I'm walking. I am not making anything. I'm not making a poem. I am not walking. I'm thinking. I'm not thinking about anything. There is silence. I'd rather not know. I don't know anything. I am going nowhere. I am nowhere. I am making nothing. I'm making something. Something happens, as I see it. It happens. It's nothing.

TURNCOAT

position the bird in a side pocket or put it to sleep in poetry. step right up to the shining path. a broken column is pinned to the collar bone, pillar to support her head. she paints a portrait, enlarges upon puddles hidden behind creative writing, drips tears onto a palette, rips open her camisa de dormir. there are two fine breasts cleaved up the middle, and crowning the brow a hairy sliver of moon. the bees are joined in marriage behind literature, european. i kiss your hand, madelaine. i eat your cookies. she unstraps her camisa de fuerza. el corazón beats between science and the mystery of moths and myths. there is cooking for my mother's rosary, juvenile for our apocalypse. choose your color, advance one square, retreat six. cambiarse la camisa is to change categories. in fiction, one must cross two rivers, being careful to avoid the black holes, center stage. fall forever into universe, tell a story, prepare a place.

the intermittent rain you see over a series of days drifts
down and i am porous too the signs shelter doves i hear
them under the bridge waiting for the signals to change

often she thinks of sex while riding on the bus the way your
hands your fingers considering gauge viscosity seek pathways
in this is the vowel and in this is the verb to be to press

the case a little lower now higher up where it is permitted
to bite the mouth is an o and all parts together stem the o
there is a line to be traced and saying with impatience how

the hair gathers here darkens in the wet a formal allusion
to nature obscuring the fold which we say with hunger words
we all say in our porosity but for love, hold back a moment

The dancer is trying on the role. There will be a pile of dirt on the stage. A woman is murdered, buried alive. Two women read from the script. There is an electric bass player, a clarinetist, percussionist. The women read against the landscape seen through the loft windows, which is to say the city as backdrop, the ramp to I-80, an edge of the ballpark, monotone shapes of warehouses and factories turned lofts. It's drizzling wet outside. The readers try to find an edge through the minor keys, but they are losing. The dancer, a small woman, moves forward to the center point, slowly shrugs one shoulder, then the other; finds her role. Through her spine and chest, she pulls the words forward, toward us; the musicians catch, and pull it back, circulate the movement among themselves. The readers find the path and thread through it. Something gets passed between them. It elaborates upon itself, magnifies, settles down. After awhile, I am looking, but not looking. The auditory sense is heightened, the dancer becomes a shadow puppet, moving across a screen, contorting, falling to the floor, curling like a dry leaf, opening up like a gray flower.

exhaustion my eroding lover why are you so shy
to creep on me like this pretending with little
adjustments there is more so i think the body
can propel itself awhile the mind runs down trips
into black holes you eat me with the fork of how
to be with emulations & commendations even love
schticks substitute for dreams you swallow entire
cities of cells tax the crumbled cookie fortunes
in the bed alone these emptied parts await you

ay, naku, i want to say, can you believe this friggin rain? i'm navigating rivers. hey, the impulse to connect. but crossing two rivers won't get me anywhere. it's in the rain. on the river. taga ilog. see?

afraid to perpetuate versions you might remember, and dislike. cuttings and pages from dresses are yellowshifts. some are sleeping, some scratching in the dirt. pry open my mouth with bohemian coffee cake, black sugar crystals, molasses. the pretzels of lost causes i tuck into a bag, for later use on the highway. more than anything, i suppose it's just trying to thread light into the flesh (the blood) while stumbling along at a "normal" pace. As in pacing, a pacer on the track, freely whipped, slave to its tracers. all those holy things that go into the production of a river in a juniper oak, stiff patterns tatted, cotton on the velvet cuff.

"...The artwork must
be brilliantly novel in its
design or formal qualities, or it must rival the
machine in the smoothness and appeal
of its inventiveness. Such art, in its perfecting of
risk-free, recognizably robotic, manufactured
forms of charming inventiveness,
participates in an
automated, inevitable obliteration or
taming of all eccentricity,
even as it ostensibly celebrates
uniqueness and individuality."
Nick Piombino

one recalls an earlier form. housing for a different constellation
of thoughts, where emotions hurtled through marketed space, hair
the thickness of a day & blood traveled, transported angry debits.

architectures. textures, fonts stemmed and pregnant. handwriting,
the fingers less disciplined. habitual type, rising under frottage
recorded on the stones, the flesh - where once stroked, now text

relieves itself. each sentence has its cargo, drags single file
over empty salt flats, running on metaphor, running on pixels
drugged on blogs, he says "pharmakon." there you have it, another

rub. not to erode, but make visible to the naked eye. tender
looks, maybe something you don't want to see. bulosan listed it
seemed habitually, the towns we don't want to remember, the names

fish smell, piss smell, continually fucking to get the bad names
out of the body. cleanliness is robotic in this sense, absolved
of ethics there is always beauty, a three line stanza, a pattern

Because of the late hour, the time etc. one nostalgically thinks back to the earlier form. That was another life wrung in by another hour, and circumstance. Night braces you, shadows, accompanies, mimics some ideal by its talent for obscurity. I've lost the connection. The ghosts no longer hang out by my computer. Without ghosts, the obscurity of night becomes real. My shoulders ache. There are two credit cards on the table in front of the screen. In the reflective patch just to the right of the brown bear on the credit card, the word "Debit" shines, luminous and blue.