with art we seek to stabilize an explosion of everyday living rhythms (breathing, heartbeat, walking, the tension of skin over muscle). the moment a bubble fails, when it is in between being-bubble and oblivion. an alchemical leap rather than a scientific progression; folding-in-on-itself and twisting. repetition demonstrates to us how that which is apparently linear and logical is actually circular and sublime. for example, excellent music finds the frictions of life’s rhythms and synchronizes them into a metarhythm (which is greater than the sum of its parts) that bends back around to show us how the supposedly banal repetitions it’s composed of are miraculous in their own right. we want to melt the signifier! a frictionless language! an eye-dropper, bottled hallucination!

Some gardens are pruned overzealously. Who did the landscaping in Eden? What type of garden do we want to live in, anyway? What type of garden would we be free in? I know that I feel brittle when I'm labeled, like dead soil. There are flower beds that we should tend to with a mother’s gentle hand. At the same time there is a lot to be learned from Jonathan Richman about subtlety; we should be open to the potential necessity of bulldozing some orchids, turning bad soil and making it new and good. We can plow our way through the doubt and the despair. We can shoot our way out, maybe, if we’re careful not to shoot our way back in. Somehow we’ll have to figure out how to do it in the name of love and good gardening.

. When we looked out the window as the wind blew big bottlecap-sized flakes of snow straight up towards the sky in the evening, and we were so pleased by that inversion of the way things normally are, and I could see the joy written on your face, I remembered that I love you.

. When we walked home from a party, stumbling a little bit, in the cold, and we saw a half-dozen deer, maybe the same ones that we saw driving back from the airport a month before, so graceful and poised, crossing the empty street, in the soft white lamplight, and you inhaled so sharply, I remembered that I love you.

. When we coated our noses and curled up together naked like twin birds in an egg, under the shell-colored down blanket that sheds feathers all over the bed, and touched each other’s hair, I remembered that I love you.

When I hear your boots on a stretch of stairs

my guts go into nautical knots

I was poisoned stomping after you in the snow

and your nose looked like a strawberry

you had a bomb stuck in your throat

Leave me here, leave me here, I’ll catch up with you later

my angel can’t get her feet underneath her

she broke my fingers with a strung out smile 

my angel wants to see past the horizon

and I’m ashamed and nearsighted, my only love

is the ready loam in my innerspring garden

you’re jealous of my answers

and the tears that leak so easy

you told me i know how to live

but i'd so much rather...

if i could be a string on your guitar

a finger on your old leather glove

if i could be a feather in your pillow

i’d check out before breakfast

but i'd so much rather...

you can touch your heart to mine

you can warm me for a time

before i go i’d be remiss

to deny you a last kiss

and when i go i’ll leave behind

all the good that i could find

as a ghost in it i’ll linger

home at last, my host refined

When an animal is about to die, it goes away from the other animals. I have all of these people at arm’s length. I have all of these people that don’t seem to mind me. It goes away from the other animals. I have all of these people that I could never be honest with. Maybe the animal is just ashamed. I wish I could follow her around all day, like a ghost, without ever getting in her way. If I met God right now, I think I would embarrass myself horribly. I would say “... if that makes any sense” at the end of sentences, and I would say “sorry” without having anything to be sorry for. I would forget myself. God would be mortified by an animal this stiff. I hope that I get a chance to warm up a little before we meet.

it’s there, right outside of all this stale air

this fun tangle

and doomed endless knot

what is it?

what does it taste like?

what sounds does it make?

please do your best

it lacks relational anchoring

it’s unclear if it has a size

it could be tiny like a spark

between static hands in the wintertime

or it could be big enough to make every cell

rip itself apart like a firework

bliss is utter lack of distinction

it’s musical, that’s for sure

that’s really the only thing to say for sure

When I was small I played with plastic army men. We had a lawn that was mostly clovers and dandelions and half-buried sweetgum seeds, and so my mom didn’t mind much at all when I dug the place up to make earthworks, trenches and berms and twig cheval de frise. I remember how the clay soil dried on my hands and cracked in my creases. I didn’t know many words back then. There were earthworms and pillbugs and white grubs with sinister orange faces. I didn’t have any brothers or sisters, so I set everything up all by myself. I had some cannons with rickety wheels and cavalrymen on flat brown horses. And really I wasn’t playing, just trying to make the scene look right. Shape and relation and fitting in concern me still. I haven’t solved anything since then. I turn a quick orbit around a coldness that I’ll sink into someday, because it’s true that nothing lasts. My little fingers would get numb from scraping, but summer storms turned everything back to mud.

i hold back my tears

with a muscle in my nose

that stings when worked

but the trumpet swells and i can’t

help but relax it

a warm gem is born 

and i hope i can make it

to our next embrace

… and in the end the miracle of the transformation, not the particularity of the transformed, is what remained, even as our bodies, temples made of childish mistakes, sank back into formlessness.

… and in the end our fatalism was ground to dust by love, which is all there ever was, which is what time and space were made of, secretly. 

… and in the end motion and stillness were reconciled and made one, and it was the beginning. 

Mister S.’s life came to a teary end last night

but the papers never got word,

and he was not properly eulogized. 

Animals at the zoo are pacing figure-eights

and the aquariums were shut down by the junta

because the fish were swimming inverted.

Our neighbors give us hard looks

and it puts us in a fluttery mood.

And the bus never comes anymore. And there are

a great many potholes. And the garbage is piled high.

the coyote doesn’t say much, the coyote’s pretty distant

he’s got this way of walking

the coyote sees other coyotes sometimes

and they know it by a certain type of wide-eyedness

when they run into each other at the grocery.

people scratch their heads about the coyote

and nobody’s got a read on him

they wonder if he’s secretly a woman

or maybe he’s the one killing cats, or both

and where he goes when it’s rainy.

death to the misdancing. depose the stiff-hipped. ice down nocireceptors. creep out from uncut lawns. phosphate truck bombs. shuck oysters. can-open. asphalt steam. foam at the mouth. magnesium pan-flash. peel them like great plastic shrimp. turn the soil. churn and burn. surf on acetone. diesel smoke. immediate harm. weld shut. plant flowers from 200 yards. one bird with two groans. burn in and turn out. upside-down and correct.

Collect your anger in a rain barrel somewhere close to your heart. Don’t let the warden see.