Aught, no. 15 (2006)
I'm Waiting,
there are thorns in the blackberries, drawing scratches,
I’m waiting, reckless endangerment on every highway,
I’m waiting in the fire, its calendar, its peeling heart,
I’m waiting, there’s only dying, here, suck on its velvet,
I’m waiting against a tower, to be stabbed, whistling
I hate all gods with planets, hurling verbs at their white columns, waiting
for the sky to fill with blades & blackties & monosyllabics,
I’m waiting for Barack Obama to enter stageleft & start flipping the script,
this, the final classroom, extracted from the mouth’s
onslaught of teeth, I’m waiting, where are knuckles, where’s
redness, where waiting, a 500lb bomb, hurts like a
will night tongue its press flat against my pajamas,
I’m waiting, West Bank, for you to be without tubes or imported dirt,
for voices in the halls to be other shadows, buildings, deserts,
I, with scissors, doorframe, & lymphnode, am waiting, waiting
to dissect home & homewardness, to construct a new mantle.
Your knees forget the moves to classical dances. No one tells the manifestation
of the world with dance anymore. I don’t want to think about your knees,
I don’t want to wish them away.
Words pass through imagination, they turn into things. Things get turned into thoughts & back to words. Your wrists are brackets. Disenfranchised. They’re more attractive in the rain.
There shouldn’t be any water in the skin. When you hold the teapot in the palm of your hand, the room fondles the hair on my legs. I want you to stop moving.
My ears are topped with expensive wine. Your southern country opens its mountains & its borders thin the blood. The words out of your mouth never give me hope.
Do you have to leave handprints on the showertiles? Don’t leave the kaleidoscope in the water. Its redblue triangles scare potential lovers & keep them from lining up on the porch.
We shouldn’t speak to each other the way we do. Words don’t know how to act. You’re not careful enough. Don’t make me think I’m not really here.
My heart’s a green matchstick. At any time it could be struck. I could become familiar again or I could find the ocean more giving.
The jar of seashells grows dust in the corner. We’re a lot like that, can’t you see that? The cone of myrrh wilting on the nightstand. We’re that way too.
Words end up being used as names. What we assume about ourselves is assumed by those names. I forget your real name, which seems indicative of how much I like having you around.
When the humidity disappears in the stringlights, their white heads, their Saturn orbs, their Ophelias, I imagine being on a deserted island. I wouldn’t be able to hear your blond hair rapunzeling on the rocks outside the window.
Your bellybuttonring’s the end of thought. It snags my throat. You put too much pressure on the hips to straighten the pelvis. When I mention you, others think I’ve been unfaithful to the city.
This is a test, strip of typing, fingers that knuckle
the hieroglyphs. Higher gifts than mine are
the dome’s. All I eat here’s the day, getting through
sixteen itches of plate glass, forearms that hide.
The arch of arc’s an absent letter, an hour
with sound, beads that water a point’s mintfresh
spartan. O livid link, O peristasis of cooler. I take
a tack on the estuary filled with suitcases.
I’ve gone back to where the telephone burns
a telling form, a telling foam, a telling fun,
that of rooster, biometric spur, iris booming
with light that can be slit down the middle, saturated
with before diabolical reception. I off the scalp,
rainsoaked staff, new sentry, come with grifted
cream to desert the being home in the unlived.
I gush, dry up, position my silk between juice & rind.