Neglect Effect

There isn’t a word for walking out of the grocery store
with a gallon jug of milk in a plastic sack
that should have been bagged in double layers

—so that before you are even out the door
you feel the weight of the jug dragging
the bag down, stretching the thin

plastic handles longer and longer
and you know it’s only a matter of time until
bottom suddenly splits.

There is no single, unimpeachable word
for that vague sensation of something
moving away from you

as it exceeds its elastic capacity
—which is too bad, because that is the word
I would like to use to describe standing on the street

chatting with an old friend
as the awareness grows in me that he is
no longer a friend, but only an acquaintance,

a person with whom I never made the effort—
until this moment, when as we say goodbye
I think we share a feeling of relief,

a recognition that we have reached
the end of a pretense,
though to tell the truth

what I already am thinking about
is my gratitude for language—
how it will stretch just so much and no farther;

how there are some holes it will not cover up;
how it will move, if not inside, then
around the circumference of almost anything—

how, over the years, it has given me
back all the hours and days, all the
plodding love and faith, all the

misunderstandings and secrets
I have willingly poured into it.

-Tony Hoagland

I spot myself while glancing outside, the window echoing its interior in

a translucent revolt of purpose. 

In this pane of dual places unaligned, cars pass through my hollow hand and disappear across the wall.

 I cannot break the gauntness of the rooms reflection, I cannot look away without being haunted by the place I stand.

We peer through glass to see the world, and sometimes the glass tricks us into thinking we are apart of it.

The moth the moon and the midnight goon

Reverse Everything

 New Rooms
the mind must
set itself up
wherever it goes
and it would be
most convenient
to impose its
old rooms--just
tack them up
like an interior
tent. Oh but
the new holes
aren't where
the windows
went.
-Kay Ryan 

(Stolen from William Carlos Williams)
so much depends

upon

the red pill

capsules

seized with shaking

hands

beside the brown

bottles

There is a time and a place for everything and I am in neither right now. The days are moving, my hair is growing but I am staying the same. I wonder where the moon goes when all the lights make it dizzy.

Do You Have Trouble Sleeping?

Still Life
I’m having trouble looking animals in the eye.
Their empty suits in outer space!
Monkeys injected with a virus to show off
Our eminent domain, the nervous system.
Teacup pigs we breed and obsessive mice 
Worrying themselves bald in a miniature opera.
For pleasures of the tongue we are
Winking cattle out of meadows
Slashing their throats and swiftly quartering them.
In riding habits with gold flame pins we ride horses
To hounds, chase a fennec fox until his red
Coat flares up against the extinction
Of light. Once in a circus we made
An elephant disappear and he did not mind.

-Kathy Nilsson

                                     

 

la event

skeletons sketched
in starlight sheik,
it takes more than oysters and tequila
to get me warm
but old bricks gleam
when textures of nonchalance
are hung on their walls
and you look even better
moving like you’ve forgotten
we’re all watching

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