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The prisoner can’t go any longer, but he does. The beggar can’t go on begging, but watch— Tomorrow he’ll be in the alley, holding out a bowl To everyone, to even a young, possibly poorer, child. The mother can’t go on believing, But she will kneel for hours in the cathedral, Holding silence in her arms. The rain goes on, daily, sometimes, and we cry, As often as not alone. The fishmonger, the bell ringer, the cook, each Can be corrupted in a less than dire way. Nothing can replace the sea breezes you were born to. Nothing can stay the shy ache in the palm you hold out to the fortune-teller. The concrete lions on her steps go on Making bloodless journeys, they go on Hunting in air longer than any of you will live to watch, Hunting still after your futures become all irises and blamelessness.

I’m this tiny, this statuesque, and everywhere in between, and everywhere in between bony and overweight, my shadow cannot hold one shape in Omaha, in Tuscaloosa, in Aberdeen. My skin is mocha brown, two shades darker than taupe, your question is racist, nutmeg, beige, I’m not offended by your question at all. Penis or vagina? Yes and yes. Gay or straight? Both boxes. Bi, not bi, who cares, stop fixating on my sex life, Jesus never leveled his eye to a bedroom’s keyhole. I go to church in Tempe, in Waco, the one with the exquisite stained glass, the one with a white spire like the tip of a Klansman’s hood. Churches creep me out, I never step inside one, never utter hymns, Sundays I hide my flesh with camouflage and hunt. I don’t hunt but wish every deer wore a bulletproof vest and fired back. It’s cinnamon, my skin, it’s more sandstone than any color I know. I voted for Obama, McCain, Nader, I was too apathetic to vote, too lazy to walk one block, two blocks to the voting booth For or against a women’s right to choose? Yes, for and against. For waterboarding, for strapping detainees with snorkels and diving masks. Against burning fossil fuels, let’s punish all those smokestacks for eating the ozone, bring the wrecking balls, but build more smokestacks, we need jobs here in Harrisburg, here in Kalamazoo. Against gun control, for cotton bullets, for constructing a better fence along the border, let’s raise concrete toward the sky, why does it need all that space to begin with? For creating holes in the fence, adding ladders, they’re not here to steal work from us, no one dreams of crab walking for hours across a lettuce field so someone could order the Caesar salad. No one dreams of sliding a squeegee down the cloud-mirrored windows of a high-rise, but some of us do it. Some of us sell flowers. Some of us cut hair. Some of us carefully steer a mower around the cemetery grounds. Some of us paint houses. Some of us monitor the power grid. Some of us ring you up while some of us crisscross a parking lot to gather the shopping carts into one long, rolling, clamorous and glittering backbone.

Trees have whole streets of when they were planted plaqued with when the city is to inherit them dead of age almost all at once as if a natural bombing. People see a bill not figured in, a blood red collection come like fall’s leaf due without fail an unseen cost of the design: pale bud and yellow blossom— though seeming little to do this time with tense spring in the window of dead and dying trees’ terms up, with expecting a life by life replacement— not this plague of life’s time as a season across the city. By trial we do, but don’t know how death counts the rings from trees to clocks, species to singled soul at its hour. or on history’s days we all die at once.

I. O the screech and heat and hate we have for each day's commute, the long wait at the last stop before we go screaming underground, while the pigeons court and shit and rut insolently on the tracks because this train is always late, always aimed at only us, who when it comes with its blunt snout, its thousand mouths, cram and curse and contort into one creature, all claws and eyes, tunneling, tunneling, tunneling toward money. 2. Sometimes a beauty cools through the doors at Grand, glides all the untouchable angles and planes of herself to stand among us like a little skyscraper, so sheer, so spare, gazes going all over her in a craving wincing way like sun on glass. 3. There is a dreamer all good conductors know to look for when the last stop is made and the train is ticking cool, some lover, loner, or fool who has lived so hard he jerks awake in the graveyard, where he sees coming down the aisle a beam of light whose end he is, and what he thinks are chains becoming keys.

Even now this landscape is assembling. The hills darken. The oxen sleep in their blue yoke, the fields having been picked clean, the sheaves bound evenly and piled at the roadside among cinquefoil, as the toothed moon rises: This is the barrenness of harvest or pestilence. And the wife leaning out the window with her hand extended, as in payment, and the seeds distinct, gold, calling Come here Come here, little one

Be perfect, make it otherwise. Yesterday is torn in shreds. Lightning’s thousand sulfur eyes Rip apart the breathing beds. Hear bones crack and pulverize. Doom creeps in on rubber treads. Countless overwrought housewives, Minds unraveling like threads, Try lipstick shades to tranquilize Fears of age and general dreads. Sit tight, be perfect, swat the spies, Don’t take faucets for fountainheads. Drink tasty antidotes. Otherwise You and the werewolf: newlyweds.

“Who is Beatrice,” wondered Walter B., “to give Beatrice up her hope?” Beatrice sulked under her cauliflower-colored hat. “It is like,” said Beatrice, “I can barely crack another joke.” “This is correct,” said Walter B. “It is most certainly like that. Nevertheless, whoever you are it is not up to you to give up your hope. And additionally you are spoiling the day.” “What is ‘giving up your hope’?” asked Beatrice. “It is when,” explained Walter B., “you have to ask.” * It all began with the appearance of The Unlikelies. It was difficult to anticipate in these small men sitting cross-legged on the living room floor the havoc they would bring. They held hands. They sang a song about trees, and as they sang their tree-shaped ears swelled with what Beatrice would later describe as pride. They asked for gently steamed vegetables. They seemed genuinely concerned. “Pick a heart,” they cheered, “any heart.” Beatrice picked one. “Expect for that one.” Beatrice picked another. “And that one, too.” “That was less joyous,” said Beatrice, “than I’d expected.” “The hearts you picked,” explained The Unlikelies, “had been picked yesterday.” “It is unlikely,” said The Unlikelies, “that will happen again.” Walter B. hid in the kitchen. Whose side The Unlikelies were on, Beatrice began to wonder. “Pick a heart,” they urged. Beatrice picked another. “Except for that one.” Beatrice picked another. “And that one, too.” With each heart Beatrice picked The Unlikelies grew larger. They seemed genuinely concerned. “All is dare,” they reminded Beatrice with their mouths full of broccoli, and carrots, and peas, “in blur and core.” By dawn, Walter B. could still hear Beatrice picking hearts. Their empty husks filled the floor. The Unlikelies huddled closer together. “Except for that one,” they mumbled sleepily, moving closer to the door. The Unlikelies were, by now, as big as the furniture. “And that one, too.” Walter B. hid in the kitchen. He imagined he would make out of all the husks a hearty soup. He rummaged for a pot. He would feed Beatrice the soup, drop by drop, until she forgot this highly unlikely event impossible to forsee by any hopeful thing. “All is spare in buds and more,” promised The Unlikelies, as they squeezed their enormous bodies out the door. * Days later, when Beatrice asked Walter B. if The Unlikelies were still standing outside in the sunlight, congratulating each other, Walter B. said “no.” But Beatrice knew they were there. And she knew they would return for her. They seemed genuinely concerned.

The flexible arc described by treetop leaves when breathing currents ripple a branch to one, then the other side. Or the level, quickened swell that follows a gust over wetlands home to a million reeds. Any terrain you find arises from all that came before: succeeding event horizons from earlier eras brought forward by today's considered impetus to lift the way it looks, lightly, freely out toward whatever senses you are there— breathed into completion, a sphere, into all it is.

The number of bodies i have is equal to the number of gurney transfers that are televised. If we’re all “just human” then who is responsible? A fire station drying out from addiction. outside the drizzling of firepower, lowballing suns it’s like a sauna in here. the strain of a charred bladder. bottled water bad wiring, that spark is no good come sit with me for a minute. my feet full of diluted axe fluid thought I heard you say everything is medicine but that’s just hearin what you wanna hear

Dear Commissioner here are my directive accounts of genitals and cash now bring me your goods We don't live among fowlers Not all poisonous juices are burning or bitter nor is everything now which is burning and bitter poisonous Air is removed from the workspace and dispersed into the multiverse It's very strict metadata You get echoes and dropouts For the most part Juliet is gaseous now as a caucasian she gets it on the head and face and I move from hypocrisy to cynicism Cristal all over the face and neck concrete and glinting audible light on jumbotron marmalade for miles That good wood kept calling my name Behavior meet Behavior, Behavior meat all the social organs