When you met her, you thought she was negligent. You thought she didn't care about whether or not you thought anything about her. You thought it pained her to remember your name. I've been with her for quite a while now, and due to the time we've spent together I can dutifully report with clear conscience that all of what you think is true.

People have asked me why she behaves the way she does, whether or not she realizes how deeply she offends people. All I can say to them is that realizing and repenting are two separate things. People have asked me if she is at all bothered by the ways in which she disgusts, disarms, and demeans them. This, perhaps, concerns her.

Everything I can tell you is conjecture. The most revealing thing I can reiterate is something that has happened. I made a few notes after the incident, and I will reproduce them for you here. I do not dare elaborate on the content of these notes, because they are the truest, most immediate recollections I am able to bring to bear. Anything beyond this would remove us from the situation farther than the words themselves:


she can't physically bring herself to
she can, physically all her systems are working
but she can't mentally engage with other people enough to speak
she can speak, she just never feels like she needs it
and people want her to so bad because it's alienating
she really doesn't and everyone hates her for it except the narrator
because the narrator is a narrator and its her job to speak for other people
so they're a perfect pair--
the speechless character (as all characters in words)
and the narrator that says everything that everyone else says
so it's a book about books kind of too
maybe an extended metaphor or something

c2. they put us in another place

d2. where they start shaving us

everywhere the hair inhale

e2. washing us exhale on showers inhale

f2. and giving us dresses exhale

just dresses nothing else inhale

*g2. and I knew why the dresses were getting shorter and shorter

These instances at first seemed to be the product of a special effect. The first time she thought she had somehow wandered into a movie. She expected to turn around and find spotlights and a camera crew, a director seated in a folding chair and a small crowd of adoring fans. She turned around, saw taxi cabs driving with reckless abandon, chic young men on coffee runs, and women pushing their children in strollers while jogging. When she turned back to her acquaintance, he was nothing but soot.

For a while afterwards she tried to piece together what had happened. She was sane, she was certain, but how long would she stay that way? She thought of God, she thought perhaps the burning bush idea was tired and now he was speaking to her with a different severity. If it happens again, she won't turn away from it. She promised herself she would look into it until she learned whatever message she was supposed to pass on.

After spending a slow Saturday evening at the bar around the corner from her apartment, she lit a cigarette outside. A man approached her softly, as if she had choreographed their meeting. He asked if she wouldn't mind lighting his cigarette, and just as she did, she ignited him, too. This must be it, she thought, it has happened again and this time I will not lose my focus. She stared into the flames, watched the flesh drip away from the skull. She felt as if she were meditating beside a fountain in a Japanese rock garden. Body became water over stone, the movement of the whole sunk into tides of a simpler natural order. She didn't know bone was so flammable, she never before realized how much combustible energy the human body contained. The flames almost licked her face and she was sweating profusely but she would not turn her back on him. She perspired into her eyes but she did not blink. She marveled at the way in which blood works like gasoline to aid fire in devouring a hearth of bone. Among the whispers of flame, she listened for a voice. She heard nothing but crackling, and thought of summer camp.

Disappointed but not discouraged, she went home. She made herself some coffee and turned on the TV. She felt bored. The excitement was gone, the surge of adrenaline had left her. The absence of divine intervention had given her the opinion that she must be the cause of the fires. She was an arsonist, she, by static or telepathic means, could turn humans into coals. She tried staring at her cat. He mewed and fell swiftly into dreams.

It was clear she couldn't tell anyone, she would live a life in solitude like all the superheros she'd ever had any interest in. She was glad for her disinterest in her own appearance now that pruning herself in a mirror had become a danger. She reclined on the sofa and readied for sleep by counting her breaths. When she reached forty-three, she was asleep.

At 8:30am, her commute to Liberty Mutual was filled with food trucks and cheap delicatessens, but one cart always seemed to have a longer line than the rest. This morning, she decided to see what the fuss was about. She waited on line and tried not to look anyone in the eye. She had awoken from bad dreams, dreams in which she was arrested for murder, dreams that collaged childhood nightmares with a picnic in Hell. She wore the largest, darkest sunglasses she had.

The man behind the stove top beckoned for her to order. She hadn't made up her mind yet. She asked if he could cook egg whites. He said no. She asked if he had turkey bacon. He said no and told her to get her Jenny Craig shit out of the way if she wasn't planning on ordering real food. Don't you see the line?

She did see the line. She had taken her sunglasses off to see it more clearly, and then turned her gaze back to the greasy, hairy little man using his bare hands to serve customers. She imagined the flames underneath the frying eggs picking up a little air and finding their way to the stained apron, then to the huge t-shirt, then the beard, the mustache, eyelashes, brows, and hair.

Are you going to order or not? She blinked. She wanted him to burn. She wanted the whole fucking line to burn. She was waiting for it but it didn't happen. Give me a coffee, she said while taking out her wallet. It took her a bit of time to find it in her handbag because she had to bypass a number of insurance claims, magazines, and newspaper clippings. Finally she saved her wallet from the abyss of material disarray and looked up to face her aggressor. He wasn't there.

All around her people were screaming, their high pitch cries pricked her ears. Voices scratched their way into her consciousness, pointing her attention to the flames that climbed higher and higher behind the cart. Everything in front of her was aflame, the tires underneath the shelves of pastries and bagels were melting and the smell of rubber choked her. The burnt eggs released a sulphuric odor that seasoned the smoking flesh. The line of hungry office folks had scrambled, some men were crying and one woman had ripped her clothing off and declared the Apocalypse.

Maybe she wouldn't go to work today. She never calls in sick and everyone deserves a personal day once in a while. It was sunny, Spring was well on its way, and soon she would get to retire her winter coat for good. She gathered herself, straightened up, and made her way to Central Park. She was still hungry, and thought a tuna sandwich and a cup of tea would be reason enough to celebrate.

events bear weight
like teeth strung by spiders
toeing sight and sensation
between tall towers, ticks
made sense as if it were
something to build upon
a construction already started,
but contribution is a contribution,
thus one is related
to every in a motif,
a motive made of suspense
in suspension, hinged
on the hereafter, near the next
pressed to reassertion

Poetry mends the always breaking,
I can tell when you are here:
Wind enters wind and teaches
How to decode invisibility.

Older Poems

Place

my legs know something
more about the grass,
the way sun licks earth
against a granite wall

my knees bend there
until i hit something; everything
comes from here. death
is respect for change.

clouds will not be
the way they are, past
now. this instant, every instance
moves, loosens.

ties between water and air
slacken. there
is always
so much space.

my hands find a place
there, where
these blades of grass
spiral into strong, soft arms.



White in Black

i have a mind, it's all politicians.
who are these people:
they recreate me
through my exhibition of them.

once, i was something.
you're doing it to me now:
staining me through your seeing of me;
it's transformation.

all details are consequence.
i have a mind, what you tell me it is.
everything is perceived
slightly, differently.

one form becomes another, the mind
cannot judge the dispossession of itself
any more than one person

is another; we are those spaces
that give us room, that absence
that makes us touch.



Brown

there is little consideration for design,
the architecture has no blueprint, though you imprint--
but that's all
press, release, ghost.
you don't explain or deliver yourself
to our substance, the space between impact--
the moment, the segment of traditional behavior:
male and female
intimacy as expressed through speech and time,
you're getting me, you're getting
half and it isn't.

provenance is sleeping, smoked, taxed.
message is static, eyes and hair are unwired
strokes of genius--
primacy is ecstasy,
your bones break
for it, but i can't find you beautiful.
i can't find you--
you are a voice that sounds like a skyscraper.
your ventriloquism is prophesy,
a long whiteness,
posture that imposes by leaning
too far back.

use your angles, speak to yourself
then to the air. if there is no response
you will invent one, then ignore it.
we can talk about art, we can talk about books
i can look at your hands.
what can you do for me--
i can describe you here;
i can make you appear and then transcend these lines.
i can drop you from syntax, semiotics, memory--

you are lost. i like the way you are
built with patches of concept and flesh,
but functional: you are a knowledge
of that else. it is not surrender,
it is commitment. do not renounce justice
with convention. do not admit
to your mechanics.



If I Had

there is always still water beneath the curb:
find the money; to wake
when a token rests in my palm,
“it was not a dream,” knuckles in the mouth--
be comfortable anywhere (for a break,

for five minutes). from your brain
to your phone, smaller,
shorter.

sometimes i can see you,
and i know presence:

after christmas, it's just
cold. the grate is
down, someone did her job.



We Made a Nest

football, all
of Pittsburgh, the name
of your cat, hair
with free will, thick
glasses, eggs
of conversations,
joints, strong legs

we sorted through the twigs,
words we were
good for, string,
plastic tubing, provocative behavior,
corrugated cardboard, decomposing
artifact memories,

and assembled those we'd find
most comfortable

i took New York, then
techno,
my words, long curly
hair, old clothes, white smoke,
those laughs, these questions,
new drawings, a body to touch,

and carried my contribution
to the nest where we would sleep
four nights before the wind came



Yellow

old isn't old,
everything reoccurs for the first time--

my existence is real. i have a dog,
and had one
with a different name.

find the pattern first, once you've seen it,
can't you see the parade
without looking out the window--

all this smog is only
the accumulation of time.
choose one instant

that happened;
find it there.

you were an empty house, severely lived-in.
remember what you did to their dogs? the electric fence,
my brother's friends.

languages that don't exist,
"leaves spiraling back onto their branches,"
New York burning millions of times,

rising again as if it were the fire;
new sets of wrists growing
after every scene in the bathtub