24 - Empty Circles

Once, hunters thanked the patrician frailty of beasts

for their takeable flesh.

We punched the bloom of exit in buckskin hearts

shucked the husk from souls

exhaled into the mouths of leaves.

Or wherever we imagined they went.

But we are choked in ghost-thick air

laden with refugees from presumed pardon.

Where are the ebon eyes of the dead as they die?

Where is the skin that bounds off the wronged?

The jelly of tomatoflesh slips from its hide

a boiled heart. And on the cutting board

a tap head weeps off wet beads of seed citrine

strung with clusters of soap’s hollow pearls—

I’m sorry, I’m sorry, forgive this too.

19 - We All Felt Sorry For Ourselves

At the funeral, her grandfather

explained why.

The car’s burnout was apt;

she needed purity,

so God came.

The casket was closed,

we each kept our own

favorite ideas.

March, two days later, I huddled over

a grease-sheer paper bag of warmth,

McFries on the El platform floor,

southbound at night.

Her train was headed the other

way, but she smiled,

in pity maybe.

It seemed kind, yet

the door closed,

and I had the particular guilt

of a person using junk

to feel better about

some indignity.

16 - Evangelicalism

Their warding curses
write in gold and black.
The first, enforcing rarity.
Second, making sure we don’t
forget our getting off the track;
conjuring one unseen eternity
in front and leaving yet
another nigh and chasing
at the back.

15 - Soteriological Experiments in Luddism

You will amble a transient on

grit-packed freeway shoulders, turn heads

in panopticon windows, the car-borne

surveilling your mendicance.

In the wind of their passing find written

the key to moralities of speed,

in your face flush the heat

of some primal shame

jumbled with an older dignity

you don’t yet understand.

Still your limbs in pace with

no purpose, and shrug

off the suit of excuse for your

being a walker: this is

unlike your to’s of the

routine morning. And you will bear

the hard scorn of concrete

and its swift patrons,

capsulate fleet of militant

goers belying the arbitrary sky.

But heaven stretches in every direction.

Your body will learn its courses

in this dissolute vault, where

vagrants find absolution for

the vagueness of being.

4 - Prayer for Stagnant Waters

See, a shred of police caution tape
yellow trampled and tucked
into a pine chip bed:
the quiet of crimes.
This place,
dappled with wrung lemon rinds
bottle mouths kissing through
topskin of pond green, bobbing
mallards
the madness of swans,
it swallows the dreams of wakers
forgetting iniquitous night.
At this humid shrine of the languid
I pray for my salvation:
Send my soul with the Gerridae skaters
cross the membrane of tenebrous deep.