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Aliens have inhabited my aesthetics for decades. Really since the early 70s. Before that I pretty much wrote as myself, though young. But something has happened to my memory, my judgment: apparently, my will has been affected. That old stuff, the fork in my head, first home run, Dad falling out of the car— I remember the words, but I can't get back there anymore. I think they must be screening my sensations. I'm sure my categories have been messed with. I look at the anthologies in the big chains and campus bookstores, even the small press opium dens, all those stanzas against the white space—they just look like the models in the catalogs. The models have arms and legs and a head, the poems mostly don't, but other than that it's hard—for me anyway—to tell them apart. There's the sexy underwear poem, the sturdy workboot poem you could wear to a party in a pinch, the little blaspheming dress poem. There's variety, you say: the button-down oxford with offrhymed cuffs. The epic toga, showing some ancient ankle, the behold! the world is changed and finally I'm normal flowing robe and shorts, the full nude, the scatter—Yes, I suppose there's variety, but the looks, those come on and read me for the inner you I've locked onto with my cultural capital sensing device looks! No thanks, Jay Peterman! No thanks, "Ordinary Evening in New Haven"! I'm just waiting for my return ticket to have any meaning, for those saucer-shaped clouds to lower! The authorities deny any visitations—hardly a surprise. And I myself deny them—think about it. What could motivate a group of egg-headed, tentacled, slimier-than-thou aestheticians with techniquies far beyond ours to visit earth, abduct naive poets, and inculcate them with otherwordly forms that are also, if you believe the tabloids, salacious? And these abductions always seem to take place in some provincial setting: isn't that more than slightly suspicious? Why don't they ever reveal themselves hovering over some New York publishing venue? It would be nice to get some answers here— we might learn something, about poetry if nothing else, but I'm not much help, since I'm an abductee, at least in theory, though, like I say, I don't remember much. But this writing seems pretty normal: complete sentences; semicolons; yada yada. I seem to have lost my avant-garde card in the laundry. They say that's typical. Well, you'll just have to use your judgment, earthlings! Judgment, that's your job! Back to work! As if you could leave! And you thought gravity was a problem!

for Hank The General’s men sit at the door. Her eyes Are fat with belladonna. She’s naked Except for the small painted turtles That are drinking a flammable cloud Of rum and milk from her navel. The ships out in the harbor Are loosely allied Like casks floating in bilge. The occasional light on a ship Winks. In the empty room of the manuscript Someone is grooming you For the long entrance into the dark city. They’ll hang the General. Then with torches they’ll search for his children. Men and women Are seen jumping from the burning hotel. Journalists, in no hurry, Elect to take the elevator. They walk Out of the building, stepping over corpses. . . You are listening to loud bells. The corpses get up and follow the journalists. It’s unfair that while rehearsing For death they actually succumbed to it. But no one sobs. Shirts and dresses billowing as they fall. Something inhuman in you watched it all. And whatever it is that watches, It has kept you from loneliness like a mob.

I have a brief confession that I would like to make. If I dont get it off my chest I'm sure my heart will break. I didn't do my reading. I watched TV instead— while munching cookies, cakes, and chips and cinnamon raisin bread. I didn't wash the dishes. I didn't clean the mess. Now there are roaches eating crumbs— a million, more or less. I didn't turn the TV off. I didn't shut the light. Just think of all the energy I wasted through the night. I feel so very guilty. I did a lousy job. I hope my students don't find out that I am such a slob.

I seam towels for Dundee over in Georgia, a non-union sweatshop with a dozen rows of them blue glass windows all around. Some of ’em says it’s like a church. Been there fourteen years, since just before me and Hubert said vows at Devotee Baptist. We’ve been divorced since eighty-four. Seems he had another woman on the side. Yessir, I been cold and warmed my hands at the motor of my jury-rigged machine, been Florida-hot and deaf from the fans that don’t do a damn bit of earthly good, for me at least. I’m right fleshy, as you can see. Been so hot I’d get the hives and swell up like sourdough rising, but I hardly miss a sick day, you understand. I hate the feel when another woman’s been sewing on my machine. Substitutes will break a needle or jack the floating bobbin out of line. They don’t give a hoot. It ain’t like they got a steady station or reputation to uphold. This working’s almost a moral thing, Preacher Wilkes would say, like marriage, and every thread has got to be caught in the hem’s edge so the whole towel won’t ravel first time some salesman in a motel or shoe clerk in his own home after a sweaty day dries off from a cold shower bath. You see, I know it don’t take no giant brain to sit behind a Singer machine and stitch hour after hour, but I’m proud just the same. I’m regular as a clock, and I don’t dare fiddle with another worker’s machine. Some nights I lie in my bed, once was my mother’s, and watch the gas flame jump beautiful blue as the mill’s windows and wonder how many skins have been wiped dry on my towels, and whose. It gives me a blushy pride right on the edge of sleep. I’m over here tonight with my sister Lily and her husband, Buddy, supposed to be having a fine time instead of talking my whole life at you. This country and western band, specially the drummer in a blue silk shirt, makes me want to eat a hot pig’s foot, drink beer, and shake my tail. Let’s show ’em a thing or two. You ain’t married just now, are you?

The windows are dressed in feathers where the birds have flown against them, then fallen below into the flowers where their bodies lie grounded, still, slowly disappearing each day until all that is left are their narrow, prehensile bones. I have sat at my window now for years and watched a hundred birds mistake the glass for air and break their necks, wondering what to do, how else to live among them and keep my view. Not to mention the sight of them at the feeder in the morning, especially the cardinal in snow. What sign to post on the sill that says, "Warning, large glass window. Fatal if struck. Fly around or above but not away. There are seeds in the feeder and water in the bath. I need you, which is to say, I'm sorry for my genius as the creature inside who attracts you with seeds and watches you die against the window I've built with the knowledge of its danger to you. With a heart that rejects its reasons in favor of keeping what it wants: the sight of you, the sight of you."

My ghostly fader, I me confess, First to God and then to you, That at a window, wot ye how, I stale a kosse of gret swetness, Which don was out avisiness— But it is doon, not undoon, now. My ghostly fader, I me confess, First to God and then to you. But I restore it shall, doutless, Agein, if so be that I mow; And that to God I make a vow, And elles I axe foryefness. My ghostly fader, I me confesse, First to God and then to you.

O UR P ATRON OF F ALLING S HORT , W HO B ECAME A P RAYER I used to sneak into the movies without paying. I watched the stories but I failed to see the dark. I went to college and drank everything they gave me, and I never paid for any of that water on which I drifted as if by grace until after the drownings, when in the diamond light of seven-something A.M., as the spring was tearing me up in Cartajena, only praying on my knees before the magnifying ark of the Seventh St. Hotel could possibly save me, until falling on my face before the daughter of money while the world poured from the till brought the moment’s length against the moment’s height, and paying was what I was earning and eating and wearing.

You had a woodchuck and an opium ball. The one ate through the furniture, the other sat in its cage depressing me. Now the woodchuck sheds its skin. I have a cow behind the Dollar Bin. You shouldn’t drink diarrhea unless you bring enough for everybody. Turn it into a teaching moment. Asian-American Students for Christ have the room until 2:30. Rumi says no donkey is a virgin, no, nor any beast that bites the grass. Maybe it sounds better in Persian. An unseen force propels the carts across the Whole Foods parking lot. The woodchuck hasn’t been born yet I’d rather keep than you as a pet. You’ll sleep on wood shavings, I’ll comb your pelt. That animal loved you, his captor, whom he hated. I know just how he felt.

What is he buzzing in my ears? "Now that I come to die, Do I view the world as a vale of tears?" Ah, reverend sir, not I! What I viewed there once, what I view again Where the physic bottles stand On the table's edge,—is a suburb lane, With a wall to my bedside hand. That lane sloped, much as the bottles do, From a house you could descry O'er the garden-wall; is the curtain blue Or green to a healthy eye? To mine, it serves for the old June weather Blue above lane and wall; And that farthest bottle labelled "Ether" Is the house o'ertopping all. At a terrace, somewhere near the stopper, There watched for me, one June, A girl: I know, sir, it's improper, My poor mind's out of tune. Only, there was a way... you crept Close by the side, to dodge Eyes in the house, two eyes except: They styled their house "The Lodge." What right had a lounger up their lane? But, by creeping very close, With the good wall's help,—their eyes might strain And stretch themselves to Oes, Yet never catch her and me together, As she left the attic, there, By the rim of the bottle labelled "Ether," And stole from stair to stair, And stood by the rose-wreathed gate. Alas, We loved, sir—used to meet: How sad and bad and mad it was— But then, how it was sweet!

I used to be a plastic bottle I used to be scads of masticated wattle I used to be epic spittle, aka septic piddle I used to be a pleasant colleague I used to be a radiant ingredient I used to be a purple polyethylene pony I used to be a phony upload project I used to be a stony blue inhalant I used to be a family-size turquoise bottle I used to be a domesticated pink bubble I used to be a pleasant red colleague I used to be a beaming cobalt emollient I used to be a convenient chartreuse antidepressant