The building with glass angled this way and that
In from the street, inside folds, ascending
past glass swamped with sweat,
plaster cold with lavender musk,
an inkling fragrance slips—
ropes and cables feather down
a scaffold slapped together high
about the entryway: through
stairwells rumors shift as dreams
shift waking; pinkish tissue,
common spaces, rooms
packed with pockets, loose
buckles, a weave
of machines wracked and amazed,
corner rooms newly devoid,
wholly devout, on past the back cells,
past calculators, metronomes, progression
pacing back-and-forth, past
cost, price, bicker, patter,
billow-into-sale, past a woman
tense at a floor-to-ceiling window,
a man rigged to a shinier
situation, past silk evidence, the plastic
brink of last year’s celebrations,
crepuscular sheets bolted to an iron frame—
past after past cast out, faultlines
you dreamt or is it outlived
beneath the tower’s ruffled
frontage, its clung atmosphere
particle driven and prickly about it.
A seasonal display
Your avenue is hive and jewel, my restless.
The after-thicket of bright exhaust
stiff where entrance swells
shoulder-bag-to-shoulder-bag with exit.
So “not me.” So stand clear.
Your destination is implied, dear we.
There's always something else to see.
A brick. A bauble. A caught explosion.
Dear nowhere, your nails drag
a click track into soot. Wall tiles
grown brackish, all grip and broach.
Quite a museum says the honey.
Quite a sticky. Customers string themselves
across storefronts glazed
with spray-on frost. Rest your eye,
my piecemeal, here
against the pliant, near-liquid pane—breath
tacks up slow blankets to muffle the glass.
Calling Home the Cows
Where night comes in, the door’s growl and fetch.
Crouch to a lower peek, street light delivered
through the letter slot. Here, featured, some
darling shoes for you– backed and streaked
with day’s gunmetal cud. A man come about
a little animal he wants put together.
Each job’s hook is tenderer, like this light,
like that public sunken shoulder set to level the door,
your opening blackening eye. And so you said,
“Come on in, I’ve been having a little episode.”
You’ve been having that dream so ankle deep in blood.
Oh kid among wax paper. Oh fatty glistening lips.
You need the scratch but no you’re done.
You’ve already passed on this offer once–wanting
to slip on a future like see-through gloves. Just so
the seams crack, shackles reach down
to the street, liquid, red. This past mouths abstinence
at you now o proud flesh. Hmm. Phlegmatic
trucks sit and sputter outside: the prospect
of a solid employ a vanishment. Consider your own
cooled heels at the zero hour and how the gibbous moon
stands in for Lips of Fate. You believed in lasting
work once but the moon’s not talking and you are
just the one cry in the airshaft. The Booke of Fame
is a many shout. What made a local boy big
on the small screen: less the familiar way
his glance o’er-threw, more the way
he punched some lady’s thighs with his silver tact.
Afterwards a sound like puppets doing “breeze.”
Cars at their cow shtick pacing the downtown
palaver. Big cobble stones tightly packed,
a script writer’s dream! Et, voilà. Here
where the cattle end eating cattle, where the feral cat
licks its pillow through continuous night,
the local boy’s pissed, chucks sawdust over slop
all over the set. The klieg lights adore him.
Hmm of your own blue monitor, as the director
off screen and last year cues the glamour puss
to croon you and you alone.
Design
Frost at midnight needle-points the windows
above us and on every side. Is this what pins me?
The windows do shake, the heat does rise
from roads and the layers of roads under them.
Is that the trap? I wake with words,
I sleep with words, and still I cannot speak.
It's a trick of the jaw. The skull itself conspiring
to keep me just short of you. Here, the question of merge
and the points in our bodies that play at being able.
That lie down for the other, baring the neck
to so fine a set of blade and bone.
What you carry inside, you carry
as if a cradle, a back and forth and not ongoing.
There we are, you'd say. Already
it escapes us–ribs split for the foot,
then the head, stretch of skin, sin and muscle,
that third of us munching seawater like grass.
Is this the way out? So I ask, so I am bound
by stranger flesh. Until the drivetrain slips,
until the sirens arrange themselves
into a pattern one can sing, the stars left to steer by
will be cold. The design, we say,
is greased, slips from us. Who put me
here is you. Who left me here is me again.
