You climb past the dull needle of the smile quitting its smile
in public urinals fifty miles south of so much more.
The events refine the ease with which you come away with nothing.
Applause never suited you.
The tips you leave behind grow back and destroy your dream.
The city has given up, they all love you, all of those beastly citizens.
You condemn anything old.
You condemn anything poetic.
Forget that which heals because you love to complain and I won’t even
say
about
what.
My days await your skeletal apparition, landing like a bird
on a wire, where you hang the rest of me. I have no room for
the pale blossom shudders in its shade. My people erase the words
I speak and the tiger growls in afterthought or dream. The future
reaches an off-limits construction sight around midnight, entire
economies wait in trepidation for this bridge to a clandestine path:
an angel on a string. My Princess, I am coming to save me from
without you. The blood my voice leaks into depths, merely pools
the sun to inform lovely black and white forms who swim the sink
of my shrinking heart. We have enough sunlight—
eleven pieces of penciled rice paper, Kiowa’s thin math and excellent
cuisine: a cherry red cup full of rice wine with sea shells
by the beaches in outer space. We measure them to the air we have
never breathed, which is almost life preserving. Watch us glide
across the water like sounds from a distant concert; the trombone
player’s savvy allegro, and a trumpet’s murmured humanity
like a baby to the sudden glare of its mother, sigh of water, dripping.
The falling stars are the tears of another god who still doesn’t exist.
And neither do I, Princess Japanese, award-winning whisper,
hiding place, flower petal, gentle curse.
One in the chamber, six in the clip. Her
dad taught her, “shoot to kill,”
lest she be sued by her would-be assailant.
Her father’s the invisible man. She makes
up all kinds of stuff—like the look
on “the old man’s face” mornings
when ex-girlfriends kick down the old
back door. Her photo album
reads like x-rays or a really bad story—
all bones I tell her, just enough
to piss her off. No bones she says over and over
so I’ve taken up playing the oboe. Maybe
she’ll stop spitting at me. Sometimes
the music induces a little nudity
and and and you know, hope and that invisible
island made of splintered palm trees
and non-dimensional falling stars.
The other night (3am) I stealthily entered
Pieper’s backyard so as not to disturb
her wiry dogs, nor to call attention
to pupils large as nickels. I watched
her bed sheet writhe like a plate of worms—
she noticed my silhouette at the foot of the bed.
She hyperventilated and the three dogs,
two of which are terriers and you know
what a nuisance they can be, went apeshit.
She claims her inner body separated from the outer.
Last night she claims I attacked her
with my tongue. Maybe she’ll stop spitting at me.
It’s a violent canopy stands overhead.
We’re thinking of adopting a past,
can you give us a hand?