To a dead man’s room

Did you always feel aired out, or
bleated, as in an empty O; pathetic

parenthetic; the walls ringing
for that which they’re without; was it

so, or did the opened space
hold full possession of the loss;

an ocean breadth in which
the act gets carried out, & out.

if they catch us tonight, we hold court in the street, awaiting

the arbitrage of the morning- stars. Plumage of tongues

rattling in enameled cages, grinning warlike as chimpanzees;

we be the dogs that scent
the havoc, electing the weak.

Prosopagnosia

All tomorrow’s for reservations. People ask
for masks and venues to wear them while I
like a comma, scenting bright
pixellated warmth, follow a girl
through nearly hermetic conversations.
I don’t ask her name because
I can feel its memory in clots of braille
on my tongue, a thing known only
to nociceptors on fingertips
and I want to go blind.
All my words are inmates rattling
enameled cages, begging pardon
in sentences from a Panopticon tongue.
I crack a beer with my eyesocket; the cap lodges,
blood monocular. Then the lights go red.
I am costumeless. Decoupled.
Somewhere a train is leaving.
And when the speakers’ volume calves
I drift away,

the silence denudes me.

A Convex Hull

Inward I go mute

teething a thought that gestates
and passes with the gravity
of a kidney stone, under inversions
of trilobite battle formations
lit by the capillary effulgence
spreading from the single lamp
that depends from the ceiling.
The walls bicker and vie
in race of palettes.
In the morning
my landlord will finish painting
and fully translate the room
but now with all the furniture
tucked in a corner my echoes
triangulate and return amputated,
toppling on a dry hypotenuse.
The room contracts to bound
the irreducible space of self:
finite, cutaneous and lacking
in positive pressure it spills forth,
scalar like fever escaping a clean room,

then I have a voice again.

Quarry

The sun bakes the soil
in an earth reduction.
Hydraulics lick clean a fjord
whose limestone tide leaves
by the truckload.
The ground retreats from the sky,
sloughs like scar tissue
from new skin, births foundations
for structures antagonistic to nature;
gas stations risen to the surface
like botfly larvae; stria of motorways.

Or, early, hearing errant things
turn error, the tear among
letters carries you back

Anecdote

Sometimes at night
the world gets in.
Moonlight floods the yard,
the shadow opens a window
where the light from the house falls.
Something in the tree line.
Fear jarring my clay heart,
cast like a bell, sounding
distance. I could run
but where to, I am now
an island, portless. The dark sprawls
and yawns; I think:
If I am parallax between this door
and that window, it will think me
an army. Now. Calmly
I should destroy the stairs.
Please let my finite light prevail.
If not, then
I hope the jaws close like doors.

Atrium Car Ceri

descending the hill

through the vascular night

glide twin halogens,

systolic dark

edging their light

spasms then closes

reflexively behind them

as though a wound.

We fear the slip of signatory
animals: turned, as any word

into a state of something more
divested: oceans are apt,

pouring forth as attributes
exceed the name,

to blind, and masters to follow
butchers, open-mouthed,

as if half through singing.
The name is strictly similar

for animals; of mouths, what clears
throats for swallowing.

Colophon

I would fill the journals
you've left to me as gifts,

perhaps the slim one
bookmarked by a knife

which cleaves to or through
the signatures depending

on the weight of bound material
and hilt as balanced over a door

I leave ajar. But.
As the knife

turns the door in,
sometimes the air resists,

the book falls
face open to the floor,

the doorknob severed.
A trap for game; though I am

a solitary animal I can hear
the warning of the words

I will not write:
All hinges on me. Some alarm.

Aggressions make way
for material,

as often a knife is used
to turn a door.

Self bound and blind,
the catalogue echoes

the master, who dives
for worlds, forwards

following the guide
of the thing he drowned.

Other Prosperos have drowned
a book to make it sing.

So I stay awake all night
watching the third worldly tide

(darkness) recede
and catalog everything

with my peripheral vision
and its superior eye

for divestiture. Or
as an oceanographer

diving in a bell, delivered
from sensory deprivation

by the ringing in my ears,
nitrogen bubbles, paroxysm smile.

I cleave to passages/ leaving impressions
but never permanently/ at each moment
altering the alert/ a red object cannot stay
as such but run/ to soak to seek the thing
that had left it/ Mouth: offered
pauses and water/ for pseudonyms

While Working Towards A Chrysalis

I though I had
emerged broken, tried
to mark time by
watching a bruise
soaking through my
palm spread wristward
like a watercolor
impaled

pain enveloping,
doorknobs holding
back my passage
in contempt, laughing

then the poem sends:
Dear Canary In
Mineshaft.
Stop. Breathe
Deeper. Stop.

Tongue filled an ear/ learns too how to
do away with a thirst/ the audience also
learns how to smile/ by the book
the subject in question/ knows what is
best for itself:/ water The thousands
slicked shining/ and volumed

Concert Hall In The Shape Of A Human Body

I can hear
the colony of names rousted
from echoes in a hive
of raindrops. Black
coruscating air torn
shining and machined
by volume. The ear persists
for its audience of slicktongue
leaves, learns to appreciate
the glissando, conduct
and enjoin. Cloudline
darkly mute. Then
that single crash that opens
the sky, closes, and smiles again
the thousand scintillating mouths
that glitch and abrade as if teething
bonewhite on palmed light-
motifs. Streetlights carve a hollow
in the night from which bricked walls
emerge. Canons of Ourobouros
delta treads roll past,
fording intersections
filled with shortlived rivers.
All this for hours and then
the reprise: sparse percussion
of footfalls on asphalt
and the sills that forgive
ingress to a single drop
before the flood's reign invades.

No longer the one who offers/ the name receive the answer: echo
given in what the hand under/ threat of saying withholds.
Still the sail sets out the map/ the explorer devoted the people
with a book buried under his arm/ still it is not the threat of one
who offers but the give of book / that breaks: undoes the name.