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.