Telling the Future Off

transcript

TELLING THE FUTURE OFF

TELLING THE TOUGHER DISGUISES SAN DIEGO 2005

STEPHANIE YOUNG

FUTURE OFF

The author wishes to thank the editors of the publications in which some of these poems previously appeared: 580 Split, Can We Have Our Ball Back?, Combo, Magazine Cypress, Five Fingers Review, LIT, Mirage #4/Period(ical), Secret Swan, Shampoo, Small Town and Suspect Thoughts. Thanks also to David Kirschenbaum for publishing some of these poems as a chapbook, BOOG Reader 7.

Particular and overwhelming gratitude to the friends who read these poems first, including Tanya Brolaski, Tina Brown Celona, Del Ray Cross, Richard Greenfield, Larry Kearney, Cassie Lewis, Catherine Meng, Cynthia Sailers and Tim Yu. Thank you internet. Thank you bloggers. Thank you Clive.

designed by James Meetze

distributors Small Press Distribution www.spdbooks.org

Tougher Disguises Press6289 Caminito BasilioSan Diego, CA 92111www.tougherdisguises.com

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 FIRST EDITION

ISBN 0-9740167-4-8

TOUGHER DISGUISES

CONTENTS

FALSE BOTTOM…………………………..7

TELLING THE FUTURE OFF……………..27

BOTTOM………………………………..55

AGE OF THE MERCENARY…………....81

CHOKER....................................95

FALSE BOTTOM

A LION THAT WILL FLY WITH HIS FACE BACKWARD

As we are given it, a dog-eared business. Pause while I stop to speak with the

dogs. For soon they will be old and learning nothing. They will be mine, and

very tired. Such is the cul-de-sac. Should we rise to view the meteors fall,

our nature in the dark is both common and elusive. A newsprint we hunt for

its hide. In the morning you can’t have opinions about the stars. They should

not have shot themselves another direction and neither should the paragraph

struggle to eclipse the paragraph. Still we give chase, the dogs bay, the lion’s

face is very beautiful, with holes cut out for the eyes.

AS A SAILOR BREAKS A BISCUIT

In the afternoon of reading

uncorrected proofs, really lovely

with food too

and wine and beer and a face with a topic to land on.

Just think of it, somebody got slapped in the face

or something. From the party, cries of oops, and oops,

and oops again, line items

linked to the wrong spreadsheet.

Between the eyes

a reveler mis-handling light, misphotogenic,

a man who arrives at the building where he doesn’t work

to barricade himself and some employees get out

and some doesn’t, it’s unclear

if the man even knows there are people with him.

Let us speak clearly of what we are taking pictures:

“Lava” on time release

thieves at Ashby

thieves at Ashby and 7th

no bomb scare but a Situation.

A three piece siren, hired for comfort and shot

into the atmosphere with social grease. An image

asleep in the contracts while the server crashes, and crashes,

does this sound like waves crashing on the Berkeley shore?

I PAY ATTENTION TO THE WORDS & ACTIONS OF OTHERS

There’s no limit to the number of pages

fluttering across our manufactured shore.

One comes toward us now, first from the front

and a minute later she’s behind.

It’s a girl

only because you can take her

elegant black travel case

through an overwhelming number of colored doors.

Even the largest LED moon in north America

wheels through its own casting light

“aware but not too present”

if conditions are lucky, shooting dark proposals

with a concave top and flashing eyes, her shirt

says PRINCESS. From behind, UNCLE SAM.

100% sky.

100% riveted, night arrives

with gold powdered on your face

same as in the poplars.

Stuck in this natural preposition

the girl falls into a ring of makeup

on the shirt she can’t return.

This one says BOYS ARE GREAT and

WELCOME TO THE NEW MILLENIUM.

It’s a thrilling wager

in a sexy PLAYER patriotic way

way of the gun, gunslinger

picture of a gun

going off on a girl’s shirt

WHEN REAL FOOD IS FRESH & LOCAL & VERY EXPENSIVE:

MY SISTER ASKS HOW ALICE WATERS GOT HER NAME

Here is the story of when we lived so close that anything could be tossed

into the Pacific from the end of the day. As promised, there were luncheons

with food cut on the diagonal, into fours. Then dinner, and private parties,

furniture no sooner taken from the box and established than we could suck

the aquifer dry. This is what I blame the media for. In 23 years the station

didn’t change. As if for the first time, you appeared very new and bald beneath

the velvet of the Christmas tree, the way it happened when they brought

you home. Later, you got a bad permanent wave, don’t think I forgot. Finally

I could never see you for the tulle. You were covered in white and leaned

forward to position each breast in its cup. We were lost in Sephora’s countered

second floor, I thought we should have been together in Texas, a finite set of

powder as far as the eye can see. Then what the eye can take, it takes. Den

mother of history, peering out the window—we wanted to feel the sirens,

their coming and going, but don’t tell us what really goes on at the empire.

How the good times come to an end. We had come through the badlands

only to arrive at the badlands. It would be impossible to say I threw you back,

I’m coming to get you, to play with you, in order to receive you, I want you,

without a buggy crashed the dune. In the end the water was brackish and

overfull of our things.

THE PRESENT EYE PRAISES THE PRESENT OBJECT

In the dormitory I was hard pressed to see what other girls claimed in the

various magic eye selections. Even cross-eyed. Even on acid. I had the biggest,

bluest balls you have ever seen. I carried coffee in a white mug and wore a felt

hat. I jumped off a bridge into the water. We were in the bathroom trying to

see the magic of the magic eye and I couldn’t see it, the third dimension was a

poster on the mirror in the bathroom that conveniently obscured the view of

my head. I was a monster, even at the time, even to myself. Mostly because of

my failure with the magic eye.

TODAY I WILL SEPARATE THE SPIRITUAL FROM THE MATERIAL

While the ceiling turned on the hour, and then an hour later we could be

seen trotting down the path “crusted,” they instructed me to clean up after

myself “with diamonds.” I know the clouds and they are not heaven. I know

they turn and sometimes away from me in bed while the light still POURS

I say HELLO I AM HERE pouring from the ceiling. NOT I said no—no—

notorious boys on ladders—have printed up the answer. The method is called

printing and they use a potato. A coupon landed in my pocket but I didn’t

use it. Keep an eye on the edge of the press. And the cloud, because it will not

speak, a cloud of such pretty encounters—

DAY IN THE LIFE OF I: THE DAY MY ARCHES FELL

Exact in its unmade form,

the bed. Rising and falling

on the right side of anything, I’ll have

what she’s having. Pink highlights along the nose

and brows, agency of pink,

pink when next to red, flesh colored

key in her place on the keychain.

I with strings of light

cast between the poles,

would be pipes

if they didn’t rhyme so hard

& I fought not to throttle each bulb

to a higher consistency. Ladder in the lights,

sound of a staple gun falling

or shot into the wall. Imagine I was forced

to review each string for the broken effect

ruining the effect. Climbing

and falling. Was that my fantasy? I turn some lights on

and some lights off. I open a door

without touching its handle. Doesn’t a poem in which the majority of lines

begin with prepositions, not this poem, constitute a theory?

I raised my arms above my head and in my hands were platters.

I found the photographs thrilling

also the greenery. The platters with food appeared to hover

in air of their own accord, sauce in bowls

cut from fruit, yet it was I

making them move.

SWEET, BID ME HOLD MY TONGUE, FOR IN THIS RAPTURE

I WILL SURELY SPEAK THE THING I SHALL REPENT

How bad is it, in the morning

folded into quarters in the pocket of my favorite pants

a slight or passing regret. An engine

unexpectedly at rest, keeper of accounts—

the mouth, as I have described

I got it bad

in the morning, my hips very tight

but don’t get me wronged. I computed the sun’s true bearing, swore

an oath declaring innocence:

I am an original Californian

to go to the trees for hunting clouds, a tempest

in the cinerama dome. I was a shop girl you compromised—

I will never be a shop girl again. I am a calculating machine

to be learned by heart to steer the ship, I have been persuaded

against the main stem, I, having an internal cavity.

Which includes pity for the entertainment

for it is irresistible to behave in a certain way despite one’s conscious wish.

Such as cleanliness, vile concentration of straight lines, vault of the sky,

I pressed my face into the pillow to conceal the sound of sobbing

for when I’ll not have hands but polished silver models.

I HAVE A MIND OF MY OWN & I USE IT

Despite or perhaps because of

inflight magazine Hemispheres

we see still

through a quadrant darkly.

On a dark station the day in me

hardly believes it take this next right

at all. I have mistaken myself

for inciting you to desire: riot of passages

which still compel—

is it right to be

“in the world but not of it”?

You tell me.

A crowd storms the escalator

a crowd is storming the stairs

and we hang back

to pick at the guitar you’re picking at your guitar, again

I KNOW endlessly.

Get your hands out of my mouth.

Do you know where I have been

holding this receiver to my own head

and you had the nerve

to mis-heard me, “Is love bald?”

It is everyone v. we

with carts full of food

and someone shouts the tide is turning.

The tide when it comes.

The tide is a magnetic strip.

Your hair looks cute that way.

I have said it myself at the door

before evening begins.

We thought we needed

more of those giant cranes.

As when you press

on your closed eyes

with your closed hands.

DO NOT GO NOT LIGHTLY INTO THE WORLD

OF WONDER

Tell me why

I shouldn’t let you put my hand to the job of carving?

Open your eyes:

we stand before the open gap

& contemplate another trip to Hades.

The vocals nod a little

towards the anguished cry of mending left undone.

I turned to go and get my bag. Here’s my body, then. A falsehood.

The grass from science fiction

everything else from memory. I mean for you to take

this interrogation seriously.

Was the music coming from a piano?

Why do you think people should go on round-the-world-trips?

For one thing, I do not accept—I am trying desperately

across a twenty-two story block

to discover how far one can go

only by calling.

It is not easy, if not, I let go?

Please do not think I am being rude.

We stood before a vision, two sets of diamonds

in a singular ear. One was true

and the other followed a simple chord progression.

It wasn’t the song at fault, but some

self-evidently false doctrine. You saw my legs appear

like sticks in the mirror

after the creamsicle’s been sucked off.

Such is the weight of a false body, a riot of swimming

coherence, the anguish of mending, our simultaneous return

to the poem I left undone. You were in Hades.

I was in Hades—both of us

solemnly swearing

never to do it again

and that,

sadly,

is not the only difference in style.

THERE’S LANGUAGE IN HER EYE, HER CHEEK, HER LIP—

NAY, HER FOOT SPEAKS

Save the fly, movement in the house

has no legal force. I foolishly tend to accept the elixir of life,

I demand to speak with the King. There it is!

There you are, smoking at the window, I demand to know

about Venus. I am hard to satisfy. Exacting in my labor with the spade

and research of documents passing as freely through a transparent body

in the voidest space. Here is a graph concerning the separation of work

a draft payable on demand, a baby when it cries

not according to a timetable. I formally claim

I am the rightful owner, I demand to know the cause of your sorrow

and appeal to the popular girls, likewise, Marilyn

a young woman of an artificial school

with a message I must deliver in person

in my loud and authoritative voice

THAT I MAY GIVE THE LOCAL WOUND A NAME

More and more we are evacuated.

Lifting weights is good for the body. The gospel,

a proclamation of the gospel, a numeric value

for good nutrition: what’s good for the bones

must be good for the body. Good works be wasted—

there was a god more specifically responsible

for the east or south-east wind. There was a god

made the wind go, to the south

and to the east a means of bringing about such a death,

a stem on the point of vanishing or too small to perceive.

Gentle now. Easy now

with the good news. I am able to be evacuated.

Improved along with all the other mammals

I am capable of roving—

RETALIATORY DREAM AFFAIR

We’re looking for a special kind of vegetable fritter,cooked in vegetable juice. We drive to the fritter standin a miniature car. I’m only doing this to get back at you, we had a bad time in Italymy name is bad IlianaTOO MUCH INFORMATION my love poet says I’m ruining it for everyone. And besides, you only saluted the right of women everywhere to remove their shirts while drinking coffee in public. In Vancouver.Your desire to salute them with kisses! I am enraged! Is this really so different from my behavior in the sleeping room? When we are not in a movieyou speak into tapes, I’ve stopped us to seethe revolving bar of lotion but neither of you is very interested. There’s nothingglamorous on the cover of the style issue, the arrow piercesher most uninteresting part, tilted to maintaina false disclosure. You might as well rub me with soapand send me to him yourself, tell me his last name if he’s here with us in Oaklandtonight, what would he say? I bump the table with my kneesin order to tell him you’re the one I want to marry but am betrayedimmediately by these stupid pronouns, which are my only vocabularyand so of course do any number of things to me,

trying to sleep through the waste clean-up procedure.

EXTREME NO SMOKING

Entered the confessional

from the side, not that

I want to be a real boy

but I want to smoke

a real cigarette. Smoke covers its own

figuration, the unfortunate shape

evening takes without smoke

to define it. False pain as a character

in the radio’s novel. Lines in a machine

pressed by a needle

into the next line, for I am not driving

or walking to the store. I pretend

you are writing me letters. Instead you are

filching water or beer from the kitchen, that is truth for you

O, David, Nouns.

In a telescope, I approach

until we’re close enough to exchange

wan smiles. I say give me a cigarette

and down comes the needle.

It does not sound like what it is. Is that

wind? Are you raining in the trees?

MERCURY RETROGRADE

The referees all point in the same direction: hideous blue. The better to

ignore the bat with, breaking again into smaller pieces, revealing a collection

of paint chips where the crowd expected whole, painted walls. “There’s

your evidence,” if there are messages they are coming too fast—they bounce

back and get stuck in her teeth. She shakes her head & continues to climb

the stairs…holding the rail…everything she does…so laborious…pinged in

the last 24 hours but none of it shows on the site. They are communicating

at 3100 bytes and then user authentification failed. She says there are more

messages on their way but has locked up my one good knee. The messages—

are vulgar. It’s excessive, moving this much. I’m not surprised when you back

away from me. How does she find you, that’s what people want to know. Well,

first my knee disappears, then the weather is utterly changed and finally we

hear something like the sound of an air conditioning unit falling from the

wall. Her footprints are frosty, as if she chewed commercially viable gum.

“She’s here,” I say to the paint chips, but they do not, as you might expect,

animate themselves and perform the minor dances usually reserved for the

space between a trailer and the movie. We all whimper as the curtain comes

up, for she is magnificent & always comes through intact. We cannot look away.

It is closely related to a glaucoma test. A lemon comes sailing through the end

of this poem and you will forget everything you have seen & heard here.

TELLING THE FUTURE OFF

Orient yourself. There’s me: dragging the fire extinguisher up and down the street. My

face stuck in this moment of bad behavior. The money’s on its way. My hair is getting

softer by the minute. Everything on the counter has its base in aloe vera. I’ve been

saved by the unmentioned bills, the unnoticed steve, under the machine operator, I’m

trying to get your attention. Just waving my fingers to breathe evenly, biting my tongue

for effect. There’s a bad thought across the way which is hard to resist.

SHOULD I STEP OUT?

Now we cast the pitch, condense it into three to five: Rimbaud said wreck me

twice. Will I find a good job? My head is in the toilet on both counts, it’s

worse when you go back out. Rent is a fun musical. Either you’re working it

or there’s a scene in Denver working you. I was a bad sleuth. I wanted the

super toy and joy, I was in the toy and joy, I was 25 cents in my new Betty

Page negligee. I won’t be content with a hobby. One can hardly cope

with the ocean, it got pushed back to July.

TODAY I ANNOUNCE MY WILLINGNESS TO ALLOW LOVING EXPERIENCE INTO MY LIFE

The problem with song is eternal request: let either love or your tears come

down. But I, I have this layer of flab around my head that threatens to go

off without warning. My milking pail floats away if I don’t pin it down

violently—

the problem here

is with rain.

Also difficulty with grass

the material objects in my car

take on actual suspicion.

See me glued to the saddle, figuline we dream of toppling.

That’s wrong. All the more light for the hazy spot at the soda fountain I once occupied.

When we came rushing onto the city from the hills, I had some vague idea of redeeming my love. I thought of nested settings.

The story of a diamond in which everything except the stone is recovered and consequently paraded through the lobby.

I could smell him in the city.

I could smell him in my sleep.

I AM A RESOURCEFUL PERSON

When at my command the P.O. and our star crossed correspondence,

there’ll be no matching this for that, the Trojans to our latest epoch of delivery

I hate Cassandra

but that doesn’t mean I have to leave the mouse for you to stumble over.

That’s what I think of the future.

A solid wall of affirmation turns the covers down.

Maybe, as in the case of Happy Gilmore and his hockey, I am made

for other things. Other things made me, not the horses nor the holiday but

baking gently to myself out of the gate.

HAVE I A RIVAL?

I thought, like a cooking text, my name might be forgotten. My princess

aurora, rocking again with no mercy. It’s clear you can overuse ‘marvelous’

but mean it every time. I was better known for sleeping in your double room.

For the first or second time I treated your house as my own. Should I say

yes? I really thought so, to impress upon you night after night my face. Oh,

for the days of motoring, forget this wax museum. We experienced the night

differently, our parents never knew where we were, the children needed a nap.

MEDITATION ON YOUNG MISS MAGAZINE IN THIRTY–

MINUTE ELLIPTICAL MACHINE WORKOUT

This is the worst practice I have ever had,

since the day I sailed

along your sight

and landed

in what pillowy mass of arms, yes

legs and the nice firm

apple of blind-to-the-world-girl’s ass.

But altitude

with all its advantage

allows me to mistake

flight for a kind of vigor.

As if I’m running away in muscular prose—shady lane

where girls get chased

or chase is given, with effervescence! and speed!

Plainly—I watched

what you watched.

I was the only one

watching. Nothing could be truer

and more wise than a trailer, in all innocence

what it was we had agreed to.

WILL I MARRY A BLONDE?

The sun is or is not golden, it’s not up for debate. They’re changing the guard

at Buckingham Palace when the setlist changes. The sun is a little more or

less golden. I guard myself jealously. Is my love true? And the sun, golden, or

what? I’m the one who changes color, I drop my dollar on the plate and the

sun stops. It got golder and golder, it went on goldly.

TODAY I WILL LOOK AT THE RULES I LIVE BY & CHANGE

THEM TO FIT THE PERSON I AM NOW

The most beautiful face in history to which I say goodbye, I say monitor the

inventory, I rough the card stock up.

Commodities critique just makes me seem hard headed, produces a feeling of

shitty. How do you feel? I feel shitty about the work I do.

A girl can run the errands in order to keep the change. Foster plans for col-

lapse of the wall between workplace and bathroom.

Bathroom, bathroom, there is a bathroom in the locker room at the gym

where the women’s shower extends into the men’s. There are the watery legs

of what might be women. There are men paused between the water and its

rehearsal.

I’m still a secretary but now they have another name for it.

Would you rather A: grow grain and corn and fruit or B: edit the diaries and note-

books of a famous person? Work the dock primarily and pursue the independence

of shipping? Attend to the passengers. Which patio is enough. The window I should

wash. I’m hiding in the skirts of fortune’s daughter, but just you wait. On the train, I

attended to you. On the airplane, I can’t get full. In the Indianapolis of your heart, I

passed out right away.

I EMBARK UPON THIS DAY WITH MY MENTAL HOUSE

IN ORDER

The back was grass, bright and wet, I could tell you had been thinking of me.

You considered the light and left it on, sensing I could not swallow without a

catch.

I rid myself of bitterness, I’m radiogenic. The house is in order except for the

future I fearlessly face my fears. You’re absent, in stereo, but coming through

the tea.

I am getting something with a letter C, for housekeeping: beauty moderates

behavior. And the street, all mud, if it rained?

A curtain rod through my shabby resentment. Stuck in the wall of

compulsory stop—

sleep—

TODAY I BID GOODBYE TO THE PAST

At which part of the Canadian border shall I evade you?

Variations on Thursday I would blush to come to,

I would blush to myself to indict you.

I would crush you because I could.

Because I was in bondage

and my feet were built to vanish

I traveled to the water in a truck.

You were pretending to come on the carpet

instead of the seat,

and I missed the whole thing:

the palm in the palmier,

my hand caught in the glass display.

If I am only so tall as all that, can you cover me? Overrun me with jasmine and still, I

don’t disappear. I arrived on the day of magic thinking, as no word was heard back,

a letter was sent. I was completely knackered: exhaustion without its breadbox, poised to

collapse on the couch which isn’t there. In the course of water, you won’t see me if I stand

behind the painted trellis. Where’s the little girl who becomes you? If I can see the water, but

where’s my wife. I was becoming in my pinafore. I was aching all over in my lace-up shoes.

CAN THESE TWO POEMS BE ONE?

I make it like a tank. Timing signals plaster from the sky is falling and why

doesn’t someone get a towel. On the genome map you hit it out of the park.

You hit it into the water where sky falls onto the city and we like to call

that night. There is even a song to go with. To go with me while the sky is

plowing through paper where I am water soluble and dissolve at the first drop.

By the clock it read early AM when I got the message in the butcher block,

when I got up to make myself some paper.

What can be timed with a timer: it is a mystery. In the ways of love there is

another box called breakfast. In love you may live in the uninsulated house

but the larger problem is flags on sticks, the real difficulty of bite size business.

Real breakfast is real trouble over a high flame no matter how many phones

you have in your hands. No matter how many smaller sandwiches you may

have eaten there is oatmeal, and you grinning stupidly into it.

TODAY I CAN RELAX & LET GO

You’re the radar I’m coming under, a fur hat in the dread. In my yes there is

much thought, glittering drops through the grate I can’t be bothered chasing.

I can’t be bothered in the ferry. I’ve frustrated him, I am no longer a woman.

In the automobile garage where I finger my finger and mutter yes. Where we

are bred in the process of yes I’m trying to sit with it. Between my fore and

my thumb, I am creating many miracles. In my own way and in my own time

I am saying yes, yes, no to indebtedness, yes. Consequently there is no public

life to even be ashamed of, no doll to fit inside the grimaced wooden doll

which came before it. This is free as our association gets. Between lit cars and

the production of feelings, how few episodes, sucking my thumb for warmth.

As the motion sensors flicker off and on like a biography, I talk of mystic

symbols with callousness. So it happens that I appear to know little of history

beyond the 3rd Reich. That is called “making me feel something,” dropping

my keys in the wooden slot before you’ve even crossed I doubt the bridge.

He who would be my help mate: wrenched hari kari from the ripcage, my

numbero one, in my yes there is a placid wreckage floating in and out of view.

In the company of Beths and Cassandras, sheltered by my enormous cowl.

I WILL RELEASE MY DEEPEST HURTS TODAY

There’s no warning in lieu—who meets you beyond the swamp, shrouded in

cock-n-highballs. Whose husband is good to go. To Florida, to handle her by

her handle, slut-wife in Orlando. A boy plays on the metered curve, which

slips through his hand ribboned and wet with cum. In fight and then flying is

forethought. I’m strapped but ready to ride into the paunchy sunset. And to

think I never sucked you off at the waters anon—

I travel opposing footfalls to the paw of your reductive print. I’m born again.

Once in Orlando, and also sidesaddle, I have found it difficult to degrade

myself on purpose. So I won’t remember rest and ice I light up in the kitchen

facing west. Dear north, are you there?

I have wanted to pull you, faceless, back and forth across the threshold.

Until you are a fine burn.

I TEST MY INNER STRENGTH

You are not the enemy, said to oneself at night. The upset clock strikes two. It’s

like living alone except for your hips between the jets landing. They fly low

to come under the fog. It’s like living alone by the sea.

I become intent on you finding me completely dressed, between doorways,

timestamped and wearing shoes. The air is wet, in these meetings, when we

were young. You can see how I might think such things. I compose my best

in the bath. I get there after some determination. Now it’s dry. And ingrown,

water which leaves me red, red marks left by my clothing, as seen in the

photoessay: I live by the sea, in the flight path.

SHOULD I KISS & MAKE UP?

Sometimes the bus doesn’t come. I won’t wait for long, maybe I never did

ruin myself for a size seven shoe. But there were plans, the baby blue vehicle

of my declaration. The one in which we went back and forth to the coast.

We should sleep in my imaginary bed, a bamboo mat you’ll not find on your

transversal of the continent. Am I a liar? The word in Spanish stands in the

river waving good luck. Could I look it back, would I even want to decipher

your lisa faces.

TODAY I BEGIN WITH A POEM BY PETER GIZZI

Barely a chair to hold to,

holding hands with little 28.

I guess we take our gondola’s selection.

In open air nothing’s permanent, certainly not you

fallen headlong through the Alps.

The whole way down I hear sweet nothing’s Echo:

surprised stereo of our public park.

What better way, loving you on the shores of Aral, to lose it.

I feel my joints disonnect for the first time. Having lost everything

what seems awful at first

becomes regular after a time. After the fashion of clouds

floating in a bath’s mucked surface. I look down through water

instead of up, into my lashes: no, coquette—

how better,

how Aral, having lost the sea, we

depeopled. The city has closed itself, scenes pass by

cloaked in night, modernity,

biohazard. Sea receded to museumry.

It’s like I wander the streets directed by muskrats.

Born under the sign of industry

doubled in placement, places

I have never been

as if we could stand on the banks and be sure

TODAY I TRAVEL FOR BUSINESS

In St. Louis I miss everyone.

On the new south rocker, I miss my mother

and father my siblings—I miss my pretty car.

It’s pretty moist here in St. Louis

where I am even missing my present host.

Instead of making jokes I craft

a well proportioned laugh

it hovers there, a kind of spare tequila, and who could blame me?

Papa I like to be watched and allow

that it has ruined my head.

It’s night of the walking girl.

The architect’s technique

has bent my bed

and I lay across it with my heart

beating madly, the scent of dri-fresh orange

in the air above me and

my heart, which wanders high and lonely

up by the smoke detector.

I’m dangerously close to tears,

in fact I’m shiny

like new and sweat. I’m so near

I could reach out and touch their corrugate surface

saying over and over, “Gambling is legal in St. Louis.”

And so my vision was clouded

and I could finally see the military sign for what it was

but today being farther

away from the water

I look back fondly on the Mississippi—

not to be mistaken for

or charged with supernatural endeavor.

I’m only thinking of a river that flooded in the 90’s.

Even at the river’s uppermost point

there is no glassy room which seats 50

then rotates slowly

on its metal axis.

My tears were now as relics

from 1904, site of the world’s fair.

There is even a movie theater there.

The river should have one

with images from our first low pass.

On the second, even closer,

the fuel became solid on its way down

and I was choking on the whole of it

the Mississippi

Am I tough enough? The morning forever for rent, I compete to yield property. The x-

rays don’t show any sign of tumor, which wasn’t the question, nor the domain of sound

breaking on her face. I’m the one who can’t fall without hitting her head. The cameras

caught me crying over magazines. It was always point and click, respond to anon at the

drive-in, the cornea of what I came to know, and now I own it all. When we reach the

top there’s a slight turn, whether you would say my best friend, or best regards. Upon

examination, crying in the girls room, there was just me jawing at the dolly on the bed.

Can you not hear the tinny tin of my fist at the story, knock knocking my head against

the poplars. For which we are grateful and shed punchy, three word tears.

Because I am a woman and could do the same

don’t fool yourself, there is nothing sweet in playing

cuckold to the sun. Gone color blind and you let me,

you let me think so. Because this debt, ratcheted to heaven

could have been called back down. Of what I owe

there is no shortage. The dogs come lunging for the afternoon

and in exhaustion we fail to stop them.

The fire turns itself, the light

inside the golden cloud is dim. Money, we say knowingly,

is one of the other common problems.

Lined up as rocks in our armchairs, under the soot,

abacus of that which was falling on us like snow.

I AM FREE FROM THE PRISON OF DELUSION

YOU CANNOT SHUN YOURSELF

The secret I couldn’t carry to term, or even overnight.

This is progress: lyric as a household tool. What I did with words before we

met is an interesting story. False. Before you everything was tight, clung to

the hand of the healer who touched me. A demo of broken faith, before you

ever turned towards me in the car on our lunch break. I drew a line between

the bucket seats and promptly crossed it. Just like an actress—my belly quite

bound up.

Now that we’ve untied it what am I saying?

You only just got home. Let me go and try.

BOTTOM

TODAY I WILL BE A MODEL OF CONSISTENCY

Because to hear you I must hold the news

within my manner of being—

your woman—if I could be like

Mike and Michelle

2 twenty-two year old Canadians who are in love

then, for instance

if you have a clipboard in your hand

with work you brought home from the office

and I, like Michelle

pull down your pants

then you, like Mike

won’t need the clipboard any longer.

I will show, instead of telling you.

Our most popular national request?

We are aware of the broadcast

but ignore the methods

shake-the-baby

purify-the-skin-using-sand

resolution-1441-to-try-and-preserve-the-peace.

Except for sex-without-breathing

we have no name

but a combination of openings

all down the side

and a dearth of objects to compare these to,

such as buttons.

The night is longand you are talking.

I know now that I should have tried harder to be a body in a car who gestures at another body in another carstripped of artifice, conversation, a raincoatwhich if worn too long during a chemical attackwill increase the danger of heatstroke.I have never seen this clothingbut believe it is useless against anythingincluding weather, after all

breath may be done with as an idea and yet we continue to do so—consider the water! Is there time before I reach it?To fumble withor otherwise engage the parachute of non-breathingshould that be a choice such as the one I am faced with now

to open my headand water rushed the cavity

THINGS I LEARNED AMONG THE WATERS OF OBLIVION

Among the forms of recognition I chose the depressive’s headache or heavy food & adolescence, loving youas a doctor in the opera, i.e.bring the energy back now into your third parent.

The taste in the scene was coming from my mouth.It was previously. Nothing ever went ‘all the way’ inside.If I went there for one thing (apples) I’d come away with another (pages)or a buttonhole of what appeared: all that youngsome fleshiness subsumed within the higher education,one snake devouring another snakewith a logo on their back of the tower at 57th & International.

Hours later, think to yourself how it all appears in the WRITERS NOTEBOOK,& tearing your hair, with a great gnashing of teethwhy must we say slip and among the forms of recognition?Unless we are actually giving him the slip.

The man lodged in my middle section always describes the girl out loud.

It is the part I remember most bitterly: in a brown summer dresshair up in a cliphere it comesvery pretty.

The ocean doesn’t care if it is Augustthen it is August. How we decided onthe tower’s make & then the radiowent up in strips of orange colored clothmoving around in the air.What about this DOESN’T strike you as a hobby?The woman in the landscapebares her chest as well. Or strapsflourescent bulbs to her armsand goes out fighting. All productiona magic production. A linethrough the form of protest,the civic duty of having great titsand splendidly hard as rocks.Poles for legs to demonstratewhat’s been done to the forest.When only scale changes: roses around the mailbox, my hand rendered with the same imprecisionattaching itself to the mail, a soft focusto save us from being drawnagain and again into the tail of an event

we have seen depicted but cannot ourselves depict.

TODAY I PULL THE CURTAIN ON MY UNSEEN AUDIENCE

back you go

through the low nineties of radio

lower than miscellaneous

for quick review

low girls

in a low car

bouncing the horizon

or spanning time

you can smell

with your forehead

in the room of perpetual action

and I bright blue

I as blue as blue looks

but never was.

Blue as a piano truck

of anecdotal evidence.

Evidenced in parts. Tired,

hateful saying of things

you should be too, of looking.

“if he is going to marry anyone”

in a falsified appearance

of the word niggling

where there was none

Sally in my arms

from talking of mom

to leaving the window open

with moms in evening view

reminder: moms: consumption

a fine rot across the upper arms

so the mom can come in and out

MY LIFE EXPRESSES A SPIRIT OF FLEXIBILITY

There is a woman whose luck has found her. See it descend even nowshe is putting thingsin her mouth. Olives…appleslit up with a desk lampshe is nothingif not decisive. Firmly, “that isn’t me in the picture.”

No invention hereto stand between my momentary turnaway from the turning subject. Some greatbarrier name, Jane or Judy comes in and out of the roomwith the whole dress shop, saying“air conditioning is very bad for the pipes” and “when Ms. Fitzgerald was onstagethere was no smoking.”

But this comes from my hands!Palms face upfor a lemony beatingthey want that problem

with the stinging nettles.

Singer opens his mouth and out comes an operatic “MEMBER!”

trouble

and we have no sense to distinguish between

laughing behind our fingers

or not laughing

behind somebody’s actual fan.

There’s the trouble. I attempted to open and close

each painted scene on the interior of my mouth.

I was denied

something important or somebody denied me

was taken away without my consult

and that is how I got to be miserable.

Watching his body become more and more “clear”

until I clamored for

anonymous sex. It didn’t matter that tomorrow

this would all be over

he would have a new name:

no more ‘Keith’ or ‘Mark’ or ‘Steve.’

You can walk your feet back now

for a nice stretch. Shift your weight

into the hips, place your hands

here, put your hands here

I was begging

and my breath was uneven.

Do you think I will be able to know

your name when it changes? Would you like

some sweet and sour chicken?

IN TWENTY DAYS I WILL BE THIRTY

I think all week I need to be lit on fire.

Why I am not content with the space heater

it’s a mystery, I’m waiting, I frigged myself

with historic narratives at least a year old

or older. Letters.

Yet I cannot allow myself to use the word ‘frig’

when another writer has done so before me

to greater effect. That I had ideas at all,

they seemed to me as mushrooms

growing from the body of my lover

just as they did to a character in the novel I read about

somewhere, yesterday, if you substitute

my horror of ideas with his of the mole itself…things

against a creamed or paled skin. I could act like that actress

on stage! But not having practiced enough,

how should I set about to practice?

Yesterday the parking lot.

She who has veiled herself, Grocery Outlet

day old bread aisle moved, neo

scratched into a bench at bart.

Clive consults the timetable at home, that’s why

I have to wait so long. I don’t. I’m holding

a sixteen dollar and five cent ticket in my hand

the least you can purchase with a twenty dollar bill.

This line of inquiry narrows, pain of constriction

somewhat eased by a change in subject:

my recent fear of own shadow

and/or chasing of own tail.

Turns out the moving darkness in the water of my bath

was me, so who’s the pervert now? This way

relieves no pain. Leaping from the corner from myself

or I back away from the water I lurked in

out of practice but full of desire

I want to act.

I am waiting to be lit on fire

somewhat engaged

and occupy a dirty house, semi-cheap

feelings hang around me from the night before

but NOT from any pain of excess

GET ME? There are feelings unlinked to my behavior

inasmuch as conversation can be deemed behavioral.

We were just talking.

Not getting me.

It seemed unwholesome.

The woman a few seats down introduces her sisters

Gary and Larry. I wonder

if it’s possible to get sick because the two stations

match so exactly, even if I only saw

one station tonight

twice in rapid succession

because I got lost on my way to the party. I went around the block

and right back down the stairs. I was worried that people would see

or not see the glory of my Beloved,

my double chins, fear them

for no one knows the day or time

of their arrival. Moreover, I have a fine sense of direction

but cannot distinguish left from right, speak no other language

besides the one I write in, and my eyes may taste of almonds

or match their color but never, never their shape. Basically,

I deliver myself into your hands. For what man

even catching my gaze before he exits at the Powell Street station

can save me for longer than the three minutes

it took to write this down? My beauty lies in being

extraordinarily thin-skinned, full of shame

& cute. There are those

who can’t refuse

my potent spunk! Little red berries come rolling up the drive

and there is nothing more beautiful

or terrible

than little red berries, followed quickly by the desire to sweep them up

so they don’t get tracked into the house.

The date is January 3, 2004.

I often hear Elizabeth’s voice speaking of Bernadette Mayer

while I am writing, and have idealized the notion I received of poems

and poems made out of trash. I can’t stop wishing for this poem

a smooth and luxurious interior

which the voice of Elizabeth may sometimes inhabit

along with something else. I think about big trash day.

And everything I have eaten or looked at

sentences not strung together

so much as they are worn,

worn out in full view

just as my new set of clothing arrives. I may not be clean

but I am somewhat naked. And what is the point in having fine sensibilities

unless they can be ruined by weather, or placed in the box for jewelry

and smashed? Look upon the face of my watch.

Look upon its gears, observe my watch held under the glass

and above us, don’t argue, the sun.

I USE MY FANTASIES & I SOLVE MY PROBLEMS: THE PROBLEM

WITH CONVERSATION, SADE & THE EXIT POLL

What we know: there was a boy in the fortress, he was about your age. The

sun. That the robot rhino is massive, like a real animal. Biographers are wrong

to speculate on the manner of his discipline. Its duration. I promise not to talk

about it. I don’t know / I’ve been told / you never slow down you don’t know the

affect on his character. The girl’s part is in taking a hint when people doze off

before the sentence is finished. But she continues to think with unparalleled

bravery: THERE IS ENOUGH MARZIPAN FOR US ALL. He doesn’t even

like marzipan, that’s why. We know the worst of it has not yet occurred but will,

in the cave, under deficit of sleep. For Rousseau in the clouds was a terrible liar!

And we a lump of dough in trousers. But studded for extra protection.

Of course I’ve come to read your trousers, those quantum miracle pants, my delight

raw and untrammelled by the marzipan tucked inside. The entendre is singular

and direct. I have pulled down my own trousers to sit in the snow of talking.

You were almost asleep, born into a troubled family, ramifications, there was

talk of a haunted bracelet type, nursing as long as you did. It was the kind of

haunted talking bracelet you can’t take off. It was haunted because so many

men had gone there before you. I mean her pussy, fresh pussy juice, workhorse

II, a novel in which she is king of the pirates, juiced by a Champion. She is

writing actual letters to actual authors, reading books on prior letters written

to actual authors, the words ‘pussy’ and Juice Extractor are used again and

again to great effect. She loves the sound of her own voice and pushes you

down. Ignores your trousers in her haste to examine the marzipan. She

who would locate your pulse and take it. OUR PREDILECTION FOR

MARZIPAN IS COLOSSAL.

You were almost asleep now.

The bracelet charged on through the woods.

It was talking.

What the bracelet said: we reject the Cartesian notion of a trouser/marzipan split.

Like a living animal, the robot is massive and needs a new program. The robot

needs a long, prehensile tongue. The thought of caressing that leathery hide

makes the tapioca rise in my gullet. God! Is there anything here that’s NOT

a robot? Even the digital voice of my bracelet, covered in leathery moulding,

telling me the human race is doomed to extinction again today.

Just so you know what you’re missing: a poem in which my imaginary

haunted talking bracelet features prominently. In the morning, walking

down the street with Maggie, I noticed a bit of marzipan had dropped onto

my wallet. Plus the amount I’d already eaten. Marzipan makes me type very

quickly and should wear me out well before bedtime.

And yet at the market I came under your protection. Was it only last Saturday

that you procured me? Over the weekend I began to expand under the gaze

of your tight animal skein. You’ll never be interested in the smuttiness of my

preceding sentence, smutty in the sense of its containing two prepositions

and one possessive pronoun. Quickly, into my marzipan you stuffed chutney,

heirloom tomatoes, organic greens, red petaled flowers & stone fruit until

I cried and fake cried for your edification as well as my own. More than

anything I wanted you to put me in your robe, I hissed like the adolescent

daughter in a Sharon Olds poem: “Wrap me up in the blanket!” for beneath

every desire is another desire to drink from the spigot directly.

TODAY I TRUST MY PERCEPTIONS

What a mess! Blowing through the fiscal of my mindfor instance having something wrong with your faceor spilled on your shirt, word beginning with dismeaning the feeling of all people discontentedeven at the very top of their job.Discontension! What I perceived with a shockas equality between the couple in lineexpressed by their similarly colored grey pants,a sustained democracy falls between the waist and face of Couple In Argumentation.Lines beginning with D. The kind of wife who says “Look at that dog!” to get back outside, anythingto get outside, a cute dog to get away from whatever may happen at the counter.& when the man turns to look at the dogit has a white head & the man is impatient. Exhibits disinterest. See,it is up to me to note the colorof the dog’s head. To pronounce Britney stupidfor one of the five wrong reasons. Historic as Katie Couric, missing LeTigre on TV, the poem doesn’t have cable

but can still file the report, grow her hair, BE the stuff running down her facelike nothing I’ve seen at Walgreen’s.Having to be a detective at your own Walgreen’s. Everybody has one, within two blocks of a media starletjust as the poetry function arrivedlit up, hidden beneath a napkin& struggling not to use the word mysteriouswhen describing cassette tapes,the sound they madehow they rattled against the wall“I was sitting right there” stiff little fingers “a few pictures fell”in a room gripped by machinesNOT phenomena. Greetings from Vegas,Oakland. The black helicopters are here to observe traffic all around the graphically moving spotlight. The girl crying, she made it lookso hard. Like that. I want my effectsto be ripe. I want my effects

transparent.

I KNOW THAT I AM RECOVERING

Have been waiting at the counter for my pen.

All there is, everything, of what I could say:

for a moment the radio and myself

were separate.

I was available for service.

I came from the belly and then hovered outside

on the sac. It bulged & threatened

to move me in a regular flood

of amniotic noise.

My mind’s not fluid.

My eyes aren’t minerals

despite being hard and made of glass like sand.

Hard, like a doll.

Exhausted, the left leg forgets to copy the right,

she looks up from her marble

& notices a sudden lack of drive by looting.

Ass looted so many times

by now it may be empty. On the highway

I felt myself outside the song, coming too fast

around the corner on her left

the woman in the song

but not the one singing.

I was nowhere

so I shot out above the clouds

for if I did not need him, well then,

wasn’t I free to more falsely pursue him?

I put my arms above my head

& really ‘went for it,’

but without the same kind of integrity

for there is no road through the clouds

& nothing to drive by.

I can guarantee you—

I looked around—

I looked ‘frantic,’ this was mid-dive

& (superman) I couldn’t get your example out of my hands:

plank, triangle, I tried but I couldn’t

rally desire to loot. Bird dog

with a bird dog in her mouth?

Two Innocent

Pigeons?

AGE OF THE MERCENARY

Everything about the pen

is unpleasant upon my return.

Everything without exertion

a fold of skin folding in on itself.

I know a mind that’s been sitting in one place too long

especially the wrist, do you? Asleep

and moving through the cells

with a basket of numbers. Did I think

I was too busy for the war? Did I think I was too busy

for the war to not be over? It’s getting worse in the novel

the woman across from me is reading

“how cheaply the renditions”

and it gets a lot worse than that.

I don’t want to write poems

because something terrible will happen.

In the middle of this poem

there is a man entirely without skin.

Another man took it off with a knife.

I can call this “What I Saw On My Way To Work Today”

and cover the pair with an ingenious portable bird carrier.

You wear the device on your back, as if

it were full of books. Inside the green interior

a friendly yellow cockatiel. A pretty dog

sets the car alarm off, his head

on the armrest. A little music.

The most embarrassing thing

I can think of. Which is the worst fatal wound? Now worsen it

with someone watching. Lumps of flesh that drip. And then

what, craft? I am going to put all of it, everything

into this season’s already dated pink jelly bag

thereby dating the violence

it was the day NPR announced

the age of the mercenary.

The only war that never ends

the war. I am going to leave the image here

the one against the imagination.

I can almost make out my murderous tendency

scratching the bumps on the skin of my back.

I take my leisure wherever I can like I am cherry blossoms

a wall of trees bloomingwithout regard for season.

I ate a mango in winter.Cherry flavor.

I bloomed and I bloomed and I bloomed.

This much and no more?

A crowd in the breezedelicate print body

and I to suit you with violent declarations.

Triumphant, your head stuffed into my apron.

Baby lamb butts thigh.Thigh to baby lamb:

I AM HERE embedded in the covers

a dream in the forehead of blossomsand each more than the next

Nightmare of something other than the cat

entering through the cat door.

The nightmare of etiquette.

Nightmare of riding an animal that can read your mind.

Nightmare of liposuction.

I had a nightmare of missing the bart

and the train I missed buckled under the water.

I had a nightmare of continuance, the world as it was

in “Ted’s Head,” the poem I was reading

before I fell asleep. I had a nightmare at my desk.

I had a nightmare involving cellulite, earthquakes

a missed appointment and Rachel Corrie’s face.

I had a nightmare this afternoon.

In the nightmare my face was covered with sweat and I orated.

On the senate floor anything is permissible.

I had a nightmare of bad decisions.

America’s Next Top Model.

The cost of a rotisserie chicken.

I had blotchy legs in my nightmare.

The motion detector light came on.

I had a nightmare of human retribution.

Jonathan Edwards was in my nightmare.

I cared about the life of this poem after my own death.

Bombs named after girls, budget cuts,

thin skin around the eyes where wrinkles show up first,

evacuation of the family house, gasoline,

loss of a hand, violence to animals or trees.

I had one long continuous nightmare of human violence.

There was something wrong with my senses.

Mostly the problem of one human

enjoying or causing extreme pain to another human.

I thought about this constantly. It was confusing

and without political context

i.e. my identification with the victims didn’t make sense.

All the other nightmares were contained inside this one nightmare.

What am I supposed to do with this fine sense of the horrific? Triggered again by

the sound of a chainsaw, the meme the machine makes when I’ve returned up the

page as far as I can go. I’m on top and just erased everything I wrote before. I can’t

get further back. The ear, irretrievably developed, as is the eye, cultivated, until

what they can show and what they can’t show affects me pretty much the same.

Mowing down the logical result of a diamond mine, veering from side to side

to express my ambivalence on the topic of diamonds and diamond mining and

emotions expressed as diamonds, set in a ring in a poem. The car is a metaphor

for the kind of mower you ride on and the grass is everything else. It is almost

not-writing. Here’s what I’m reading and what I just received. Coming along

with self-loathing and the image to match every use of the word mutilated when

a body’s described on the radio but a curious blank where the mortars should be.

Just cement being mixed sedately in a truck.

Do babies go to heaven when they die?

Come, let us reason together.

In one story a person veers in the back door and is mistaken

for a temp. But it’s the wallet of

a temp gets stolen. Or she runs

a licensing company.

The story of a thief who leaves

by the front door.

Facial surgery, the fast internal music

propelling us through and out

the back of the newsvan.

Born again in a puddle of stage blood

the charge you get from viewing media

when you haven’t in a long time

two socks stuck together

taking chances with our sobriety.

For there were no bits of foam on this lip

these last ten years, but the high gloss of boredom,

national pink well-being, preventative

presence of mind

I had it

because I didn’t look, not at one

& not at the other.

Outlet v. outlet.

Not looking.

The kind of thing you hate in your mother.

I developed a wish to have

legs as long as a horse

for showing excitement.

That the lyric

could pass, if it were pretty

or not, if it were too pretty.

I can’t live with this domestic upheaval

everybody at the table with a twenty

quick look embarrassed

what was drifting away from its own video hole

to think about the groceries

7:00 on a Friday night

the best of TV had convinced me

of going around in heels

nothing too frivolous for distraction

all the food

processed or unprepared

there’s a hold in the delivery

dear liza it’s full of people

a pair of shoes for every part

and still I can’t stop seeing

the prada you wear on your mind

the one to worry about

The usefulness of W.D. Snodgrass to this very poem

I anti-deny it

I came through a tunnel

it was red

thinking to myself

as did all of us

my legs are blue

from veins

are you seeing the same chair I see

did you hear what I did

do you have it too

the real sickness of equating unlike things

the constant incremental comparisons

everybody sick to everybody else’s stomach

How about don’t eat at the cupboard.

And while you’re at it

don’t eat anything from the bay more than twice a month or once a month

if you are pregnant or a child under five.

I can’t stop looking at businessmen, either.

There is hardly more pain than watching them watch other people

even while they are with a companion. The terrible pain of bourgeois couples

in New Yorker cartoons. You need not look any further.

I don’t want to write poetry with a big clumsy fist.

I want to be a series of intricate hands

pounding on a fine wooden table.

I must want to take over the world.

Yet I couldn’t even work our narrative to its precipice!

Cover the plate with the bread that came with it

because the food itself is menacing. The wrapper of a Clif bar,

how it physically resisted my opening it.

California report: flip flops and umbrellas

occupy the same space. I did this

and I did this. It felt good

falling to earth, I observed the boy

in his father’s casual embrace

and I had no part in my own safety.

I would look great in the ground.

If only to fall more indefinitely

or ride on the eurotrash train

always. I wanted to have kept

my wishes to myself. I’m in the only position

there is to find it amusing, being mis-read.

The naïve belief in ghosts

that linger only over particular types

of violent death. A gravelly voice at the counter

and a girl goes down the hatch.

Knives for sale at the smoke shop

or cotton shirts for $7.99. I’m your goner.

And then as quickly as it came

there’s a callus in its place

a woman collapsing

before an image of herself collapsing.

Andrea Bocelli on repeat.

8:00 at night, my favorite

until you consider nine, ten,

eleven … each round, each nice

in their own way. I don’t know them.

Easter’s done but my own

holiday of hiding in the blankets

seems to never end, I can’t that night,

I’m organizing my anxiety around the direction

our bed faces. Back to the car or

what could be done to the car

while we’re sleeping. I can’t stop myself

from being part of the knock at the door in the morning

or inside the children who work in the office, mothers

scatter like wheels into the back room

to hide our baby. I’m one of the agents.

I’m in the grass. I have been

hiding from my own antenna.

CHOKER

ANOTHER PICTURE OF SOCIAL CONDITIONS

AS THEY APPEAR TO US NOW

I saunter out of bed

substitution of an alphabet for the more confusing

moral claim, these thoughts

sent from one living person to another

or those more recently dead. HELLO

I AM HERE

Disturbance of sleep rhythms, overhead

bursting into flame. Was it a planet

we sought to increase

in friendliness and symphonic connection

or just a star

engaged in backbends from the standing position?

WHOM is orbiting WHOM I asked myself

and struck out in that direction, straight for the definable axis.

Did the stars call out faintly, “Fuck you?”

Were their pants so tight

they found it difficult to move? What, in short

caused them to explode…was that your face

raining or your face in the rain?

Pane after pane but I honestly knew

it was you in a fog of meaning. Only the slightest embarrassment

when you leaned close to brush the star flakes from my lapel.

And may I have this opportunity?

To more coyly move

within the doors “of your heart,” & go

unnoticed there

while the rest of the army bursts in.

We are becoming visible

when the door swings shut

not as if hidden, but toys

lost in a rhetoric of backdrops

icon of a bed

children of the world

running from another blazing mess…it is later now

& you suddenly become very sleepy.

We say don’t you dare lay down …not in the snow…

that’s close enough

even the government is played off one another

while we dine on these abundant shreds of tenderness.

UPPER MODERATION

It must be true that things happen. Things

happen to you in a democracy

same as anywhere else

in the same democracy

you received ideas about doing one thing first

so you wouldn’t slip into

doing another thing later.

One thing was ascendancy

not by accident first

you’d need to talk with yourself

straightforward as possible.

You have to hear a break from the social unit

made in your own voice.

Unless there is funding. Then there will be travel

and you’ll be above things happening for a long while.

Otherwise be lean.

Perhaps your hair has gotten long

and I think you should

look like a wild horse.

You are rising above your mother—

why should your hair not be very long

and disingenuous?

Very poor at first, there will be no name

for the thing you do until later.

That thing you do, bright eyes

etc. they are going to love you

100100

in the boardroom. This is how

I was told too late

to avoid middle management

a thing you might slip into

if you’re not the logo,

you’re the logo maker.

In the same vein of knowledge

was eating salt for unwanted pregnancy.

It must be true

things happen. Some things are

little babies, rental units, too tired to fuck

trying to walk on water

not to actually walk on the water

but just fast enough you don’t go under.

Some things are happening everywhere

but the supply chain is inefficient

and medicine takes months

to reach the hinterland.

Having the kind of skin where

things come in but not back out.

Things on TV. Things on the wall.

Seeing things. Descending

a staircase in the hall of higher education

where is the will of excess time

now to play detective to? If I am caught

I must disengage myself. If I was not poor enough

101101

then I must be so now. If I am another thing

what will not be surveyed

how will it not be

worked into a lather of originality, another thing

above things happening?

Jonah tread slime in the belly of a whale

and I must too. For if music from the workers

working on the rental unit

reaches our ears, everyone is mired

in the same things at once.

Everyone tossing everyone

overboard, on shaky ground, rhetorical, ourselves

not the minister but the minister’s daughter.

Placing cakes around, moving through its layers,

moving up. Well if I did one thing

I’ll do another.

For until one is commodified,

there is heroin, the champagne to draw back,

always incorporation.

Concerning all acts of innovation and celebrity

there is one elementary truffle

the ignition of which kills

countless idioms

and splendid plastic:

that the mondo one definitely

commodifies oneself,

102102

then proliferation moves too.

All sorts of things occur to help one

that would never have otherwise occurred.

A whole stream of executions

issues from the décolletage

raising in one’s favela

all manner of unforeseen incoherence

and melancholy

and material assimilation,

which no one could have dreamed

would come their way.

Whatever you can do or dream you can, belay it!

Blindness has gender,

power point and magnets.

Belay it now.

103103

I don’t know. Relentless buyer’s

remorse in advance. Tall calfskin boots

assault a mid-calf boot.

Boots in a pyramid.

Via Spiga!

I despise you!

Sounds like

square shaped things

breaking in the house next door.

But a perfect boot

keeps me coming.

What I think are dishes down the stairs

are pots from a dollar store.

Glass above the bed. Imagine.

The small oak bookshelf

mounted above my first bed

never fell while I slept.

When I left, there were places where the cork

still clung to the wall it had been glued to.

They looked like eyes.

I think I don’t have to come out with it,

but I’m guilty. The wounded woman in my dream

resists in order to vomit up her spinal system.

Then the cradle of her pelvic floor.

She’s always in position, an x-ray

shaped like a greyhound.

I DIDN’T GO SHOPPING?

104104

Ready to go forward.

The house next door gets closer.

Not that today is ruined

but going around boots

has ruined me. Understand,

there’s a miniature boot on a keychain

pointed at my head.

Just keep walking.

She grins for a minute

to show the shape of nothing inside.

105105

It’s 12:45, the fly’s

inside the cabinet.

That book from the year of our birth

in the used up bedsheets.

It’s shabby

without finishing

like we’re alone

now that the magazine left.

Left a single piece of trident behind.

And the shiny spot on my cheek

everything gathered onto the edge of a pin

the one you are thinking of

and thinking of

until papers fly off the desk.

Walking a total distraction.

A woman turns her head

in gestural complete-ness

but a test would reveal

holes in the bones of her heel.

What happens to the photo of a sponge

in the afternoon of a viewing mystery?

I mean later? We are wandering through those halls

and we are explaining. Because we cannot follow

a table of thought. We got some free

posters from the exhibition and drank

American style. There was only me

TRES TRES

106106

but the wish to be plural.

It’s 1:00 so I’ll make it happen.

You’re on your way home now

on your way, one of the birds

seen in poems

and also the Brooklyn Bridge.

107107

Hole in my sweater

I mistake for a hole in my arm. Dirty sock

asleep in the wrong room, commas

some in the notebook

back at work

I left the notebook on

and now licking the plate full of macaroni

I have a sincere desire to change.

Back again. Little sock

licking my paws,

can’t I go outside, back

the house makes a dripping sound

forcing my face into the wave

and then forcing myself to talk.

It’s nothing. I cursed you for not getting in touch.

Half the house is solid

and the other is for talking on the phone.

And it’s really not very good this time.

Hard to feel sad

as sad as the music is

coming through phones

and those looped over my ears

on top of the plastic glasses

the whole get-up

the whole contraption

makes it look hard to look sad.

MUTABLE, POSITIVE, FIXED

108108

Like a delivery system should.

I’m going to fill this entire book no matter what.

Careful John, she’s endeavoring.

But a dirty sock may yet adjust its pose

ripping buttons off

in the fog.

I want to get the key

that Houdini got in the mouth.

Thinking there of my remarkable purchasing power.

Monster with two ways of looking back

or otherwise diminishing

the borders of a tawdry brown book.

Ethics, endeavoring

stuck between the upper flat and social services

cringing at the desperate sounds

15 minutes with you

I wouldn’t say no

I-I-I—

and right when I wanted

another artifact, to get jacked up

and collect things,

Naomi Watts was killing me.

She was being brave on location.

Sometimes with a chair

like Chris says

109109

sometimes it’s like mating.

Just put it through the net.

Some supernatural ball, some baller.

Will I be forced to dribble always?

Thinking about the neighbor who took up the machete

thinking about it too much

what’s too much

taking it easy, fire eyes

before we even land.

Later it’ll get spongy, be “good material.”

I too am looking to speak

in the third person. Without crossing anything out.

I guess you need a third person

to hold the sponge.

110110

HAPPY EQUINOX, HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY

A movie at the end

of all our desire for rest

plays in the other room

and I’m missing it.

Like the ghost is idle.

Like the ghost has free time.

I can hear it

being profane

being over-decorated.

There’s too much night

along the bridge, themes come in

story per minute

per orange scrawl on the side of a plane.

The saran wrap we came through

always before me

and Manderley projected upon it.

Memory of Kevin

singing takes me out

and there’s Del on the phone

to ask about repeated sound.

Yeah that’s the way

the way we like it.

I laughed at the mist in the dark

before it overtook me.

111111

In the car

on repeat

a human on the table

or bent towards her feet on the floor.

Many times we have attended to a human

on a table or the floor.

Non-attendance

when it breaks out

is nothing. Is coming.

Something for nothing:

I will have to make many minor adjustments

in order to stay. Wiggling

which is good for you. Your, ok

my bones are getting very heavy.

I raise my head

to address you from the flowers

even as they wander from their stems

on the bird problem, the birds are gone,

they’re packed around the subject’s organs.

Poets did this. The faces we can’t make out.

And then I looked around

and I was all by myself

and I was all

where’s waldo?

112112

Of everything I made then

you can be sure.

I made phone calls.

I made copies and fliers and calendars.

Friends and acquaintances.

Sounds as I floated to the floor.

There was a woman at the public piano

and I knew she felt the faces

hiding in the hidden surplus, too.

I had gone very far to rest among the foxtails.

Wearing my equitable risk ring. Still I could not enter

through the smaller door

inside the bigger door.

I wanted to throw off this gray cloak of despair

and be done with it.

But there I was, pornographic.

Pornographic as ever.

113113

Those fools in Vermont

and foolish rain

what doesn’t belong to me

rising from the sea

I’m a little custard

with stomach acid so strong

it could melt the bones

of the house I’m cleaning.

I wasn’t kidding

every decision is photographed

thought of itself as furious

wrapped around the corner of a corner office

invasion of the book sounds

come crashing on a membrane slick.

Plaster from the wall on her face

where it went through her neck.

Something in the branches

before it falls, a congress

said my sleep, it’s congress

in the tree outside your window.

I guess you’d have to know

what you’re looking at

to be wrong

and I don’t

even with all my hair removed for travel

and my things inside my things.

RESIDENT

114114

Not about my own stomach, tropical

or not tropical, like getting spam

and then complaining about the picture.

However the drive to write is much upon me now

on top of the bad intention

and the ladder I ran over with my car

and then again

the rubber ball that wouldn’t stop.

So thanks,

yes, I like all the lights on.

It helps with the planes crashing.

115115

We look grey

because the air is grey

ashen because

they’re in the air.

If intention is all there is

examine this badly behaved girl.

It seemed I was driving

up the road to Manderley,

he, the beloved object

somewhat beyond rescue.

I drove behind a truck of mules

and at each turn the grey smoke

came from another direction.

I should not have said

the things I said

last night.

And other nights.

Yes yes and yes again

I had facials done to me.

Going home I won’t

compare my body

to the branches of the great house on fire.

Now on fire the flames

two valleys away.

Where are you star eight six?

In the restaurant

NOUVEAU PAUVRE

116116

on the cliffs

the length felt

suspicious. Menacing.

The word for something

doesn’t like me.

The hedges around Manderley

the bay

the mind to say why

the water

far below and dark clear green

ink streaming because it can

the dried up streaks

this ink feels tight

trying to describe

why I am menaced, am menacing

why I lie outright

why I’m a pen. A pen.

A pen.

117117

On choking: the use and abuse of pronouns in cases of self medication, a

mystery strung together by commas, exactly the type of sentence that can

cause a person to choke, a room with four walls, I choked on my latte, or

choked with contempt, caught on her own words, being choked from behind,

her own voice, all attempts to properly organize the father, “I saw how she

touched you!”, the line had a lot of static, your voice periodically sounds like

a cell phone that has lost its connection, pieces of the email may break off,

illegal jelly treats, “I am tiny!”, choked up with emotion and stumbling over

her own words, who is the misanthrope in the following sentence? My voice

choked, and the words I could not speak to you quite choked my heart.

I CHOKED

TELLING THE FUTURE OFF was designed by James Meetze and typeset in Bembo and Futura. There are 1000 copies, of which 26 are lettered A–Z and signed by the poet.

Stephanie Young lives in Oakland and performs a

wide varety of secretarial and poetic activities. She

is the editor of BAY POETICS (Faux Press, 2005) and

has published her writing in a number of magazines

and collaborative postcard poem chapbooks from

Poetry Espresso. Find her online: http://stephanie

young.durationpress.com.

ALSO AVAILABLE FROM TOUGHER DISGUISES:

Chuck Stebelton, CIRCULATION FLOWERS

Chris Stroffolino, SPECULATIVE PRIMITIVE

Cynthia Sailers, LAKE SYSTEMS

K. Silem Mohammad, DEER HEAD NATION

Noah Eli Gordon, THE FREQUENCIES

Peter Gizzi, FIN AMOR

Clark Coolidge, ON THE SLATES

Most of these titles can be ordered from Small Press

Distribution (www.spdbooks.org) or Tougher Disguises

(www.tougherdisguises.com).

TOUGHER DISGUISES would like to thank the following fabulous people for their generosity, guidance, and support: Jay & Carol Meetze, Peter Gizzi, Kathleen Miller, Cynthia Sailers, Dan Fisher & Amick Boone.

Telling the Future Off

Documents