Exaggerate this Green Blossoming, the Church-Broken Sunlight, Refracting the Long Sorry of Wind opening like a pawnshop door, like the unbendable fingers of a man at the bar, his thumb an upside-down “L,” imbued, as the momentary rain clings to everything, like memory, like the quiet tussles of this unmoving, this battered inevitable.  How

our neighbor washes her hair, practicing her vocal scales for a song she’ll sing at AA, some immaterial hearsay, like your sister wailing at her parole officer, with the convoluted oneself of longing, with neighbors watching, suddenly Awoken to the Arguing of Glass and Stone, precipices of diaphanous arrival, deliberately unremembered, fraught with streetlight, impossibility, and the querulously

literal,

carving the soundlessness, the shattered shape of the hard sun, blank stone, The Inventing Wound.
 

*


Abysmal, Sleight of Rectitude, like the Dogmas of Ache, imperceptibly uncouth, idioms for neglect, repose, and the true origin of names.  For example:

call this sorrow because of its hard, low sound.

Two syllables, exponentially desolate, like how you told me parts of this city are so unpopulated that pheasants and deer have begun to appear.  Call it shame,

because it begins hushed, begins nonnegotiable, surreptitious, unstrung, like the charred alters of clouds passing, like coppery yarrows. Look

how lightly they lay.  Call them anything, anything, which translates to dust.



*


On the Stoop


Corey: which in Celtic means hollow.  Zeller: which in German is slang for prison cell¾also a possessive--as in ruler.  Translation: hollow king of the prison cell.

Annunciate.  This demonstrates that words matter.  You’ve barely spoken--strictly humming.  You’re humming as if a black limousine is waiting outside.  Wild, on the stoop, you know you’re nothing.  Annunciate: a cadenza of copper-colored light shaving through these gauzy clouds, like bandages, purpling into the downbeat of twilight-- gossamer shredding over this unpronounceable gray--as in your lineage, your self-portrait.

Your mother is a cubist and your father is in his blue period.  You watch your mother cut onions, hang sheets on the wire in the style of Nude Descending a Staircase, fold the hand-me-down clothes you’ve outgrown.  She’s lost her favorite pearl earrings and your father doesn’t give a shit.  He’s listening to bebop while he repaints the bathroom.  He’s sitting in front of the TV, drinking.  He wants to tell you a story. 

This body is hollow but it wants to take French lessons and learn how to play Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea on the piano.  This body wants your body to recognize it as a poem--to clap and cry--because you must be lonely, aren’t you?  Tell me.