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I. She thinks the monkey's bad luck because of all the Institutions it's seen. A curious curious George hooked to my hoodie, with arguably racialized, inappropriate lips curling out to smile and greet the staff as I ask for the nth time why no release or where is Albeheary? By now, anything may well prove to be true, which, of course, is insane. II. Sometimes I lose it. If I can't wear it, When I'm on the outside, the backpack Or higgly pocket. Little higgly pigglies Tearing at the tongue. Speak to me. Who, art? Thinning. More vodka. This time Lakeshore third floor, My DTs I can't dial. The kindest black Trans/guy who did my dialing for me. Others tore their hair out or hanged themselves. My roomie he collapsed his lung Eleven times. This is his last trip to the place. Eventual. Even. They moved me I got the same roommate Last New Year's as the one before. The shakes are permanent. The stain all the more so, like nothing. Inside, a perpetual processing. This is prisoning. Ever emotion's measured. "wrong" (with you) This isn't as or like anything. Outside, I just want back in. III. At one point, there was something to it. As when he found a hernia on me in the tub And suddenly, "operation." Herr Doctor. Then hospital at five years old and a Curious Curious George story. How he went too. Or windup Campbell's Soup. Of course he slept there, for solace. For comfort. Night rounds. Book lernt animal instinct. Aping compassion. Inappropriate lips. The old testament wronged.

She walks in beauty, like the night Of cloudless climes and starry skies; And all that’s best of dark and bright Meet in her aspect and her eyes; Thus mellowed to that tender light Which heaven to gaudy day denies. One shade the more, one ray the less, Had half impaired the nameless grace Which waves in every raven tress, Or softly lightens o’er her face; Where thoughts serenely sweet express, How pure, how dear their dwelling-place. And on that cheek, and o’er that brow, So soft, so calm, yet eloquent, The smiles that win, the tints that glow, But tell of days in goodness spent, A mind at peace with all below, A heart whose love is innocent!

She was a Phantom of delight When first she gleamed upon my sight; A lovely Apparition, sent To be a moment's ornament; Her eyes as stars of Twilight fair; Like Twilight's, too, her dusky hair; But all things else about her drawn From May-time and the cheerful Dawn; A dancing Shape, an Image gay, To haunt, to startle, and way-lay. I saw her upon nearer view, A Spirit, yet a Woman too! Her household motions light and free, And steps of virgin-liberty; A countenance in which did meet Sweet records, promises as sweet; A Creature not too bright or good For human nature's daily food; For transient sorrows, simple wiles, Praise, blame, love, kisses, tears, and smiles. And now I see with eye serene The very pulse of the machine; A Being breathing thoughtful breath, A Traveller between life and death; The reason firm, the temperate will, Endurance, foresight, strength, and skill; A perfect Woman, nobly planned, To warn, to comfort, and command; And yet a Spirit still, and bright With something of angelic light.

There are rooftops made of cloud remnants gathered by a trader dabbling in car parts and burlap At night, I dive onto the breeze fermenting above the dirt and dream that I am a crocodile a tin of shoe polish, an audience of two In the morning, before the smallest yawn becomes a noodle, I am offered a ribbon of yellow smoke I opt for fuzzy rocks and clawed water and, of course, the perishable window I am one of the last computer chain errors to be illuminated I tell you there are rooftops on which the moon stops being a cold jewel And one by one the mountains begin their descent from the chambers of a lost book

You were given feet but had never touched them to earth. You were given the sea and you fed upon it for months. So when your head crowned, ashen with loss of blood from the cord wound tight around your neck, and when they cut you from me, and you were silent, and the tide in me receded, I remembered the shearwaters following the ship—the slow sweep of them riding the wind’s current. The stretch of them, hovering, cruciform, shearing the air the way an envelope slides back into a box of letters, making its narrow space. I had watched from the stern for hours their trailing: as if stillness itself drifted toward me. I thought it was my life. Then someone lifted you up, and there was a sound, and they laid you on me, breathing.

Farm boys wild to couple With anything      with soft-wooded trees With mounds of earth      mounds Of pinestraw      will keep themselves off Animals by legends of their own: In the hay-tunnel dark And dung of barns, they will Say    I have heard tell That in a museum in Atlanta Way back in a corner somewhere There’s this thing that’s only half Sheep      like a woolly baby Pickled in alcohol      because Those things can’t live.      his eyes Are open      but you can’t stand to look I heard from somebody who ... But this is now almost all Gone. The boys have taken Their own true wives in the city, The sheep are safe in the west hill Pasture      but we who were born there Still are not sure. Are we, Because we remember, remembered In the terrible dust of museums? Merely with his eyes, the sheep-child may Be saying      saying I am here, in my father’s house. I who am half of your world, came deeply To my mother in the long grass Of the west pasture, where she stood like moonlight Listening for foxes. It was something like love From another world that seized her From behind, and she gave, not lifting her head Out of dew, without ever looking, her best Self to that great need. Turned loose, she dipped her face Farther into the chill of the earth, and in a sound Of sobbing      of something stumbling Away, began, as she must do, To carry me. I woke, dying, In the summer sun of the hillside, with my eyes Far more than human. I saw for a blazing moment The great grassy world from both sides, Man and beast in the round of their need, And the hill wind stirred in my wool, My hoof and my hand clasped each other, I ate my one meal Of milk, and died Staring. From dark grass I came straight To my father’s house, whose dust Whirls up in the halls for no reason When no one comes      piling deep in a hellish mild corner, And, through my immortal waters, I meet the sun’s grains eye To eye, and they fail at my closet of glass. Dead, I am most surely living In the minds of farm boys: I am he who drives Them like wolves from the hound bitch and calf And from the chaste ewe in the wind. They go into woods      into bean fields      they go Deep into their known right hands. Dreaming of me, They groan      they wait      they suffer Themselves, they marry, they raise their kind.

All the old photographs, hidden like buried Treasure. Broken prayer sticks under my dreams And my worn mattress. Each one like a postcard sent back Home; wonders only seen in slick travel magazines. Boxed up under my bed, colored souls on Kodak paper— I can still see Grandma’s smile next to her resting sheep dog. Like a blue lightning strike over the northern sky, Over two black houses, I pull the first leaf out, at random. A picture-flash: Tom and Susie Worker are sitting together On a couch covered with a large Navajo Chief’s blanket woven By her brown hands and sheep’s wool. The pattern of stripes— Blue to black to white, shifting like rain clouds to clear skies. My grandparents look tired. The day was Christmas 1992, With a little bit of snow on the Earth. Tired from traveling Over 100 miles away from their painted desert To the city, tired from raising eleven children of the Deer Spring before the Depression, before Roosevelt, Before the World Wars, before computers, before Satellite phones and televisions . . . . Outside, the north wind Was blowing Tuba City away. But, Grandma’s and Grandpa’s Eyes are glazed red from happiness. Outside, The clouds swelled full of snow and ice. A blue lightning flash, another photograph, another place: New York, 1985: I see the Statue of Liberty, tiny, like a pin Stuck in the gray ocean, surrounded by the wrought metal Edges of Gotham City. It was the only picture I took: The dollar-bill green lady holding her torch, guiding Moths, reality, men and ferries. As she stood in iconic Pose, Grandma flooded back, quickly: strong in her own green Velvet dress, she stretched dough over her palms, making frybread. A foghorn wailed just past the Emerald City’s fiery torch. My mind refocused on the warm glow of a new moon. The Lady’s light filled the starless sky like Grandma’s teardrop Turquoise and silver brooch. Made from a thousand tiny Kingman Nuggets, its shine captured in a perfect burst— A sunflower high on a green stem. Each seed a raindrop Made of smooth sky. When the sun touched the brooch, It was blinding. A perfect mosaic of water-light-sky stones. A blue strike—bright from a cigarette—steals Lady Liberty’s light. The Staten Island ferry moves on to Crow Agency, Montana. At Custer Battlefield, my cousins smile for a picture, tourists Next to Custer’s grave. Defiant, wearing dark shades, They hold up cans of Coors Light waiting for Custer to rise Again so they can take up their bows, arrows, uzis. Warriors, Proud and ready to hide deep in the yellowtail prairie grass. Their women and children safe in tipi camps by the Little Bighorn River. I know they would die again and again. Rise Again and again to put up more white marble tombstones. They would do this to save our future children, to save our Grandmas—Mary Black Eagle, Susie Worker, Great Great Great Grandmother Lefthand . . . . They would save our grandfathers too— Sonny Black Eagle, Tom Worker, the horned toad . . . . Lodge Grass Indians, the high school basketball team, plays A few miles from Mary’s block house and her ten grazing horses. Her basketball team is waiting for the final winning basket To end time, an orange ball to shoot dead the visiting team From Billings. Another war of Savages versus Whites. Won this time by the “Skins”—Class “B” State Champs again. Two Leggings, a ’49, a warrior’s party. The tranquil dark Raven feathers, a deep cold night fueled by a bonfire and beer. Victory runs hot, steaming piss into the trout-filled river Lined by a hundred cars, nights caws, and some more tame Drinking brawls. All night long, the happy Indian basketball Warriors sing ’49 songs:We won, but my dark-hair girlfriend Left with one of the blue-eyed. He na ya na

Do not a civilization make. Do they? Cozy up to the fleece of a sheep, take the lid off Elizabeth Bishop’s head and get a spoon. Do not eat yet; do not swoon. There will be hours for that. First there is a long war march. Then there are other animals to press into the barn before the lightning storm comes to cook the grass and rinse it and make a mess. But this is all outside and you need never go there. Can you ride a tin? Yes, you can, says the child detective. The poet lies under the sheep, reading of Robert Menzies, his wife Pattie, and their pets. “We had a lovely weekend,” they tell reporters. Just months later their cat’s dead. Robert turns from the golden syrup, while deciding whether to use a knife or a spoon, the television on though it’s only 8 am . Elizabeth was reading her poetry aloud into a woolly microphone. She thought she saw the top of Robert’s head pass by the window. She was thinking of the story “Marmosets” she was translating, by Clarice Lispector. A spirit moved out of the shadows and found an unopened tin in the cupboard and threw it at the window, causing the monkeys on the verandah to flee from the glass. You can hear it on the recording at PennSound. A shearer found glass in a sheep’s fleece months later. “Lucky.” “Why lucky?” “Lucky it didn’t take your thumb off.” That was what Bishop heard about it. She wanted something to give to Clarice. Something in wool or a painting. She saw the earth tipping up, as if she was falling over while looking out the window, and she was traveling to Australia via a flying tin of golden syrup, where there were sheep all ready to cushion her, but it wasn’t necessary for she fell into the arms of the Prime Minister. “Tilted space age pastoral,” she thought, but “marmoset” was what she murmured up at him. He could hear his wife crying that their cat was dead. “It was bloody ASIO!” she bawled. Saying sorry, he dropped the unexpected visitor on the lawn and went to his wife’s aid. He spread one of the scones he’d baked earlier and made a fresh pot. “I don’t want any of that ASIO muck,” Pattie grizzled. Robert turned to Elizabeth to see if she could hear, ready to explain how upset his wife was. Elizabeth had found a curious black spread in the cupboard and was helping herself. “That’s not food,” baa’d the sheep detective. Lightning struck where they’d been sitting just minutes before. “Life is not flat, that’s for sure,” Elizabeth thought to herself, remembering the sheep in the window back home, and starting to write a poem. It would be about flying through the air, and strange food, and the floury arms of a patriarch.

for Learned and Augustus Hand You, my friends, and you strangers, all of you, Stand with me a little by the walls Or where the walls once were. The bridge was here, the city further: Now there is neither bridge nor town— A doorway where the roof is down Opens on a foot-worn stair That climbs by three steps into empty air. (What foot went there?) Nothing in this town that had a thousand steeples Lives now but these flocks of sheep Grazing the yellow grasses where the bricks lie dead beneath: Dogs drive them with their brutal teeth. Can none but sheep live where the walls go under? Is man’s day over and the sheep’s begun? And shall we sit here like the mourners on a dunghill Shrilling with melodious tongue— Disfiguring our faces with the nails of our despair? (What dust is this we sift upon our hair?) Because a world is taken from us as the camels from the man of Uz Shall we sit weeping for the world that was And curse God and so perish? Shall monuments be grass and sheep inherit them? Shall dogs rule in the rubble of the arches? Consider, Oh consider what we are! Consider what it is to be a man— He who makes his journey by the glimmer of a candle; Who discovers in his mouth, between his teeth, a word; Whose heart can bear the silence of the stars— that burden; Who comes upon his meaning in the blindness of a stone— A girl’s shoulder, perfectly harmonious! Even the talk of it would take us days together. Marvels men have made, Oh marvels!—and our breath Brief as it is: our death waiting— Marvels upon marvels! Works of state— The imagination of the shape of order! Works of beauty—the cedar door Perfectly fitted to the sill of basalt! Works of grace— The ceremony at the entering of houses, At the entering of lives: the bride among the torches in the shrill carouse! Works of soul— Pilgrimages through the desert to the sacred boulder: Through the mid night to the stroke of one! Works of grace! Works of wonder! All this have we done and more— And seen—what have we not seen?— A man beneath the sunlight in his meaning: A man, one man, a man alone. In the sinks of the earth that wanderer has gone down. The shadow of his mind is on the mountains. The word he has said is kept in the place beyond As the seed is kept and the earth ponders it. Stones—even the stones remember him: Even the leaves—his image is in them. And now because the city is a ruin in the waste of air We sit here and despair! Because the sheep graze in the dying grove Our day is over! We must end Because the talk around the table in the dusk has ended, Because the fingers of the goddesses are found Like marble pebbles in the gravelly ground And nothing answers but the jackal in the desert,— Because the cloud proposes, the wind says! Because the sheep are pastured where the staring statues lie We sit upon the sand in silence Watching the sun go and the shadows change! Listen, my friends, and you, all of you, strangers, Listen, the work of man, the work of splendor Never has been ended or will end. Even where the sheep defile the ruined stair And dogs are masters—even there One man’s finger in the dust shall trace the circle. Even among the ruins shall begin the work, Large in the level morning of the light And beautiful with cisterns where the water whitens, Rippling upon the lip of stone, and spills By cedar sluices into pools, and the young builders String their plumb lines, and the well-laid course Blanches its mortar in the sun, and all the morning Smells of wood-smoke, rope-tar, horse-sweat, pitch-pine, Men and the trampled mint leaves in the ditch. One man in the sun alone Walks between the silence and the stone: The city rises from his flesh, his bone.

Considering the frequency with which I take people’s words out of context, lie through my teeth and smear anyone who doesn’t hew to my philosophy of division and contempt, I’d prefer my candidate of choice to stay on the high road, but there’s a certain element of fighting fire with dilemmas, not just for me, but for any candidate. Is it more important to lose honorably, or to get into the gutter with your own particularity when so much is the answer? I love the pumpkin idea. I will definitely use that and I also plan on making the “kielbasa launcher.” I already have a guacamole rifle and it’s the same thing, I just need to figure out how to do it. If you have ideas for that please help. Also on the splitting heads thing they have that hydraulic wrench that rips the brain chunks out of the head you can do that so much easier just get the fishing line attached to the fragments and then fill a two to three liter soda bottle with sand and throw it in the opposite direction your life is going. To see the results of this oscillatory combustion phenomenon between the acoustics of the cavity and the pyrolysis of the propellants which were used in irreproducible ignition which I never liked much anyway. I couldn’t decipher myself. Too bad. I have typed out some abbreviated remains where my old life used to be, but I’m still living in them as if they were a book. I spent the afternoon reveling and wondering what I need to do to get my own sheep. I saw sheep herding and shearing, admired the baby lambs, and followed the “from sheep to sweater” interpretive trail.