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.
copyright © 2005 by Stephanie Young
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
9
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.
1010
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?
1111
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.
1212
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
1313
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.
1414
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.
1515
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—
1616
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.
1717
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.
1818
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.
1919
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.
2020
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
2121
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.
2222
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
2323
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—
2424
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.
2525
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?
26
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.
29
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.
3030
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.
3131
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.
3232
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.
3333
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.
3434
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.
3535
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.
3636
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.
3737
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.
3838
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—
3939
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.
4040
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.
4141
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.
4242
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.
4343
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.
4444
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.
4545
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.
4646
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.
4747
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
4848
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.”
4949
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
5050
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.
5151
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
52
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.
55
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.
5656
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
5757
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.
5858
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.
5959
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.
6060
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
moved
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
6161
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.
6262
Singer opens his mouth and out comes an operatic “MEMBER!”
crude
basic
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.’
6363
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?
6464
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
6565
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
6666
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,
6767
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.
6868
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.
6969
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.
7171
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.
7272
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.
7373
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.
7474
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
7575
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.
7676
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?
7777
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?
81
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.
8282
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.
8383
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
8484
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.
8585
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.
8686
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.
8787
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.
8888
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.
8989
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
9090
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
9191
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.
9292
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.
9393
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.
97
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?
9898
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.
9999
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.