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The first line is a row of girls, twenty-five of them, almost a painting, shoulders overlapping, angled slightly toward you. One says:I’m myself here. The others shudder and laugh through the ribbon core that strings them. They make a tone tighter by drumming on their thighs and opening their mouths. The girls are cells. The girls are a fence, a fibrous network. One by one they describe their grievances. Large hot malfunctioning machines lie obediently at their sides. Their shirts are various shades of ease in the surrounding air, which is littered with small cuts. One will choose you, press you into the ground. You may never recover. The second-to-last line has a fold in it. The last line is the steady pour of their names.

I found you on Gothtrash.com and saved your picture to my computer desktop it gives me the feeling of something terrible and familiar a space between lives like seeing Marcel seeing Gilberte for the first time how the fact of life itself becomes a thing languished and melancholy I think I would like to lie among southern magnolias in snowfall dark skies above into which I will never enter I'm watching Maya Deren maybe I will smoke weed I called out sick it's the afternoon

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high; Where knowledge is free; Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls; Where words come out from the depth of truth; Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection; Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit; Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

Give all to love; Obey thy heart; Friends, kindred, days, Estate, good-fame, Plans, credit and the Muse,— Nothing refuse. ’T is a brave master; Let it have scope: Follow it utterly, Hope beyond hope: High and more high It dives into noon, With wing unspent, Untold intent: But it is a god, Knows its own path And the outlets of the sky. It was never for the mean; It requireth courage stout. Souls above doubt, Valor unbending, It will reward,— They shall return More than they were, And ever ascending. Leave all for love; Yet, hear me, yet, One word more thy heart behoved, One pulse more of firm endeavor,— Keep thee to-day, To-morrow, forever, Free as an Arab Of thy beloved. Cling with life to the maid; But when the surprise, First vague shadow of surmise Flits across her bosom young, Of a joy apart from thee, Free be she, fancy-free; Nor thou detain her vesture’s hem, Nor the palest rose she flung From her summer diadem. Though thou loved her as thyself, As a self of purer clay, Though her parting dims the day, Stealing grace from all alive; Heartily know, When half-gods go, The gods arrive.

Give it back—I made it all up That alcove where surplus glowed under dust Unfinished, an attic space with nails poking down Khaki of sheet metal, orange flickering in tubes Ephemeral as the smells, which were plywood, solder, and Kents Color words, smell words—I put them in a book Everything there is still missing Two lies of remembrance: it was always winter Things could speak

If the hope of giving is to love the living, the giver risks madness in the act of giving. Some such lesson I seemed to see in the faces that surrounded me. Needy and blind, unhopeful, unlifted, what gift would give them the gift to be gifted? The giver is no less adrift than those who are clamouring for the gift. If they cannot claim it, if it is not there, if their empty fingers beat the empty air and the giver goes down on his knees in prayer knows that all of his giving has been for naught and that nothing was ever what he thought and turns in his guilty bed to stare at the starving multitudes standing there and rises from bed to curse at heaven, he must yet understand that to whom much is given much will be taken, and justly so: I cannot tell how much I owe.

So, because you chose to follow me into the subtle sadness of night, And to stand in the half-set moon with the weird fall-light on your glimmering hair, Till your presence hid all of the earth and all of the sky from my sight, And to give me a little scarlet bud, that was dying of frost, to wear, Say, must you taunt me forever, forever? You looked at my hand and you knew That I was the slave of the Ring, while you were as free as the wind is free. When I saw your corpse in your coffin, I flung back your flower to you; It was all of yours that I ever had; you may keep it, and—keep from me. Ah? so God is your witness. Has God, then, no world to look after but ours? May He not have been searching for that wild stat, with the trailing plumage, that flew Far over a part of our darkness while we were there by the freezing flowers, Or else brightening some planet’s luminous rings, instead of thinking of you? Or, if He was near us at all, do you think that He would sit listening there Because you sang “Hear me, Norma,” to a woman in jewels and lace, While, so close to us, down in another street, in the wet, unlighted air, There were children crying for bread and fire, and mothers who questioned His grace? Or perhaps He had gone to the ghastly field where the fight had been that day, To number the bloody stabs that were there, to look at and judge the dead; Or else to the place full of fever and moans where the wretched wounded lay; At least I do not believe that He cares to remember a word that you said. So take back your flowers, I tell you—of its sweetness I now have no need; Yes; take back your flower down into the stillness and mystery to keep; When you wake I will take it, and God, then, perhaps will witness indeed, But go, now, and tell Death he must watch you, and not let you walk in your sleep.

Now She knows what it feels like

when I’m braced for a mugging is stranger than the Eritrean boy asking the question outside Clifton Hill station. The skinnier for baggies he’s hop & a skip across three lanes following my hand. No way to countermand him. No way he’d stay for the whole story. The ghosts of spray-can gangs who tagged the length & breadth of the subway are benign I’d tell him. There’ll be the odd gutter-crawler in front of the House of Love. Keep walking. The garage’ll be closed but in summertime a gaggle of mechanics will punt a football in the road there. One missing his mark is bound to call an Eritrean to kick it back. Ignore them. Continue to a far flung franchise of the American dream. Once it was the dull red brick of the United Kingdom pub where the last of the blessed aged quicker than most on Victoria Bitter. Now it’s the McDonalds of this convergence of worlds in whose vicinity I’m more or less lost.

The last ice age had been caused by a wobble. After it passed they made houses from stars; Visitors would peer in And see the tongs not slipping, Roomsized pebbles having been moved far. It’s like this more When we speak than when we write; Loving thus we have been Loved by ground, The word being A box with four of its corners hidden; Everything else is round.