34.
Portmanteau
Remember
the accordionbottomed loafshaped
bookbags crewcut men used to lug at rushhour?
Now how thin, how pearlgray & swankbuckled
Our papers have become to fit in the
Waferthick carryalls. The conclusion
Is improvement shrinks everything to the
Size of a memory chip: ergo they are
Working on having world trappings
Be as small
As nothing
What-
soever.
35.
dockedge
the channel
the current
swift meal in a silo
fertile winds of plain having
feckless swells
in a
conflated
green soffit
a fierce green weed channel dug deep
fish have never swum so fast
how near to the surface
your rumble
aquarian farewell
in an aquatic view
office
largest of aquaria
farewell to them
so far beneath us
36.
The fear impounded stealthily, the mass of
Flattening
Flattening the world.
My God, the effort, pushed through cinctures of blood,
To round the earth out, puff its center up,
Shape the arc of water under air
And mold the curves of all 4 compass points,
And travel east as though upon a wheel,
To touch tomorrow's hour like a seam,
And launch this spheroid high in coldest night
Around a warm and loving sun. How sharp
A fuze it took to flatten out the earth,
And swash its history in bites and chunks
To fill the urn of pain up to the lips
And shave the edges down with burrbuffed welds
Smooth now, for the stripped down life in the pits
Of the jettisoned, the stretched, the shredded fill.
37.
My Long O
How I want to howl alone
& push aside the chattering others & clear the forest
with a cry
Like those of my children
—worse, bewildered, frightened, angry, unable, incapable,
Of the real knuckle-under fighting needed to
Force submission, or even sit cross-legged
Pendant like a Bedouin worried so
Of only how to get on with it
And what and why are you doing this to me
You know what it takes
You can move whole pieces,
Dependent glossy chocolate bites bit in semblance of the living
It all gets to be more difficult to feel us repaired
You mad surgeon, undressing wounds to see the blood,
I mad patient, undressing dressings to see the wound;
When, why, when you can come back to me and
Still in tears, still angry, still howling
Still loving in my heart as I always am,
Do not go away, do not stay, do not slide
Me down this rainbow, this dark well
This puzzling aftertaste of kitchen waste & smell
Of wonderful things gone sour, of roses
Dried and trod under
Cocoadependent
In the quotidian, the rigor of the March, the tramp
of don't you need me
Oh look where my abridgement comes a-wassailing
Don't you need me don't you love me my
only my life my wherewithal my A, my Ω.
