirroring the sun— there, in a berry bramble, calm as a stone This is enough to wrench our hand out of his and simply devour him, though he exceeds even the tallest grass Every mother recalls a lullaby, and the elegy blowing through it

One Christmastime Fats Waller in a fur coat Rolled beaming from a taxicab with two pretty girls Each at an arm as he led them in a thick downy snowfall Across Thirty-Fourth Street into the busy crowd Shopping at Macy’s: perfume, holly, snowflake displays. Chimes rang for change. In Toys, where my mother worked Over her school vacation, the crowd swelled and stood Filling the aisles, whispered at the fringes, listening To the sounds of the large, gorgeously dressed man, His smile bemused and exalted, lips boom-booming a bold Bass line as he improvised on an expensive, tinkly Piano the size of a lady’s jewel box or a wedding cake. She put into my heart this scene from the romance of Joy, Co-authored by her and the movies, like her others– My father making the winning basket at the buzzer And punching the enraged gambler who came onto the court– The brilliant black and white of the movies, texture Of wet snowy fur, the taxi’s windshield, piano keys, Reflections that slid over the thick brass baton That worked the elevator. Happiness needs a setting: Shepherds and shepherdesses in the grass, kids in a store, The back room of Carly’s parents’ shop, record-player And paper streamers twisted in two colors: what I felt Dancing close one afternoon with a thin blonde girl Was my amazing good luck, the pleased erection Stretching and stretching at the idea She likes me, She likes it

We are walking our very public attraction through eighteenth-century Philadelphia. I am simultaneously butch girlfriend and suburban child on a school trip, Independence Hall, 1775, home to the Second Continental Congress. Although she is wearing her leather jacket, although we have made love for the first time in a hotel room on Rittenhouse Square, I am preparing my teenage escape from Philadelphia, from Elfreth’s Alley, the oldest continuously occupied residential street in the nation, from Carpenters’ Hall, from Congress Hall, from Graff House where the young Thomas Jefferson lived, summer of 1776. In my starched shirt and waistcoat, in my leggings and buckled shoes, in postmodern drag, as a young eighteenth-century statesman, I am seventeen and tired of fighting for freedom and the rights of men. I am already dreaming of Boston— city of women, demonstrations, and revolution on a grand and personal scale. Then the maître d’ is pulling out our chairs for brunch, we have the surprised look of people who have been kissing and now find themselves dressed and dining in a Locust Street townhouse turned café, who do not know one another very well, who continue with optimism to pursue relationship.Eternity may simply be our mortal default mechanism set on hope despite all evidence. In this mood, I roll up my shirtsleeves and she touches my elbow. I refuse the seedy view from the hotel window. I picture instead their silver inkstands, the hoopskirt factory on Arch Street, the Wireworks, their eighteenth-century herb gardens, their nineteenth-century row houses restored with period door knockers. Step outside. We have been deeded the largest landscaped space within a city anywhere in the world. In Fairmount Park, on horseback, among the ancient ginkgoes, oaks, persimmons, and magnolias, we are seventeen and imperishable, cutting classes May of our senior year. And I am happy as the young Tom Jefferson, unbuttoning my collar, imagining his power, considering my healthy body, how I might use it in the service of the country of my pleasure.

( a myth of consequences ) The ivy across our back fence tangles gray into a green evening light. How a second emptiness un-punctuates the first. Disloyal, we attempt to construct. An ache will tighten but not form. Making impossible even this upsurge of crows across our sightline. The Mayans invented zero so as not to ignore even the gods who wouldn't carry their burdens. Too slippery as prayer, too effortless as longing. Our problem was preparation. Premeditation neutered any rage potential. Years later, the spine of our backyard appears to have always been crooked. White jasmine, dove-calm in the lattice, is not a finely crafted lure.

I'd search for Philippines in History class. The index named one page, moved on to Pierce. The Making of America marched past my enigmatic father's place of birth. The week he died some man we didn't know called up.This is his brother, one more shock, phoning for him."He died three days ago." The leaden black receiver did not talk. My uncle never gave his name or town, we never heard from him. Was it a dream? The earpiece roar dissolved to crackling sounds, a dial tone erased the Philippines. And yet my world grows huge with maps, crisscrossed, my History alive with all I've lost.

After Brion Gysin / William S. Burroughs All writing around the sides the persons a galaxy all writing resounds a hot history. All writing is in fact cut-ups history will decide games heated and heated economic behavior. To rise up scene all sounds of Tahrir and inside supply side threatened. A long delineation. Longer than I would be counting. This, a whisper, this the end of whisper time. Rise up and wiser this the streets of the world. Commission overheard in spin a soldiering one. What streets of the world to spin rubric’s yes yes commerce, no, a no, no. Tanks of the blown-off world. He is my beautiful offshore a caw caw of major spills and elsewhere no, no. Cut the dialect the binary the dear word so precious and forbidden. They use the machines to take the streets of the world. Horizon my headwater cut cut the cable my beignets my else an appetite “poor politics, poor poor pols.” Waters of the world in media cut cut the lines manipulate desire and show the word show the Man show the tablets a Paleolithic grab all the twilight fields of discontent that shadow governments rise up people of the world of many wounded galaxies of discontent. And hear you, people of the word. What room? The gray we reach to. Assume that the worst has happened deporting Rom explicit in the gypsy purge meeting with Popes in the streets of the world. Subject to strategy poor poor pol a scrutiny. Its link its drill its Bandars. Condemn Salazar and the interior ministry of fisheries and assume the worst in writing cuts his exterior of life the glib industry, the selves behind the tyrants. My loaves and fishes in deep deep water. Is at some point classical prose, my no, Bulgaria my no Romania my Haiti my Egypt, and gypsy environment come to this coastline America ruptured pipeline to awe caw Gulf Stream is seated cut cut to other fields ripple effect and your domino will fall. And the bomb fall down. Cutting and rearranging factor your opponent your domino history will gain introducing a new parity binary Assange dimension your strategy. Will history decide “caw caw caw.” How many Rom yes yes discoveries sound to kinesthetic a gulf of everyone. She wanted to soldier a gulf of anyone. She wanted to soldier out of here her long delineation longer than would be counting. Cut through this leak of revolution the future will come out. We can deport Rimbaud now produce accident to his color “Voyelles.” Exit the colors you drain me of. And new dimension to films cut cut Sarkozy cut Hollande the senses the place of sands, gambling Rom scene all sounds all colors tasting sounds, France, France smell all streets of the world. Wake up, all colors of all the burqas tasting sounds of the shadow world. Cut cut when you can have the best all: Anthropocene. Welcome to the Anthropocene. Rom the gypsy in everyone. In a collage of words read heard decipher, Rom arise outbreak of military strategy, sound of voice a pitching wail will sear the wall will wall the sound will break the word will suck the variation clear and act accordingly history will decide the streets of the world. Caw caw introduced the cut-up scissored remembered gulf renders the aroma in memory of my despotic elders. Aroma of Rom. Let the dolphins in and act accordingly. If you posed entirely of prearranged cut cut determined by random leaders no Merkel cut cut G-20. A page of written words no advantage to leak from circular Salazar. Interior from knowing into writer predict the move the mood, no go back will step down will will step down. Circumpolar water and denizens within arise. Streets of the world arise. The cut variation images shift Rom sense advantage in processing to sound sight cut cut sound to arise. Visit of memories New Orleans Florida have been made by accidents is where Rimbaud was going with order could live could systematic derangement of the gambling scene, cut cut in with a tea party lullaby then hallucination: seeing and places that arise the streets of the word. A long line’s delineation to random future streets of the world. And they our nuclear future to deny deny. Our man in rendition and cut cut the torture oh streets of the world arise to cut back forms else mammals suffer a dead Mubarak. Rearrange blunt the word and image to other fields Rom, no France France rise to streets the USA the USA of the soldiering world. We’ll see how calm politics will become. G-20 outbreak of temper Germany. Of temper BP. Condemn the masters UK France corpse or carp on it but no longer predict the move, cut cut other fields than cuts your writing Egypt your Yemen your Syria your Libya your Mali.

In this poem there is no suffering. It spans hundreds of years and records no deaths, connecting when it can, those moments where people are healthy and happy, content to be alive. A Chapter, maybe a Volume, shorn of violence consists of an adult reading aimlessly. This line is the length of a full life smuggled in while no one was plotting against a neighbour, except in jest. Then, after a gap, comes Nellie. She is in a drought-fisted field with a hoe. This is her twelfth year on the land, and today her back doesn’t hurt. Catechisms of self-pity and of murder have declared a day’s truce in the Civil War within her. So today, we can bring Nellie, content with herself, with the world, into our History. For a day. In the next generation we find a suitable subject camping near the border of a divided country: for a while no one knows how near. For these few lines she is ours. But how about the lovers? you ask, the freshly-washed body close to yours; sounds, smells, tastes; anticipation of the young, the edited memory of the rest of us? How about thoughts higher than their thinkers?...Yes, yes. Give them half a line and a mass of footnotes: they have their own privileged history, like inherited income beside our husbandry. We bring our History up to date in a city like London: someone’s just paid the mortgage, is free of guilt and not dying of cancer; and going past the news-stand, doesn’t see a headline advertising torture. This is all recommended reading, but in small doses. It shows you can avoid suffering, if you try.

He fancies his chances are good with her, unaware that in the years since the war she has come to prefer women whose cunts taste like mustard. To pin one’s hopes on a bark-colored moth, its wings crinkled like crepe paper, a moth affixed high on the kitchen wall, frozen for days where it will likely die in noble clinging mode just under the cobwebby heating vent, is to confirm your need for more friends and a greater daily quota of sunlight. To raise C.’s hopes that T. can stop drinking and then to liken those hopes to fields of undulating grain, alfalfa perhaps, is to wish C. hip deep in acres of unscythed denial. The blind typist hopes she’ll be hired tonight without her disability becoming an issue. L. said he felt hope’s rhizomes race throughout his body, radiating in all directions, like some incipient disease he’d been fighting since childhood. Hope, he said, it’s as insidious as bitterness. If mother earth only knew how much we loved one another she would creak, shudder, and split like a macheted melon, releasing the fiery ball of molten hope at her core.

Oysters adhere to things, no eyes: spat on the smooth curve of a pier they feel shadows and snap shut. The sun wavers while anchored below each distills Tomales Bay, accreting waves within its shell. Voluptuous and cold, Kumamoto trembles on a thin fork, liquefaction of cloud. Rain distorts glass, our tavern submerged all afternoon.

I threaten'd to observe the strict decree Of my dear God with all my power and might; But I was told by one it could not be; Yet I might trust in God to be my light. "Then will I trust," said I, "in Him alone." "Nay, e'en to trust in Him was also His: We must confess that nothing is our own." "Then I confess that He my succour is." "But to have nought is ours, not to confess That we have nought." I stood amaz'd at this, Much troubled, till I heard a friend express That all things were more ours by being His; What Adam had, and forfeited for all, Christ keepeth now, who cannot fail or fall.