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From Daddy sprung my inborn ribaldry. His crudeness destined me to be the same. A seedlet, flowered from a shitty heap, I came, the crowning glory of his aim. From Mother I inherited ennui, The leg irons of the queendom I once rattled. But I won’t let such chains imprison me. And there is just no telling what this brat’ll...! This marriage thing? We snub our nose at it. What’s pearl turns piss, what’s classy breeds what’s smutty. But like it? Lump it? Neither’s exigent. And I’m the end result of all that fucking. Do what you will! This world’s your oyster, Pet. But be forewarned. The sea might drown you yet.

For Andrea Brady As though the overcast might tweak an airman’s maps, his foretelling — as though in chains of stop-start ischaemia, I count myself unstressed, I walked along the human promontory rough-tongued as sugar paper, walked from the metal-bashers’ shop, vinegar and cayenne sprinkled, spiked my glass of milk. Well-set icing blistered. Ice set into cat’s-eyes. I walked through the empty lot the enormous empty lot towards the store beckoning me, soon I turned my back on every now forgotten unit. Get yours I said. Get yours. And I kept mine in ghost capital. Such was our material ease that year in plenteousness, in full flush. Sumptuous but interfusing, basking all the while June was leaching sweetly, bite like molasses. The block the far side of the apron squatted with capacity. Happy to take things as seen I browsed, I window-sloped, honey lanyards brushed my lips. Then I too was stopped by the incident, the episode, the voice that spake, lushness hit the doldrums. Frigate birds collapsed on ice, wings like stick pyramids. I stood dangling my bunch of keys. Saw in the lake’s heaped frozen waves a new car exhibition, restaurant, luxury housing. This then was the block whose feed I hung upon, suckling on the live stream so generous I could overflow, creeping to within earshot, stealthily advancing within reach, this then was the source marooned in transitivity, flushed pink where sky spins and grips or tries but soaked it slithers off, its dazzle-shroud sagged sopping with new storylines, slid down in folds, pleats, bales of episodes. Lines aspired to mottoes, mottoes to a motionlessness tethered to reflections on void lagoons where intermittent light spelt far less : blemished forms of love loving fault must needs be filled but the field is made of faltering, we walk on thin ice, images that relay genital parts. Look, each of us knows what we could do with any of these. A peasant with his crippled back and upright broom dusting off the sun-gilded runway, a banker’s shouting ontic features crabbed and tentacular, crabbed and tentacular. Like everyone turns in on himself I saw the gathered looped and spooking out their children, these too stretched in their fire cavern, talk would shift about the board grinding thick lines of violence. Activity lights flashed, cycles juddered to a pit reprieve behind star-blasted rock pooling oil. Still within a smoke scarf three sit and talk and think to send a call through wintery clearances. Across the asphalt my bone vibrates. Tap Tap.       Buzz. Calendar beetles tap inside false ceilings, failing brands collapse into the flickering of a hearth. Clear light annuls red crackle, time-stamps every flash expiring assets show in. Look, to make my call I found my mouth, licked the barrier streaked with fuchsine, nibbled at the pith between the tree and bark. Red daddy, aren’t I big enough to walk, pick up my legs, my pace Look, I hack at overgrowth, too grown up, well-fed for jelly mould cars and download junket. Magenta freights a weary sky, heaved limbs abdicate. Who hankers to walk grass and thrift. Ankles pricked by gorse and heather. Who walks on creases now shale pockmarked with spots of tar. My ghost is trying its weight on stepping stones, look, it’s peeling off, weaned into the asphalt river. Ahead I see this huge container.

& sea swell, hiss of   incomprehensible flat: distance: blue long-fingered ocean and its nothing else: nothing in the above visible except water: water and always the white self-destroying bloom of   wavebreak &, upclose roil, & here, on what’s left of   land, ticking of   stays against empty flagpoles, low tide, free day, nothing being memorialized here today — memories float, yes, over the place but not memories any of   us now among the living possess — open your hands — let go the scrap metal with the laughter — let go the upstairs neighbor you did not protect — they took him away — let go how frightened you knew he was all along while you went on with your day — your day overflowing with time and place — they came and got him — there are manners for every kind of event — he stopped reading and looked up when they came in — didn’t anyone tell you you would never feel at home — that there is a form of   slavery in everything — and when was it in   your admittedly short life you were permitted to believe that this lasted forever — remove   your   hands from your pockets — take out that laundry list, that receipt for everything you pawned last night — decide whom to blame — stick to your story — exclude expectation of   heavenly reward — exclude the milk of human kindness — poisoned from the start — yes — who ever expected that to be the mistake — with all the murderers and miracle workers — with the hovering spidery fairy tales — kites, angels, missiles, evening papers, yellow stars — clouds — those were houses that are his eyes — those were lives that are his eyes — those are families, those are privacies, those are details — those are reparation agreements, summary judgments, those are multiplications on the face of   the earth that are — those are the forests, the coal seams, the carbon sinks that are his — as they turn into carbon sources — his — and the festering wounds that are — and the granary that burned — and the quick blow administered to make it painless, so- called — his eyes his   yes   his blows his seed’s first insertion into this our only soil — &   the flower, the cut flower in my bouquet here, made from the walk we took this morning, aimless, as if   free, where you asked me to marry you, &   the loaf   of barley, millet and wheat I was able, as a matter of course, to bring to the table, fresh- baked, in life.

After César Vallejo The fury that breaks a grown-up into kids, a kid into scattered birds and a bird into limp eggs, the fury of the poor takes one part oil to two parts vinegar. The fury that breaks a tree into leaves, a leaf into deranged flowers and a flower into wilting telescopes, the fury of the poor gushes two rivers against a hundred seas. The fury that breaks the true into doubts, doubt into three matching arches and the arch into instant tombs, the fury of the poor draws a sharpening stone against two knives. The fury that breaks the soul into bodies, the body into warped organs, and the organ into eight doctrines, the fury of the poor burns with one fire in two thousand craters.

The future is one of place devoid of race. A jawbone under a sock is a geological clock. The plunking of rain on the termite-riddled windowpane: reading a Bible on that ledge is a tiny college. A Galápagos tortoise is killed (or, simply, unwilled). The Ebola virus weeps, or retires, because, like us, it tires. Meanwhile, below the subbasement, a Suede Revolution: the phlegmatic skill of the cryptographer soixante-huitards the teleprompter. The id in facsimile is suspended on a leash, twisting in the rain above that goddammed windowpane. Being is slightly corrupted by the Thinking that’s one-upped it (like the pun on pain) and will never love again.

Everyone has a cousin Benjamin Bunny. Peter said a walk would do him good. The edge of the wood. Peter did not enjoy himself anymore. He never would again. The brooding lettuces in their falcon hoods. The coppice gate wound shut by weeds, the jaws of life trying to keep it closed tight but anyone can climb it. As a child I played on a gate in a neighborhood park that swung of itself and sounded like the distress call of a rabbit. I stood on the bottom slat and backed in and out of the air. I’ll never get out of here. The gate was pure folly, without fencing on either side, Greek tragedy staged around a doorway the imagination strains to enter. I was raised in an aisle seat with an eye line of an actor about to come through from behind it. Melodramatic onions grew wild. I cried and cried until someone said it’s okay to cry, it means the onions are fresh. Every dream begins with a threshold. Meat in the driveway where dogs tipped the garbage. Where’s your mouth? There is a whistle you can buy that makes the sound of a rabbit screaming hunters use to call whatever they want out of the thicket because everything they want wants rabbit for dinner. Move your hand along the shaft to change the call from jack to cotton- tail and back again. Once you see them nose out of the interior at your bidding what stops you from sounding every single day? All day? The shrill imagined rabbit’s canned terror. You can do it with a reed of grass. Cup your hands. Everything alive is listening. I knew a hunter who could do a spot-on fawn whose suffering would bring a doe into the open every time. He didn’t want a doe, though. He wanted a buck. Here’s what I can’t stand to acknowledge: when bucks hear the sound of the fawn my friend makes with his mouth they come, too, not in pity, but in lust, so badly they want the doe drawn by the yearning of a fawn in need of her. Everything is within range suddenly, and who am I to judge. He mounts her relief and spring comes. No. He takes a bullet. I was caught up in theatrics and forgot whose theater this is.

They were smooth ovals, and some the shade of potatoes— some had been moth-eaten or spotted, the maples were starched, and crackled like campfire. We put them under tracing paper and rubbed our crayons over them, X-raying the spread of their bones and black, veined catacombs. We colored them green and brown and orange, and cut them out along the edges, labeling them deciduous or evergreen. All day, in the stuffy air of the classroom, with its cockeyed globe, and nautical maps of ocean floors, I watched those leaves lost in their own worlds flap on the pins of the bulletin boards: without branches or roots, or even a sky to hold on to.

I forgot how lush and electrified it was with you. The shaggy fragrant zaps continually passing back and forth, my fingertip to your clavicle, or your wrist rubbing mine to share gardenia oil. We so purred like dragonflies we kept the mosquitoes away and the conversation was heavy, mother-lacerated childhoods and the sad way we'd both been both ignored and touched badly. Knowing that being fierce and proud and out and loud was just a bright new way to be needy.Please listen to me, oh what a buzz!you're the only one I can tell. Even with no secret, I could come close to your ear with my mouth and that was ecstasy, too. We barely touched each other, we didn't have to speak. The love we made leapt to life like a cat in the space between us (if there ever was space between us), and looked back at us through fog. Sure, this was San Francisco, it was often hard to see. But fog always burned off, too, so we watched this creature to see if it knew what it was doing. It didn't.

I saw you painted on a ghetto wall last summer and thought don’t submit to this medium...    everybody’s running into the wall or running into each other and plagiarizing our future like mummies and nukes, I watched you hug the Mona Lisa. I wanna use the word pariah until it shrugs for us and even their disguises go limp as a fire tumbling down a hillside into the playfulness in my heart, acres and acres of a lean, almost spiritual vibe afraid of  its own momentum and then not afraid again

I carry you, a fleck, to Jamaica At the Chinese temple in Kingston I am sick daily Victor leads me upstairs, says this floor was once Nights, I hold the bed’s edges full of beds where men off the boat