A line of sailors and small women

The first words you wrote were a farmer,
and red ants crawled up your legs
and got into the complex straps
of your wedge heels. Everybody mingled
at the party in their neon tee shirts. Later,
they crashed their bikes. Naming you
was as natural as casting a shadow.
It was like there were two of us. It began
to flow. There were children.

Our girls were smart
and we guarded them wild,
in sunglasses. People avoided our gaze.
Even the homeless toughs folded. We said stuff like,
“We’ll make it our business,” and
painted the bellies of our coworkers
with orange latex paint that stretched
with their breath and when it stretched
we loved them
more.

But they didn’t love us back.
So we drank more and got weird haircuts.
We longed for the women in the park to be lovely.
We cried at the war memorial and tucked cigarettes behind our ears.
We never knew where we could catch the train.
Crows shook their heads at us, like:
“What a pity. What a shame.”

Our bonfires burned into the next day. It seemed
like we were constantly breaking
our knuckles.

Our small wheels rattled and the sidewalks buckled.
We did not break the stare with
the Italian couple.
We were usually dirty and impossible to please.
Now, it takes so long
for our cuts to heal. We moved
to higher ground and didn’t know
ourselves in pictures. We creaked,
our dense chests so full of completed tasks.

two two oxford something silk
an awful tape in arms
what song bored on his thighs
how typical
the largest sound my
days are desperate and make mistakes

waves beat the harmful shore
somewhere close some days can smell it
the wife whatever

happens to us or what doesn’t

a ruined page my
forehead i recognize
an old system or at least his swing
none of these are available

bending down because a great city is small
for adults
infield dirt looser
we fall on hands and
i imagine you do too intolerable

i give these circular boys
like a question mark yes sir yes 

I dare you fill the room with smaller rooms and the smaller rooms with hard objects that will not break the density of the objects is not important because in the small rooms in the room they will be weightless unbreaking in the vacuum. This is one long long letter in the language you and I both speak. Signed your friend.

The sun blinds me and the earth blinds me and all the animals in the world are faster. It is a fact. The person I came here with left me alone and I am in the large room it is empty and the air is heavy and where are the rocks the objects I ask the air and the air goes they took them with you when you were always leaving this place and don’t you remember walking out the door.

Each car on the train is for a separate group of people but I don’t know the terms.

Wheelbarrows navigate the moor-like expanse struggle is a rock itching lips and unhelpful travelers. Two men in blue notes starch their teeth I am pimpled like a dream like a moor like the opening scene of a movie.

The world is large the world’s largest. 

The shore was long that ran from the fence 
to the end of the shore. 
She has a way with a piece of data to see her with an answer. 

You’re a rascal 
falling

out of cabs with beer in your purse. 
The light in the office reddened I think I was drowsing. 
I woke up and weak light 
from the cellar-style window coughed

in my burned face. 
I own three watches and all the batteries are dead. 
The faithful dog’s lustrous

brown eyes now moist with regret. One day 
the radiator finally came on and melted the cheap towel.

Oh thank you We don’t stop thinking oh thank you oh about the deep voice and laughing thank you.

(Borrowed-text algorithm & impressions, Orient Heights/Brighton, MA, February 2012)

We keep track of what we bore, as if the boring into is
the holes we leave by boring.
It makes me feel like paper without the delicate.

It is of the utmost importance that I do not make you the places that I am likely not to go to, like I make the city stairs, rope ladders, dull rain and a dull breeze.

We talk about thunderstorms.
I wonder if you smell like anything, like dirty sleep
like I do, or excitement like the dull rain,
your hypothetical childhood.

Enormous ears navigate my enormous head like a globe,
with charts and tools. I sense
you in the dark.

I am the magnifier. The leaves
with small holes
bored in them.
You keep this stupid, difficult life
and now I just

I wonder if I’d offend
for being so simple,
for just being a person.

The face is always burning because of the glow of a computer,
humiliation, beer, or motion.

Gesture is all pause.
Moving is not moving, not silent.
They rattle like a couple of cheap
copper bracelets on a raised arm. We blink

over frames

and when you blink you
draw a string map through a series of desks and chairs.
We are the scratching and the scratched.

The wheelhouse, my energy source, water
tempered, and not the river.

The officials are super soft, Oh,
opening body
the humming of the machine. 

First, the war, the act of war, the plunder, raiding. It’s like how hair could bristle before you even had your beautiful hair.

Look up from your computer like there’s no such thing as an armor piercing cartridge.

Your eyes are two harrier jets. Your smile is a harrier jet. Everything in you is named for what it hunted.

The agency has released
its preliminary report on the Sept 15 crash. 

Things can be too right,
like really clean hair.

Be faced with
what’s facing you from across the room. Later you

Relax. A few
weird gifts in the bottom

of a heavy bag.
Nice vest, by the way. 

            The Mare

                                                                        in Middle Welsh is

            something

stuffed into

a             shoe closet under

the computer

overflows            with flowers

                                    firemen arrive in the office and we

trade                  significant glances

                                                                        hair too long, ah,

                              I know you too well

            The computers molt

         flowers stick in my throat

my brothers starve in heavy bags

                                                                                                             the notebook fills

                                                                                                                    with numbers.

                        Digital signage is awkward

in             cheap shoes

The small skirt                        Mare, the         sea hair or         horses

The small battle lord of Wales pass in millions

great or splendid

iudd has the meaning of

            lord

The girl does not receive the pages but a history of the pages

does not receive the words, “give me your blonde, pounding heart!” in her ears but in her hair and fingernails.

does not walk lightly across the thin carpet and up the stairs and up the stairs

does not walk effectively over cobblestones in high heels, faltering (I want to break your ankle, carry you crying)

does not forge things or read by forging light or steal from medicine cabinets in bathrooms at parties.

does not receive a handshake and the glance is less the glance and more the absence of the glance, after.

does not receive the conspiratorial text message: call when you get home dont ring the bell

does not receive the carefully shaped plea to be anything but the tone of the plea like a flute.

does not receive the acute, telekinetic, gut sticking sinews of his chest like tightspaghetti on a fork.