Garrett Caples

for Bill Berkson & Khaled al-Assad the union president’s dead & they won’t let transgender people pee in north carolina & here i’m complaining about climbing the mountain again the mountain’ll always remain if i’m lucky, to keep me from sucking & only a king mule will do. humbled by bill as he goes through the business of staying alive with dignified unconcern. i don’t deserve him, have no zen no dasein, just half-a-dozen self -inflicted wounds i’m expected to grin & bear & like robert plant, i do. it’s like i’m in a rembrandt or something holding testtubes to the sun to read my urine specimens & —spoiler alert—i’m trigger sad checked my email mid-poem so of course its bad news the ancient city is practically gone, palmyra, palmyra at least i still have bill here in isis usa

the trapdoor is closed; am finite again, but a moment ago—levitation! purple lights the bluewater bridge turned on the oil- black river st clair became fuel for the nightfishers there it was the dream of a memory or the memory of a dream that dumped me below a window, watching a woman change into a man. she entered his dairy log:at first all the world was america and didn’t that suck, he thunk, and strunk his cunk against an overwrought iron fence. they stood waiting like that photograph of the bootblack jack and the aristocrat looking away from her window at a fact well worth recording—Alexander Graham Bell wanted to call his daughter Photophone. between the forest and the gander i hand her over to Metacomet. yes i certainly did. and King Philip sayeth unto me: nature denatured thee friction alone makes her come therefore i need some more before you make me wear’um pants. O failed invention! where’d you get that voice? refusing to come to a particular point, castration finally made sense.

for Andrew Joron the desire to show is destruction in lessons forgot before learned no shrunken heads hang by wires no mourning songs of half-remembered shutters open the width of an eyelash it is enough for vision to run its finger along, for access to steal from forbidden shores the still-cold beams of night and pack them in ice but a child couldn’t live here nonetheless in the morning is come a bell that summons a fortune that reads she will soon cross the water and the intended instructions which may not florish after all she leaves a painting outside her room and in the morning it’s gone and not one word is spoke between them but her father carries it to his grave the desire to show is destruction and we are not hung with skins we must follow internal echoes commit ourselves to memory

the madder runs like blood lifeblood of the livebud that kindles next to earth the hair on the church is water the lovebirds curve their crutches down so long to the sacred palaces so long to the fingerbone that lingers on if i’m alive it’s no thanks to you if i’m comatose let’s make the most of it tomato ghost rude twilight ruby tear discipline disappears between the shapeless necklace and the cloudy robe of shrapnel in the absence of incense no balm can grease the throbbing temples of the rotting world