Third Attempt pt. 1

What do you think you’re thinking?
That the world is just a sphere
and we are too many?
The last time I did that birds pecked
out the eyes of my dreams,
and I remembered a wayward
stash of crows jutting out
of the trees like a taunt.

Screw up your courage ‘til it seems nothing
to think of night as having a sunrise in it;
can you actually look at the glass?
what is the color of your darkness? No, screw it
up until you can scream “this is happiness”
to me from across the ceiling.

I know futility is the size
of the bird in my heart
whose wings always celebrate
the arrival of a now

My weakness is that gravity
accumulates in seeds
blowing about the street
until they pile to a paralysis

There is no flutter
a noun can’t mend
into a pile of paralysis

I hear the wide world
spins itself into a pile of paralysis

I also hear you get caught
up in chants til you’re tossing
their corpses, dumb founded

I wonder if each month
approaches like wound clock
Or is that a womb?

Boy, that was sure surreal,
passing around envelopes
full of inconsequential stonings
of love through the sky —

I’ve stepped in it thick —
I think I lost

my breath a few times
and tried to mask it
with whiskey and now
I hiccup up and down
the whole city thinking

but what I really
want to say is
sueño contigo

"Frank throws
pebbles into the
map if the
world and
readies
himself
to ride
new waves
to ruin"

from The Book of Frank by CAConrad

I will not take this jar of ashes.
The simple things rest for a moment
in our ribcages, they come back to us,
twist the heart notches backwards.
How is it that they fill?

Clouds, the TV with slight chances
of rain, the small miracle
of rain in deserted summers,
lists of names unfurling up
and down the stairs, our favorite
words stamping themselves out
in ashtrays, maniacs and clowns
asking us coyly about our vanities?

But there’s the truth, no? Dragging
along your carpets, crawling up
your walls, sliding down your banister
with a giddy smile and you wonder
what that’s like because you’ve never
had a banister in your life. I wonder
too, but let it be, hoping
it returns to the top of the stairs.

If it returns, I’m not sure we should
listen; if it stays still, we should dance;
if it burns down its smoke signals,
we should wave them high;
if it murders itself in its own skin,
we’ll recreate ours. Remember to
underline that last part twice.
One day we might cart it around
in our backpacks as poems in a slice
of stone, asking us, “Who are you, really?”

And we can say, “Right, okay, you got us,
our hands are up, but now we’re going
to have to crush you.” Or, “come back,
come back, come back!
We haven’t heard you yet!”

I’ve decided to smash the state
like a window that got stuck
during a pivotal cross-breeze sonata.
David, you’d be proud of that first line,
but you’re too busy living out a post-
blowfish phase, all stickers and blood
and mucking up the dashboard -
how am I going to drive is all the way
to the airport without a feel for the road?

I shouldn’t mock you, even pseudoly,
because you’re excited about something
and you’re using the violence of silence
to build yourself a better room and I can’t
even muster a cogent sneeze
with all the sand in the air.

Have I told you how weird Nogales is
after New York? The tallest things seem
cacti, though empirically they aren’t,
but stand next to a pillar of spines,
put your arms around one and miss
the listless embrace of Rockefeller
or Flatiron or WT1. Sometime in a cloud
caught morning the cacti sparkle
even better than an open night.

Who let this poet out of his room?
Who out him in an airport lounge
at midnight with some hippie playing
James Taylor? Who taught these road
runners to actually stick out their tongues
in their mocking sprints. I didn’t even know
they have TV in this state - I’d like to
smash all of them for what they did
to cultural studies, with its chaos
of blancos party-crashing the rio.

Here’s to a single star traveling at highway
robbery speed into an Alex Mac
puddle of blue bullshit. If I’ve remembered
anything from my geology courses,
we’ll fall back into the ocean broken and stuffed
full of questions because one dream
is only a sixtieth of the prophecy we need.