i.
Rather it's what they eke, body like juice
consecrated in cellophane
doing trouble or a ditty and if I should falter
a living, a metaphor
for a wall, damn libretto
souping through my panties
as wage, or opening eyes
wide and ploughing through
"We'll never be this young again,"
so thresh labourers in abstruse skin slaps
a parody kissing abdomen vitamin lips
cheap tile, cheap in nearby brick kilns
pumping out what slurs,
epistemology that dances for money
boom boom or by the airport extended stay hotels
I huff euphemism for sport each night
like paps took long walks
and we only had one tub covered in cum
distilling moonshine.
ii.
Our spectacles reflect this terrarium
of failure plinthed, affectively disordered,
slowly in the branches rumbling
self as a deepening of blood
setting into sofa fabric,
cancelled carpet daddy yum,
a bus can count him
ping-ponging angles blubber
grainy footage
banter this global position
thrown to the waves.
He finds himself on a frame slack blue
thus redoubtable in its smudgy shriek,
come and knock on our door
who, beyond the structureless
salmon shorts of our despondence,
remains callous, in uproar, age of 26.
The wrong people approach the rifle.
I love a man in traffic,
men in traffic, tense
in the clovers.
iv.
in memory of Sean Bonney
The problem, he was saying,
is chuck banderole slobber,
aren't any papers in this
our daily hibernation's colours.
The problem was last seen
everywhere the problem was,
too inward to ever float,
whiskers in a minor key drone more
like a wail or a keen.
We're edges, comme ci comme ca ja.
Later that morning, the problem
was runny eggs or the morning itself.
I tug at my left nipple
reading Notley by candlelight in a van screw work,
nuzzled burden of verse—
there is no romance mowing the lawn
the problem was the lawn.
Could not recognize the faces standing over me.
Did you sing your chomps
into your fragmentary subjecthood
or did you unmute the problem
was witnessed by a neighbour,
the apparition that is melody
tool demonstr sin city dairies theuboomf inspctqn
we misremember words we summon
a directory of murmuring alleys
all our harms like weaverbirds.
v.
Imagine directing assistants
placing a painting of smacking lips
above the master bed
in the Zurich pied-a-terre while your advisor says,
The zeitgeist has lost touch with the data.
His mouth's corners host a foamy buildup.
I got fucked in a basement bathroom
by some sinecuring fop from Dubai.
Use this text to sell bottle service
and expired film, plague,
signifieds never surfaces is a demand, dammit
light, dammit graceful light named empire,
shrill blue fields and fields stubborn, yellowing.
I king urinal and expanding void
whereas that's my sleep mantra,
rapids in a canoe lulling route
to obscurity's portage, a better way
to say frozen ground at dawn
or an epidemic builds
wherein we need to spend hours in the woodshed,
emerging only to pour hot diarrea
on our careers, ensuring
that a would-be ladder's a sawed toon,
really just hokum clobber prescription.
x.
Smirk, slurping justice
formless interior
the party that has been in the backyard the whole time
secret recipes for tatertot hotdish
blood Satan Satan not otherwise on ice.
You can't beg for better words
thawing, disintegrating underfoot
yon silence of drawing.
What happened to plumbago
but sheen snapped
for materials reach outward first:
we drop buttonwood twigs
off one side of the bridge,
a shore hence recollection:
a gasp or serrefine
lead-up to yet more dismal bog.
That is a doomed campaign
for a more rigid flocked surface
of temporal concerns,
gagged undulation in the shanty
we strip and ablute each eventide,
good news is bad news:
we've breath, rawdogged in a castle dungeon,
dunked myself in a barrel
of lube, a political theatre regurgitation
where hallways are charred,
long and damp, bootprints
on low-pile carpet.
xii.
We beget violent massaging of the panda
in the 1970s and now its face litters
license plates new milk cartons, another industry decimated
by the young and anemic pop a softgel
with that underbite they're worried
about jobs force-feeding geese I've had a lardo crouton
with a handcrafted cocktail, tits slobbered.
I spend hours thinking of my caress
and the sequoiadae family in the Americas.
"I pissed on roses and an African tortoise
roaming the grounds," he says
horizon of bridges soars his corneas,
heap, heap on excesses and surely the soul
or another drastic image will flutter
into that overturn grabbing the throat,
thumbs at center a loading dock for sex crimes
amidst other conveyances of slavery
it's what the border is for:
an unyielding romance void
and dustborne illness fabricator.
She calls it knife salsa.
Until then, bleached remains.
xiii.
Right now, it looks like substance flashing
from a malfunctioning squeeze bottle
slipping on orange spooge, forgotten veins,
sick and wearing unlaced Tims.
Huffing gas, staging a coup on the bunny hill,
attempt after attempt to avoid catastrophe in the glade.
Like things cocooned in sweat seeking the river people,
bad camp burning near the tracks they say.
If so, it will be yet more proof that the hugs don't work:
curses on his arms, admonitions from Hollywood
sleeping it off in the tub, the deepening suicide of July,
dust collecting on serape, what seems evident
is pretending the meals are going well
or finding maps back to the cistern,
another breath method. Quick and shallow
isn't easy, it's questions of closets in warfare.
Looking sexed-up from one angle
on the situation, correspondence with manic scorch
eyeballs and lightening curtain.