Down By Law

In the beginning there may be the word, but there is also the 

wordless

[We] learn the grammar of our being before we grasp the 

rules of our language

We speak, but only ever partly, and the unspoken is as 

intrinsic a part of our utterance as the enunciated.

The unthought known is a substantial part of eachof us

-Christopher Bollas

The kids who run barefoot

across sharp rocks know

more about transference than most. 

They dilute themselves from the earth

Never existing fully in any step

Navahos, ghosts, indigenous urgings

Where are their parents?

To be shoeless now is to invite disease

Or crippled bumblebees

Those kids know more

About transference

because their dread

isn’t for stepping on the edge

of something sinister

its for touching anything at all

awe is the suppression

of things too vast to utter;

a sudden clarity of the hopelessly

small perspective we share

and its unbounded negative space

Viva

the head is the only limb to get lost

the rest just grow weary

As the twentieth century fades out 

the nineteenth begins

 .......................................again 

it is as if nothing happened 

though those who lived it thought 

that everything was happening 

enough to name a world for & a time 

to hold it in your hand 

unlimited.......the last delusion 

like the perfect mask of death

-Rothenberg

Tell Me Something New

A high school mash note’s stammering lust.

Father and me, shirts and ties, snapshot glare,

and somehow graphed into that air

a young man’s foolscap poem when a just,

loose joinery of words was all that mattered.

But then in last night’s dream, she (mother, wife,

mash note’s love?) tells me a box holding secret life

has been shipped, enclosing sounds I haven’t heard:

a wind-harp’s warp, words yarding across staves,

fluty sounds ribboned to sad, screechy tunes.

And things: a wishbone, ring, whatever I crave,

the heart-hollows, the cannot-do-withouts, the whens

and whos, the frayed veils between death and here...

I packed this box myself. I packed it full of fear.

-W.S. Di Piero 

The past pumps through the walls,

My roommates belting along like they’ve

Experienced any part of it

Inside here, the television hums

Even one mute

I follow sports for the sake of disappearing

Existing elsewhere

Sometimes I’m so tired I return to the noise

Chandeliers and nicotine don’t bode well for despair

try to see through smoke and suck in glass

it requires being alone to work up the silence to go out again

Reverse the order of life and discover A Palindrome

In the fabric

Bedding is as thick as the fellow who falls into it

Past the Failure

To forget is to remember something else entirely

blankness has the feel of endlessness,

we cannot say how deep the coin falls

until it hits.

So forgetting is to say there is something on the other side,

a bottom to echo from.

Sometimes I forget things I never knew.

I exist in the darkness,

falling before there is ever a bottom.

The way you catch something in the corner of your eye

and spin to find

the street emptier than you left it.

 
 
 

She visits still too much, dressed in aromas

of fir needles, mango, mold: I still get lost

knowing she’s close, me not getting younger

or more conscious. Sometimes I fantasticate

I’m broad awake: her witchy presence waits

for me to jump into her arms, but then she’s just

an incoherent ache in sleep’s freaked scenes.

I feel her frosty nitrogenous hands and wrists

vaporing nooses around my head and feet

and genitals, conjuring my drab hair

into a party bowl of oiled, desirable locks.

She makes me nervous, but what would I do

without her? So long as I can’t have her,

I want her and this alarming manic frequency.

Then again, who wants to wake to change,

its pulped, smelly suit of meat, drawing flies?

My night-watch hot girl, moon-maiden, mom,

let me get just one night’s sleep without regret,

released from your foxy ticklish fondlings,

your latest smell of windblown fresh-cut grass.

-W. S. Di Piero