ifyouaskmeabouttrashiwilltellyouabouttrash
hellohello

you don't get to know you don't get to know.

where is this place

you don't get
this place

where do you get to
where is you
where do you get to
you know you don't know
you get
you get
you get
this you don't get
you is this place



you reach for it you reach it
where do you get to  where where
howwhen

you reach out outreach environment.

cudgel.

"Man alive, we are reaching way back in time for our heartbreak tonight."

Even though we all knew that we were doomed from the start, somehow everything seemed so full of promise. We questioned whether or not love was a viable response to sexual stimuli or if it was something else entirely, some yawning desperation. Some great and horrifying beauty that we could not possibly reveal for fear of the unknowns of the forgotten things.
Was there ever a together in the sense that we wanted there to be? What separation anxieties do you breed? What names do you give them? Loves, loves.

Rockbag

He shrugs into his finely knitted overcoat every night late at night as he marches out into the tundra or the steppe. He carries a bag full of stones and a shovel. That is all we know. He has two extra teeth that grow out of his jawbone. They are tiny and round, but there is no mistaking them for not teeth. The odds are in his favor for being a failure. He has a dished face. Sincerely yours.

You could call memories of the past by many different names.
For instance foresight, which is like a memory turned around the whole circle.
A bludgeon, a nostalgia (which would make me feel easy, at, peace, at home in a memory, the memory of a place and a time, a space lost, a lost space that is uninhabitable, a lost-in-space time span) which does not draw me away gently, but separates fibers and tendrils which do not bind but create succors in my hair, like spouts of optimism or yearning despair depending on the moisture because I remember a time when I only had an idea of your existence and you did not know that I was there and thinking very hard. And I am here. But you were not there. But you are here.
And poetry, and poetry.
My limbs are self aware
and every pore speaks and sings
each hair stands in its root
which contains a direct conduit
to white nerves white ligament
you caress, pluck, sing into with light.
Our lungs are symbiotic creatures
which sustain one another underwater
equally
and do not discuss the baser organs
such as the pancreas and do not speak.
Not at all.

The teeth represent humility,
which resembles fully-fledged snap peas and lightness.

I refuse to compare something like your chin to something like a mountain.

The hands are all of the things
which they contain, such as birds
or leaves or tree bark.
And radiating outward from the palm are fingers
the fingers sense and palpate and know everything,
realize everything but say very little (which is due to their kindness and wisdom).

Though the flesh is tender and lustrous
(its softness is forty lambs)
it is not your throat that sings.

I would know,
like gold or gold's metaphor
or the metaphor of a forest cleared away or
vines that hold fruits of rare geometry and
every branch weighed down by a
yield of fruit, immense, I eat
over and over, the fruit delicious and
unblemished and juicy, I would know like a flood.

And so I breathe you in,
leaving secret messages in your spine.

AKarenina (excerpt)

He sulked in the distance and she felt him.
Her eyes flashed, looking at the strangers (she imagined benevolent strangers) in that crowded someplace. And she danced, occasionally glancing at the sulking figure in the red velvet armchair. He was opacity, penumbra.
She ruminated, clicking her tongue, mouth and head full of champagne.
I am so selfish. A smile. It’s not fair to keep him in my thoughts for so long. A snatch of laughter and a luxuriant gesture to the garlands. Can’t he just notice me? A friendly kiss on the cheek of an acquaintance. There was nothing shameful.* There is nothing wrong with me. Dance. Dance. The music raked its fingers through her hair. Turn turn turn. Turn.
She left the dancing foray with a group of her more respectable associates. They were taken to a parlor via horse-drawn taxi. They ate. They drank champagne. They reveled. They left. They kissed the night as the taxi ambled through old haunts, streets occupied by the living. The lights, gazing subtly and lovingly at the drunken revelers, spoke in supernatural languages that only they could decipher. They drank in the night, the city of light and magic, steeped in meaning that Anna could not decode. To home. “To home.” Home.
She dutifully tore off her bedclothes and shrugged them tenderly over her tingling form, settling into bed, pitching on the sea of revels. Bacchus. she stretched her legs eternally and cyclically, dissipating into the dark nimbus of this night, all nights.*
The venous hand of a cruel individual entered Anna’s dreams. A red velvet armchair was mocking her. Mocking me! Of all the nerve! Something jutted into place and air rushed past her ears. She felt him, sulking in the mutable shade, invisible and unadorned.
She lay, paralyzed in the half-wake. Could she be so bold as to breathe now? She gasped and felt something. She swirled.
Her eyes seeped water and salt, which dried in miniscule crystals as she struggled to sleep.

*from Anna Karenina by Tolstoy

Plane

Bernoulli, where are you taking me?

Wren says

There is no magical city:
humming industry, factories
of “ohm” and “aah” and
“clang” come out from deep
(in the earth)
where ore strata move
fluidly, indifferent. Trees
form in layers, come out
from the deep earth, where
life lives, where heat is inspired
into unconscious being.

There is no tuft
or cloud that did not,
at some point, find itself
under the surface of
this dirt. This dirt,
which was gathered
by the invisible hands
of magnetism
and unloving,
emotionless gravity.

They are the voices
which tell you in the middle of the night
that you are not special
and love is chemicals telling you
that you are something,
that you are not.