From the corners of their mouths
a meandering ribbon of blood.

They tell of rich detail
beyond forgetting,

of tapestries that fell like
waterfalls from the ceiling,

of strings of popcorn teeth turning
the doorway into an instrument,

of the lash, the lash
my lover

held.

a carefully posed
set of glasses

pen
between fingers

ink that spills
from grizzled

mouth-
corners

oh you must be a ship
in rough

sailors about
to

cast themselves
on the mercy

of a fevered
quatrain

but I am enough to break.
But said nothing, but did something.
It is enough, though it is not enough.

Perhaps there is no such thing as
“enough” but instead a constant
turning away from the wheel.

a Form that flies at night.
It deifies description.

Throw away the telescopes,
the moon whispers.
And especially the rockets,
it whispers.
Throw them all away.

It is also possible to love the earth,
though the earth is a close,
rough-hewn marble,

a set of dull knives that kill
on purpose or accident.

It does not speak except to say,
Build the telescope,
and build the rocket,
and you will see how
difficult it is not to die.

He stares in a mirror
and sees himself
in his meat,
the frailty of it,

and imagines himself
made of stainless steel,
polished and gleaming,
unable to move except
via continuous explosions.

He leaves and can’t remember
quite what he looks like.
His attempts to describe
himself fall short.

Except when he says,
I am unable to move except
via continuous explosions.

Yesterday, a thousand
rumbling axles per minute,
but today he lies in bed
and the house is
an unearthly quiet.

Planes one quarter whistled
and three quarters roared overhead,
loosening drywall screws bit by bit,
making the walls crooked,
but today he lies in bed
and the house is
an unearthly quiet.

The microwave door clicked shut,
a child cried, two dogs barked,
a man tossed bags of recyclable
into a truck and drove off,
neighbour children went single-file
into the short yellow bus,
but today he lies in bed
and the house is
an unearthly quiet.

He imagines all the disasters,
the probably, the fanciful,
the disease, the war,
the zombie apocalypse,
the police state,
the terrorist attack,
and he finally settles on
the most horrible of all:
He has grown used to the unceasing
grumble of the gears of the world
and that what he hears as nothing
is in fact the absence of something
long-missing and the thought slips away
as he lies in bed
and the house is
an unearthly quiet.

Thanks be to God.
The creek nearby overflows its banks,
engorged with meltwater.
The kayaks are swept away,
but not the dog,
not the daughter,
not the son.

This is a strange geometry.
You stand on the shore
of an infinity that resembles
other, smaller infinities.

This intuition was beaten out of you
by petty schoolmasters,
those Euclidean rulers.

But the world is not a smooth ball
suspended in space waiting
for a grid, a lattice
to be installed.

Rigidity insists upon its
own failure. Inability
to conform to what
is

instead of what
could or should be.

so I tear
open my throat

and the words
come pumping out

then when your
horrified efforts

have failed to
stem the flood

your delinquent
fingers cannot

hold on to
even a few

No-one imagined that our greatest minds
would be building context-aware
advertising and trying to
deliver it to a watch.

I drive a car to work every morning
just like my father and his father
and his father’s father.

I will die.

The promise of the future has been
transmuted into a banality so banal
it defies a metaphor.

I’ll just come out and say it:
This is not what we imagined.
There is no great now.

Instead, a singularity of lack,
where imagination involves
remixing past with past.

Instead, I imagine a future
where I can communicate with
my half-friends without
lifting a finger,

and a half a continent
or block away a starving
man dies
in the street.