There are things you don’t believe
There are things you can’t believe
Let me tell you
It’s hell to dig up pretty words to conjugate shit
To find the shovel can’t do justice to the metal hinges of pain
To find that in the mirror it’s someone else
An android I no longer recognize
Oh, world of expired friends
Pose in Paris, Israel & New Jersey
Looking at iCloud’s stream, I enter demons with switchblades of life
I won’t declare I have loved for that implies I haven’t lived
Truths that surely can’t be true
Two years beyond anesthesia, I can’t come clean in the wrong body
Return me to settings on the treadmill ramping up to hit my stride
Mix up my reveries one of whom sings Cogane, Mysels & Robertson’s “We Three”
“My echo, my shadow and me” revolve sure & unsure
This body has nowhere to go
Evasive stranger to itself
I’ll take Mozart in the fingertips at 11 with Bono on the run at 19
The basic level of existence can be lost
Resolve chafes brutal daylight
Homicides of casual glances
This hip hiccups textures of decimating dark
Jettisoned out of its half-emptiness
Blind me from this bind
My colonized clavicle cranks out
My rubble of ribs tear the leather of what must be & ought not be my skin
Kin that’s never kind
How do we claim these flesh cassettes we can’t play?
Strum Clapton through anesthetic backwards ears I own but can’t speak into
My alloy of ankle & foot are reckonings
Nerves unravel narratives in this right side that contests my breath
I dock it across the bay in the malware of my stomach
It’s my ravaged world
How miserable
The extinction of your everything
Inarticulate mostly
No
More than mostly
The body is, is & is
I learn to pray for myself with smoke & Calla lilies
Vicious falcons in the unexpected breezeways & trains of heartbeats
Charged in the courthouses of dawn
The abrupt hours hammer open my chest but there is nothing there
Barren of primrose goggles into nucleotides that illuminated ink for me
Nothing but fucking all that is what is at stake in this broken pushcart of bones
The damp light of words is the oar that pushes off
Steam rising from plates of fried okra, salmon croquets & hush puppies
We buttered our suitcases with Miles Davis & Beanie Babies
The City’s machinery mass-produced microwaved tears of our dandelion grits
No one ever asks us about our origins
No one ever asks about my snapped flesh
We couldn’t get away with affecting this living with that life
There are things you don’t have the knack to believe
There are things no degree of expertise can sanction without violence
Malignant October minutes
Runaway second hands in a doctor’s hurried hands
Cut through my synapses
Cut this flame besmirching the air
I look backwards
I lose a year of my life
I lie down in putrid grief with every incendiary dictionary & encyclopedia
Take off my right arm
Neuter my right leg
Arrest my tongue of Peppermint Sticks
Chainsaw my right ear
Dim the switches in these cracked blues
Skew the screws of sight to behead legs
Blackout the sweet scent of vanilla
Litany of blighted nos
Your indelible pen evicts virtue from this crossed-out body
I don’t mourn this
I make my own diagnoses of their nothing dispensaries
Lyceum of lyrics lick me like our Springer Spaniel
Fetch my brainstem, Lulu
Vacuum in the famine of aphasia
All the runners, cyclists, children, schoolgirls: so fatal
My life is contused with this stomped-out sky of dead babies unborn
I notice the prisons of thought
Rev up the Jerusalem of memory
Plant an olive tree on the bulldozed Erie of sadness
Take me, world
A black-winged intoxicated forget-me-not
Light-deprived & covered head-to-toe in pollen
There are things you don’t believe
There are things you can’t believe
Scratch this record
Redact this poem
Forgive this poem
Revise this inventory
Wash this inventory in the rivers
Make its archive anthropologist over this contagious blue sadness
An axe into seas that deny ending