“Are you tired of it yet?” Can’t hear the answer through the waves.

The weather is done with our sanctity. Pacific. California Pacific, precisely: southern California when the sun leaves. We don’t have fingers to count the illnesses, injuries and deaths of people we know. If there were a bus or a train, I’d throw more parties. If you’d throw more parties, I’d take up surfing, be more gracious with small talk. Nothing is discrete—number, person, house, poem—sitting on the balcony as the sun goes by, bus goes by—not enough people on balconies or buses.

I don’t understand you, so I think you’re making fun of me. Write until we throw up, or only write at stop lights. I don’t understand you, but I see you’re anxious for connection. I’ve forgotten my phone number, my phone.

~

Potential poems: Of. Oh! If. To.

~

A person who coughs long enough begins to sound like they’re coughing on purpose. Persistent itch. A second, third, fourth or fifth language, almost understood, partially heard.

~

I love now. Kinds of sleeping and kinds of ritual. Standing on your shoulders was too—almost together we’re moving with crowds but no crowds here except in cars; a postmodern paining of cars looking at the greenbelt the train what else smashes?—small organic growing what opens?—hip (sockets) chest (sternum)—a whale watching cut free. Watching itself be cut free.

Love naps. Cold mornings and warm ones. A headache, an inability not to say oh! When someone says something interesting. Half a nose, clogged, lower backache vs. middle backache, standing on shoulders, on someone else’s shoulders. Falling off them, on to your back, my back, to a floor without mats, the day before an important holiday or ritual. So much joy I just might.

~

“Daddy’s little helper needs a break.”
“That’s a funny thing to say.”
“I know. I thought it would be funny”

~

From: Blank stare. Modern man’s current
address: wall to wall precarious over
limit texting to share this inexplicable
exaltation: “at one point I thought ‘we’
would be ‘different’ from” co
workers peers partners: many-sided progress
to point to find pleasure in blood (Dostoyevsky):
Mantle of apartments with no mantle
or fire—look at this: slip the social: a military
ship used to moor there.

What kind of ship?
“What kind of hawk?”

of street to walk on at
night to the club in shoes that
gave us shin splints.

Wake up in love with each other, with the rat on the carpet.

~

Irony/outer voice of critique as principle affectation—a demonic tendency to marry and divorce, to turn off the new phone. Everyday perversity: don’t eat breakfast until headache, nausea. Breakfast as universal ruin. Hello! Solitary bee, where is your hive? A mob of bees at my door. A swarm around the administrative building. Trying to live in an administrative building.

I’d like to love you at the expense of the poem. I’d like a new watch.

~

“Uh huh.
“What?”
“I said, ‘uh huh.’”

~

Inner vibration object out spinnaker and cormorant never expect to answer the phone one the beach sand makes what kind of a world gulls as bears as government ranger power station annual replenishment some shared abyss out

places love entire continents neighbors’ horrible music habit drugs healthy pelican hatchlings in the fake lagoon not fake but constructed water

to Australasia and Asia grounded as able to move backward bend so the front of our body is open: tops of feet shins, quadriceps, lumbar, stomach, lungs, sternum, chest, throat, mouth, eyes,

face.

~


Forced upon challenge as if employment.
Choice as choice or street as don’t
sit on the grass Traveling alone through
landscape and inevitable birds friends fight.
Brought the cloud cover with us.

~

Tell me every unexamined emotion. Sincerity doesn’t matter on the battlefield.