Aught No. 6 - Lacook, Four Poems

Aught, no. 6 (2001)

Lewis Lacook

Sunday Drive

Sundays we bounce the house around dreamily.
Uglier-than-thou (and sweating, too) ponders
not the bag that shrinks but abstract containers

scouring the processor map. What can't fractal
him is also what does obsfucate the face that
eventually's moved over the waters; passport
literally in hand; on Sundays we bounce the grown
leavings against our brow until it's bloodied and

sacrosanct; when the dead repeal your pants.
I'm breathing rapid poofs. Another telltale
licorice. My father can't remember in cold stones
knives that bend when you fall. It would hurt.

Owls Before Dawn

She smiles in this picture like she's got
lights so hidden inside her she's gotta
earn dark clothes, sleep dark hours,
empty out my homework on the server. She
peels outta her drive with listless integrity,
laminating her frenzied lateness to work un-
early with complicated dawns that emergency
seriously, seditiously; there's no one else
scalding enough for me. Like a comet

dropped through the tepid water of a Mexican
red horizon, in this picture she smirks
odd, thinking something about me, or her;
we take pictures to laminate each other, pack
souls along with books and movies, involve
you in our plans (wish I was ruffling

such hair on your arms you tremble so revealed
that you feel like me, nervously lit, all your
imperfections and zits staged for one another
calmly, as if we had packaged the landscape,
kicked ourselves for pointing at it, explaining:
"You know where this is. You've been here before").

Thickly Coated With Light

—for Renee

Round dollop of sunshine I must have thought up,
even your feet you feel are huge I thought up,
down to your lips and their jewelled juices I

thought up first (of course; otherwise, what
here in this starry night that bent Van Gogh's
orbit into tinfoil haloes would I kiss so urgently,
under streetlamps fractured with cars and crazy
girls not yet tangible with their ephemeral loves?).
Here to there, here and everafter, I bow before
the pendulum of what I was a year ago spouting
sap into the waters to pollinate dips, fattening

at the voice that careful palms slid beneath me from
ground into this hilltop jeweller's case, this impasto
assonance I now shake like loose curls in a ruckus;
impatientless, unlike my Vincent, head wholly head,
nondefunct: just a city block of nothing but sunflower.

Copula

Whenever I see you, my skin is undeserted.
Apropos of sophist diction, the sophistication
targeting blank little girls is over and done.
Entry to a horizon of virtual truth: those who
really care stay there even when you gnarl and

trample, and there's nothing you can do to
wallow in your own soup, the clinging odor
imbued with buoyancy, disharmonic, the two
not parallel nor rotating, no food for either
side. Whenever I smell you, the budding of your

skin, whole orders of rooms unmoor from their beams.
Education codes itself in the story your fingers
xanadu to flesh your nails: you're not too much of us.