Month: February 2025

count them

with bird

What after that wind flies? There goes one harpy. Now another. Repeat. They fall back later, to resume the docile pose of downy chicks in hand, two at a time.

After, one wonders. What this means if you consider the ratio of handheld bird to idea of those remaining in the bush? Look around then, sense a feather of presence. But now is one of those times when counting will not hold so maybe later but who knows. Was now always so hard to number–– or ever?

o bird
o feather
o breath
o time

hold me like the one about to fly
like found feather after bird gone
like opening notes of song almost
remembered.

i can believe it’s not butter

on what passes for sacred and current events

It only happened here––margarine, that is (though counterfeits like this are obviously too common to detail)––and the dye that went into it. And the marketing. The cigarette doctors spread it thick on Wonder Bread, and it was indeed a wonder. As was so much in the age of suspended belief––or disbelief, depending on the lens.

Flying cars were coming soon, so the age of advancement seemed like as good a time as ever to learn about the quaint past, like how Abe chopped down the cherry tree and Paul Bunyan sang a song and one of them had an ox, and there are those who will argue with apparent conviction, No, no it was George who did the chopping as though this is a crucial distinction––but it’s easy enough to concede, maybe he was harvesting vital wood for his teeth, and as anyone who spent any time in a grade-school classroom in the U.S. of a certain era can tell you, poor George had no business eating apples in any form but mashed, and that the careful preparation of these was a sensible act and arguably the lovingest thing to do for the man to whom you wish to offer something sweet without increasing the risk of your beloved incurring any variety of deadly oral infection most likely to spread to the brain in rapid time.

And yet, it doesn’t follow that whole histories––or even the accounts of current events, which by a certain logic are one and the same, depending on the extant understanding of the movement of time––should be treated this way, boiled and mashed into easily digestible baby food, unless the point is to hide the crushed contents of the arsenic pill that no one would swallow if they saw it whole.

i dream of possibilities

in atmosphere

if cessation of air then
if balloon i can hold it maybe
if i can carry it over
if you catch (if you see me)
if in what happens after that i may remember (that point)
if what pierced was the inlet of air (and not skin)
if remember
if i ask you will you (try please)
if to prevent this you may (show me)
if i am breaking and fear (to remember how)
if whether an alternative (or what?) ever was
if can be helped
if this breaks everything open in the end
if asking you where does that leave me or us standing
if to this question one answer is back to the floating again
if dizzy just remembering that vertigo and
if terrified to go so far and high so fast
if needing help at altitude will there be any or only the snipers again
if alone losing air at that distance will there be others
if so and we burst at those heights will it matter
if skins gone
if breathing
if not something
if i knew i could explain at lower elevations
if i go i need to tell you i have tried before
if i go i need to tell you i am scared
if i go listen i could not speak before of this fright it had more dimensions but
if language would allow i would have shared with others i saw shaking too but
if this is time for turning to another, calling hold
if i or you should try
if what is here
if when is now
if_____then, how?
if i am running out of pen

notes from a reading

in the shade near the back of a crowded room

Why does the performance poet so often sound like the caricature of a self-proclaimed poet? I suppose this is something that happens in the act of proclaiming so much and at such volume in that outfit. This one calls himself by a word that is three adjectives stitched together, each of which might have been lifted from the stickers of a 1980s grade school Trapper Keeper ™. It isn’t @zippydippycool, but you get the idea. I do not like noticing these things with such profound embarrassment. Doing so only reminds me that whatever it is that one is supposed to be very excited about, I am not. And that my heart, which may sometimes retract in shock to a mean and stingy artifact of itsownself, is usually on the verge of brimming way beyond expected confines, so I spend most remembered moments of this one life trying to pass as one whose heart and everything else is not so often leaking. Meeting mostly failure, with many humorous exceptions that never fail to surprise me, as when someone remarks (as someone often does) on my apparent calm. Which may explain the aversion here, as perhaps only the complement to a fondness for the dull-seeming ones with no names who do not wear any outfits but go on in a deliberate way, careful not to show themselves too much and scare everybody off, unseen and unproclaiming, especially when it comes to knowledge of what it is that is going on––here, and here, and also––do you hear that thing in the background, which is nowhere? I feel it coming closer all the time.

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