Poetry might be a mysticism
but every time I approach it
it flirts away awkwardly
like a bird that can’t fly
and I’m afraid to pounce it
for fear it would confetti
itself like a fucking dodo.

Why am I even talking about poetry
in a poem? My head is empty,
so empty, and really I’m trying
to be cool like an asymmetrical
shirt tuck. But I worry because
asymmetrical wings lead to crooked
flight, and asymmetrical oars lead
to floating in circles, sort of
how your asymmetrical lace

makes me want to drink
my nerves away like they’re sea
sickness, and asymmetrical drinking
has me spinning around
your straight face, just like
an asymmetrical face is risking
ugly, and asymmetrical teeth

are a choking hazard, which is caused
by asymmetrical genes and that could
be a death sentence, but
an asymmetrical noose ain’t
gonna kill me as good
as we did the dodo.

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

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.

The World Lacks Reversibility

And so does time, which is why
my grandma tells me she grew up
in an era where indoor toilets weren’t
a given and that she remembers how
“glorious” her first shower at age 15
was and how she fears the world
our kids are growing up in: Make It New
and you can shit yourself when you wake
to the price of milk or a drone
asking to lend a cup of sugar and to put
your hands up. Just like the world and time,
the heart lacks so much, but I can
misspeak about that just as much
as I can flat out lie about it, and so
the dead seem everywhere I look.

I’ve been getting sad reading Bruce
Boone’s Wordpress, about how much
he doesn’t lie about the heart’s
irreversibility and how heartless it makes me
feel — maybe I’ll call a nebulous you
you’ll never decipher or deserve
and whisper “darlin” like a knife
soaked in blood, like a desert searing
off its horns, like a legacy that cannot come
from the softer world my grandma talks about.
I believe I’m being punished for something
more sever than the wall paper
not matching up, my nails peeling
as if I’m pulling spears from your Bronx-
filled mouth, and it could be my fault
you’ve unscrewed the world’s sensibility,
but it could be my fault for looking back, too.