Thursday, August 29, 2013

"I AM THE KING OF INFINITE SPACE"



We were young & we were shattered.
We took our lives & we settled down.

“I like your town & your trees & your
bodies of water” the way the music
drains out across a field. No vision here.

The house we built no more
than a maintenance shack. Insect shells.
Dry road. No visions.


I don’t believe I understand. God
was happening all at once & even
though we didn’t believe, he made us
good in the wind, made us something big

& dead & so comes love, so comes
this anniversary. So comes again
up, empty, open on the face of the waters.

Open across the breadth of the sea.

Friday, August 2, 2013

Biographical Note

I am not a politic.
I am not a politics.
I am not a politick.
I am not white magick.
I am not a sonnet unfurled.
I am not a crown prince, not a spear of asparagus
of the sort buried, robbed of chlorophyll so as to be
the best thing there is to be, which is white & fat.

I am not a sonnet in your hedgerow.
I am not an alarm in your digital.
I am not digitalis extracted from the vagina-like
foxglove to cure your terminal illness.
I am alarmed by your refusal to capitulate.
I masturbate twice, then absolve myself on your back.

I am trying not to hear you but goddamn the sonnets
are so fucking loud.
I am not reading your book about mangroves & paneer.
I am not a brick.
I am not a Frenchman walking all over your America.
America I am not a trail nor a trial nor a fish masala.
I am not a foreign national.
I am not a national velvet.
I am not Andy Warhol.

I am not employed by your "man."
I am not interred in the Cliche Mausoleum.
I am not finding in this new enterprise something
to make me a better man like it was supposed to do
but am finding new reasons to be annoyed.
I am not a crown of sonnets.
I am not a purple.

I am saying this very slowly so
that you will understand very slowly.

I am not a self-referential dead lyric.
I am spending half the day just coming back around.
I am not a proud man.
I am not a doctor of physick.

I am not a peninsula.
I am not America's Wang.
I am not those blinking taillights &
I am not exploding at 10,000 feet.