Desperately seeking
sexiness, she
had done cumulative damage
to her animal heart
by lunging after acceptance
from unworthy men.
Donned imaginary
lures and fished.  There was
something baitlike
about her, a hook hidden
within that was not
well-disguised, was easily avoided,
and those who bit
took at least
a little piece of her, some
a big piece of her, with them,
and what was left wriggled
with volition that
did not seem
to be her own.

a man
became a critter

creeping
over land

he sat on rocks
turned em over for moral guidance

he’s a cemetery
of thinking —

left over
animal

reptile brained
chunk of reaction

fight and bite
sleep where it’s warm at night

stay out of the cold
of opinion

screw a little
when needed

no need for a lot of breath
to tell this story

it’s so common
you might be forgiven

for pretending it’s not true
just another legend

until you cross paths with him
while trying to fall in love

Swear
that you can lose yourself
easily
in something
if you want to be
close to me,

for the best friends I have
thrive
on a passion
outside themselves,

live as if they are constantly
writing letters to others
that begin with “To Whom
It May Concern,”

and go on for pages
of detail, obsession
writ tight and careful,
no detail left behind,

certain that whoever receives
the letter will be
concerned as they are concerned,

ending them always with,
“Love” or “I eagerly await
your response,” forgetting
(or perhaps omitting with intent)

their names, the least important
detail, not worthy of note
in the presence of the greater topic.

These are the people I love most:
the ones who can forget themselves in something
as I have forgotten myself.

We find each other
without worrying about who we are
because from the start,
from first contact,
we understood that we had it right:
we are incidental chips bobbing
in the wake of our love
for the torrents of this world.

red lights skewing
across the road
in the white darkness
and the visible wind.

we sleep through
someone’s near disaster,
ignorant for now of fear
of losing control

even as we are blown
in our dreams to vulture islands
as the cold beak of winter
tears at our rest. 

we will face the morning
with crossed fingers
hoping the road under the snow
will hold us when it’s our turn.

In my hand is a hyoid bone,
staple reference of crime shows
for the way it breaks during strangulation —

It supports the tongue
and gives us
the offer of speech —

The person who once owned this one
is silent now,
choked for some reason —

You can tell by the cracks
along the horns how it was
seized from without —

crushed by some weight
as the person stared into
another’s eyes, perhaps familiar ones —

I can’t speak myself
of any one suspect, don’t know
how to explain —

I’m stuttering now, my breath
stalled inside, preventing me
from lying to you —

My brain’s gone down into a blue hole
swirling into quiet, the lights
failing as I rasp my distress —

How this bone was ripped and crushed
is a story for someone else to carry,
not a burden, really —

a small tale of suffocation
so mundane as to be
unremarkable —

It happens every day, the
free floating bone of language itself
a casualty of others’ desires.

Before I got here,
I wanted the poems
full of feral Siberian iris and
the sword leaves of cattails,
their cotton-bomb tops
coated in tan smoke;

now I have the poems
sticky with asphalt
and cigars, Saabs
broken down on Vermont
snow trails, starfruit
on a glass plate
in a downtown bistro.

If I seem to know the world
these days, it is because
I can still sense it distantly
through its cloak of tar
and screen of clever conversation over
well-constructed food —

but there was a time
when I could stalk the woods
alone, never speaking,
filled with One Word that was enough
until I became hungry
and then I could pull white tubers from the ground
and crawfish from the streams,
build a fire and eat well,
and still never say a thing.

This is why I will not write now
of the peregrine
on the museum eaves,
knowing how little I might have to say
is true to what I have become,

for it seems that everything
that grows or soars without speaking,
is born to be itself without being told,
is now just a symbol of something I’ve lost,
and a weekend trip to the forest spells nothing
worth repeating, and I am
starving, and noisy
with the need to speak of human things
to other humans.

I am discontented
and desire only
to be alone
with the memory of how
I could have been as animal,
as mineral, as green and dumb
with simple existence as these
better beings.

Some nights,
up here on the sixth floor
in the highest loft I can afford,
I can almost believe
it was real.  My blood in my ears.
My pulse slow as constellations
turning.  My eyes fooled
into thinking I am still
seeing things as they are.

On those nights, I sleep
soundly, and the city
fades behind the curtain
of unspeakable
divinity.

It does not last.
And I do not tell a soul
of how it is.