while you skip through the arcade

like a river imitating a lamb.

i still can't believe how many lectures

you've skipped.

all the little skips in your logic

while you talk,

the dreamy leaps you'll make

in the speech in the last act.

(no, i still

won't understand you.)

scarletti's K. 40,

i can't believe how glittery

it feels

when i turn on the steam bath

and no one’s there, not

even public storms, us

in the machine gun’s

dictionary. i can’t believe

how smart you are. how

little you read. how

many lectures you went to, waiting

for more fathers. more decreation. more

linen shirts. how far is

vilnius from kaunas? how far

would it be if i was in one

and you were in the other,

eating dark rye bread spread

with cod liver?

how far

would we be from each other

if you got cod liver oil on your shirt?

i can't believe

how long we can talk

without understanding the questions,

how long we'll

drive tanks through the stage curtains.

how fast the ending

crumbles into renewed

science. every time i put on

a new shirt in a place i’ve lived i

want to fall asleep. i want my dream

to be glacialbaroque,

so my parents can’t climb

to its top, the place

where I memorize your passwords. how come

time doesn’t change. that’s not

what a promise should mean. i

keep thinking about

hiddenlectures, upside down auditoriums where you,

languid, sad, but full of life,

butcher a wolf

and make a stew with honey, wolf,

black pepper, and hot chilies,

and i follow your eyes as

you separate out fat and sinew,

seeds from pepper-flesh.

why does the end of your

play feel just like

the beginning of my life?

so many sparkling wooden porches,

empty dream-interpretations,

what you told me

were constellations inside constellations but which

i knew were yours, in

deterritory, windswept incompossibility. everything

baroque. it doesn’t even matter

which side of the river folds

on top of the other. everything double

and baroque. like your eyelids and

the purple shadow

on the flowerpot drinking

candles in the back

of the reactortruck. i can’t believe

what memory does to me: nothing. i can’t

believe what biopolitics does to

the furred sink: almost everything. almost

even us. the us that matters. you know what? that—

was a ploy, sorry. i didn’t know anything. i didn’t

have the deed to the house.

i will fully understand your speech at the end,

and i will just

call you afterwards. from kaunas, i'll swallow

the call-note of your sobbing.

from the end of your dream, i'll hold you

at the beginning.

in the very end of the summer,

tiny white flowers poked

through the boards of the porch. you said,

over the phone,

if i ate them i would have strange dreams.

that night

i went and picked and ate like fifteen,

one after the other,

and i just remember so many cicadas chirping,

dreaming, just living so strangely…

We used to talk about the icy ground. We used to talk about weak power. We used to drive in circles

through the circle of the ground. I remember talking (in rich, abysmal tones) about

the planetarium of your dreams and nothing else. I held presupposition dearly,

almost, you said, heartlessly. Is that what hearts are for? Giant skating rinks where I hate you,

where, almost, I could cave in. I don’t give a fuck. I don’t want to let the dream simmer

but I wanted to let the wolves in…

Are dreams what hearts are for? Then, what? Your piano is still full of icelessness,

and the way you talk through the phone… I can even tell what color your eye shadow is (kimchi-honey red, dreaming's share in honey red,

gargoyle red). I know you care about rain falling on the heater at night. The way that sound

helps me matter. Lightning over Ibiza. Do you still remember the mainland? Your hand

holding my hand doesn’t help me at all. It’s like public baths. Roadside memorials for

the wrong person. I don’t understand how they could have gotten it wrong. Me. You Know?

I've never not known, full of spatial-wolven-grey-green-

light. I'd say… you only know my thunderstorminess-through-the-elliptical

-window. You

know all of me. My shirt is locked through the windowpane. (Let me ask

again.) Are dreams what hearts are for? Even if the lighting never reaches Ibiza? (The angel of history is safe.) Jakob, a room full of physics textbooks, the broken hip inside of the world,

and the shirt draped over it. The shirt I undress in the corner to wear. As little as I know, I know

there is no world, only islands shrouded in angels ready to rip our hands off. Ready…

to have fun. As little as you know, you know everything about cinematography, fields

of wheat in strife. I can’t? Really? Can’t I? What can’t I? You pass me the garland and, already,

the leaves are whistling. And, as much as I know how late in my life I am, I am

who you're wrestling, full of giant ginger-glass questions.

LOVE, the whole continent. DESPAIR, the ocean love floats on. DREAMS

OF DOUBLE-LEG TAKEDOWNS, the depth of our despair. I can't believe

I keep giving you the answers like this, and still, over and over, you misunderstand the questions.

(Of life and life's huge, blind, misery.) Puff, puff—eh? Puff. As for Siggy's bible? Puff puff. What do you care? You know I only

believe in dreams when you have 'em. You know I only read the play

once through. The scene where you call me but somehow neither of us pick up, the vaulting arc of the wolf.

The scene where you put on your shirt

and somehow I notice so much, the vaulting arc of the wolf.

In one dream, our parents, holding hands with the wolf, kissing the wolf. In one dream,

us, shovelling ice to fill up the well we almost died in. Now

it’s an ice age. Now we can kiss the wolf. Sometimes, I have this feeling that

the mud up to my knees is going to turn transparent. This feeling that, at some point,

more likely sooner than later, I will have to understand

what you mean by these words. Wolf, heart, island. The way each word dips into

and then extends out of misery, shrouded in peach flour, either/ors. Which

is also to say that I’m all decked out, finally, in misery. Which is

also to say that, sooner or later, misery. Which is also to say that, at some point,

you meant misery. Lightning cutting through the wolf’s happiness, which

means cut-happiness, which doesn’t mean misery. Stop. Stop

right there. Oh my god please stop. Stop. I

can hear you change the world for me.

WOOLENS. You'll never, ever, do laundry again. Whirly-green light, literally pure of heart, feet planted straight forwards in mugs of bergamot oil. If you slept on the roof, I would sleep in the stars.

Parmagiano, kissing Bronzino. A treatise on late style, the way mannerism is the style of the end of something, the way we swim through the poembeach to Crunch on each other’s damp, windy bones.

THIS IS THE OLD CAPTAIN SPEAKING. WE HAVE TO KEEP THE MACHINE ALIVE FOR POSTERITY.

THIS IS MARCEL PROUST SPEAKING. WE HAVE TO TAKE CARE OF MARCEL PROUST.

THIS IS VENUS SPEAKING, RESTRAINED FOR ALL TIME. Venus' balance. You, me, and Sacher-Masoch, touching the constellations

and thinking about dirty snow on my bookshelf, your photographs on the wall when the ship starts to hate us. The us of this poem. The us of

the cobalt mine. The us of fire's freezing life. Ice-locked pages, filled with (we can't help but speculate) memorandums for Rilke's instant oats,

the ones we eat in the pool, laughing!, staring at the broken wine glass no one steps on because they’re kissing. They’re

still getting undressed, waiting for the steam to disappear. & more constellations. My pool dream was so real. The shower room, so real I can barely

touch your face through all these leaves. Dear Winter, you were perfect-stealm. You were chronological. You couldn’t have made sense when every other

winter was purely spatial. Dear Winter's fur soul, this is my perfect-beige-elegy.

Major theory of colors — just fuck me up. (Sister, greenery, stoneware.)

Minor theory of colors, let me hold you. The sky, so deep and huge, is like stones. I will hold you up, against the sky and life.

I could not remember your memories. That’s not how memories work. I could not evade you. That not how the sky kills Darwin the way it does.

I gather you. Winter's komnomarionette grace, I assemble but do not dream you.

I have you but I can’t ruin you. I hate you but I can’t follow you. Instant death. Instant coffee. Instant you-for-me.

dear clairo, I’m sending you my letter to the tiger. you’ll have to

break open the space between the nocturnal sky. Write letters of purest fire,

which is experimental farmland, the reactor’s dreamie shadow. ghostless,

we open winter's door. We lift winter's starlessness. Groundless, our first star kicks softly.

dear gebser, the table is rotting. will I ever see you off on a steel ship at dawn, my phone crying

and kicking. We are born crying. Space, the dreamt, wrestles and predicts us.

coffee, the dreamhail, synthesizes us. neongenesislovely. your openness to missed experience

and your dreamreturn. Your tired glances, the longing of the machine. Your pathless

I don’t even know what to call it except nutrients. your ability to scare me in the

climbing mornings of winter. We takedown ladders full of angels, we cradle boilers full of steam.

when judith kills holofernes, holofernes kills goya. i’m dripping with deep winter steam, maple

wells, and snowveiled hillcores. Sleep the expanse. Sleep the circle. Sleep the predatory wolf.

i’m ready to make matisse happy with balconies, the matrix on my leg, the sleepiness (hold on)

laying me down. You sun, you lone wolf, burst forth! Reveal me, you future hunting!

if you die before me I get to take your packets of vanilla chai. if I die before you you have to give me everything I have wanted to strip from ur hands!

Emptying blueprints. Chagallbirthday kissleap. Step blindly through your own Earth.

step on my elbow. step on the powercordmisery dangling over the dishes in my sleep.

Now, leap. Leap like thunder on a stained-glass window. Winter, come now. Leap like my first words to you…

dream bergamots, fluffy chairs. death, of which i knew,

turned into your love of cooking. Go, you starry handed.

Huge storms, your prescience, futures' rainsticks.

I’m sick of boiling water beautifully. Let me waste u.

It’s a real crushing miracle, the way the water stays lit beneath my feet.

How I practiced Joy & Lamentation, and you still caught that misspoken ä.

In great halls, in breaking oceans, in dandelion fields, this is the dance of my love:

tantalum whirlpools. The vortex-edge of Being. We’re talking sparrow ontology.

The you of Westphalia, hurricane-force emeralds in the wake of vanilla.

Carrying this you past fish tanks. Wagons and stars. The Eye, the center.

I never know what you mean. You could speak forever.

And I would still be lighthouses, phonecalls, places where I was hiding.

For dinner, chives & basil. For dinner, rolled oats & basil. Memory & basil.

My trust of you. My supernova of you, without stars. Your phone calls, those labors of love.

Redismembering sonatas. When we learned to cut the mustard.

And then why we cut the surface of memory into little fabric squares of crying.

Like you said, we keep ending every day like it’s a poem to be thrown under.

Your famous gaze. Dearest Chagall, over the rooftops, somewhere you are in my Soul.

What memory! What life's gait! What turn, and what center!

& what does that mean for me, the historicity in my motherliness.

Dreamy cups of tea in the window. Are they loveable? Are they candles or burial scenes?

Every question goes unanswered... I would drink tea for its water: I would love ritual & event.

When we dream, whose dreams do we answer.

Why does the glacier have a door. We’ll have to knock.

Dream dream dream dream dream, when will you stop me before I kill u.

STOP! STOP! You've stopped myself. I've held you, sparkling, into the night sky.

See, John 1:1, our dream. The Word, dreamnaked.

Like a second floor. Like an absolutely buildable building.

How much of this is the gummy bears & how much is actually cruel.

All of it, while your heart beats for the first time. Sourdough; or, the morning.

Which fire turns you towards life?

& which life turns you towards beach-construction.

Life, caramel, undeath me. Why do I have so few memories?

Infinite Play of youth, forgive me. These few will do! You beautiful stars!

Life, of which I know, will begin inside me.

Death, of which I knew. You were every season.

Speak, the stars.

You, no clothes.

Lifting the stars, your dreams.

The difference between the bathtub & the lifeworld.

Entanglement, our clothes & the claws.

Lifting the stars, your pretending.

Name, circling our heart.

Returning images from the World

to their Origin.

When transit comes we’ll be weightless.

When the paintings float from the walls, I’ll know

how much you can get away with forgetting.

Humans stepping into spacesuit.

Ineffable, the stars' slightlightness.

The inanimate, calling our heart so.

If we burned it the table could keep us warm for the best hour of our lives.

All winter,

our mouths stuffed with fig bars & snow-memory.

We can not touch the ground.

Space can not help but to touch us.

Held there, our most sacred historical process.

Halo-lemons on my nightstand to soak in

my dreams. I will not remember them.

The space of the ground, fitting within a hot kettle.

Your dreams, the body of the World.

Dreaming your heart, the soul of the World.

My dream in you, the soul of the soul of the World.

A GIANT SLAB OF WOOD, COVERED IN HONEY.

I am trying so hard to remember the smell of honey/blankets [entanglement].

You ring the window in the dream & the dream keeps beginning to be lovely.

Communion, my clothes.

Somewhere beautiful, the counterweight

to our heart is falling.

Summerweight chiffon, in scarves we don’t wear/fall [entanglement/anarchy].

The World.

The World, which we don’t wear.

So that you speak, this Play has a name.

Lilieshoney, through the pages of this page.

My love, yesterday, tomorrow, today.

My love, eating me on the table.

The powerlines flip over the lightningstorm.

Wait let me speak before you read.

Ritual and plain, our selfsame dance

around which water empties cleft space.

Around a mighty will.

Dear Foucault, how do I swim.

Nightfall, damaged life, by the lamp-island

I am barely able to keep unlit & in view.

Bells on your clothes.

Ring, you stars,

ring, you unspoken center.

Coffee & milk popsicles, on rooftops of the nightmare.

Caffeine-burns on moss-beds just

so we can see the center more closely, more homed.

Liliesmilk and rain.

Us, love's steady gait, while

everything inside of life ceases.

The exteriority-nightfall in me.

The nonexistence of the face when we sit on the table.

When we bite into the blanket because there’s no other way to read. When we turn into milk.

dark green wonderlands, a chilly chilly feeling.

Starry brick palisades. My space-suit is torn-

@-the-belly. @-the-glacier. Seventy flashes

of emptying space. You've studied so long…

& lost so little. You’ve flown out my hands.

Malleable, my sun. Perfect umber clay, my life.

You set it in order. You set it in order from the end.

if we waited long enough, we would see the lightworld do everything.

Shosha, we would see good and evil fuse. Far away, languid fields of daisies

do everything. Why don’t you ever leave? A Museum of poetry that

emerges from nowhere, leaving words useless from K. street to 125th.

Sometimes it feels like you just don’t think anymore. Basil silk

heartstellations. Overflowing with thoughts, with dreams. Life's gait.

Life’s memory of caves. Will we ever do a portion of everything. We won’t.

Will life ever cease to be everything. If you speak. If, when you speak,

you become animal. You become giant living cliff. You become crushed seashells

and fifty nights. You become space. We will forever look for Isaac on Earth

& become animal. We will pour water on the dancefloor & become animal. We

go hunting. We bury the animal in the desert, on the bare mountain. Crow. Iron.

Onco-mouse. The beginning of life is starting to flash into view. I can almost picture

the end of our conversation. Psychotheologicopatholo-flowers. You supernova.

Perfect silver gelatin print of lifedeath. You, in white cities in the extranorth,

in inanimate worlds. Life, sweetness. In plays of possession. In holidays, in marriages.

Spicy onions & black wine. Honey & cucumbers strewn all over the kitchen bathroom

before you dreamfloatoverthesky. Tragedy unfolding in the selfsame. Lamentations

& conclusions. Balloons falling from the sky. I won’t tell you how to kill me

because I want to die by chemistry's hand. By the hand of chance. C's gaze. N's gaze.

Wait. I need to hear you tell me if you think strength matters. I’m not sure if it matters.

It matters like chimneys. It matters like hats. Dressmakers, snow, poorhouses. Droshkys.

When I come back to Earth after you come back to Earth, you’ll have to tell me how

warm is the rain. When life begins, I am going to stretch out my arms into the nocturnal sky

& become dresslike. Become mineral. Become Medusa in a house of green glass cups.

Life begins for the first time. Shosha, take your hands from over my eyes.

Life begins for the most unexpected time, dripping with coffee. Shosha, your story was Shosha.

Is this Nature? Or billowing screens of Clover. Wishing that he were a steamship… or simply dead.

I pour coffee on the steam engine, cracked ice on your wrestling shoes. Anything to draw at least one line of flight

out of winter kitchens. At least one reassembling of the given.

Anything to keep working with my hands. Over on the bed

the Word is opening. Brie cheese and coffee because you brought them: the maps, my hands. Simons Observatory and roses, full of life: the takedown, my hands

battering your wrists. Time full of lilies. Nine minutes

of more chocolate than we can handle, the heater by the bed turning on for the first time all year, just

so we can keep Benjamin warm in bios. Is this Nature? Or just

rotten fields of oyster moss. Counterfactuals, fruit flies in your beautiful, sweeping kitchen.

Eight more minutes of Brahm's life. Seven counterpoints for the single-leg takedown

during our lives. Mass in our lives. Mass, brutally. Mass, blindly. Mass

returning. Masseternal, looking over his shoulder. Forty-five seconds in and the match is over. Over on the bed, the Word is open. At eleven forty-five, all

the flowers open up so we can sleep,

damp on the floor. This morning everything we stack on the floor gets hidden

by the fog on the floor. A second front of ghostwater, Haitian

fight songs ringing through the grass on the balcony. Some weeks it feels like,

just by zigzagging through the rooms, we’re moving closer to saying something littoral the way

it doesn’t matter if we say it or not. Beach-heavy. Carrying bags full of old books to the seafront

hoping to find one unlocked ship to sink. Just press the button & sink. How did

we even get here, microflowers growing from our cut hair on the ground, which

the battering ram crashes thru. Crashes me thru.

Wrist-locked thru the other history. The one on the last page, where there are

just a couple lines left but so much we don't understand. How did we say it without

scoring any points. Just working, slumbering-

through-the rocks unseeing. The exegesis. The eternally-rustling leaves of exegesis.

However the flowers move thru the text, however the cradles turn into pins, however long we have left, the Soul. Why do we say anything:

Tables and chairs of contents. Interior pages out on the balcony: We couldn't find them under the table. Cabinets and entire

houses of contents: this was what we meant when you told me about the weight

of the world. About the weight of the world. About the weight of the world. Sometimes

I copy out my favorite rooms by hand, vase after vase in my notebook. My winter

bedrooms smell like smoky seaweed, sandalwood detergent. I copy it out

by hand. Commentary on commentary & how

it isn’t at all redundant. I am not frustrated. I am not enlocked by your war games’

shifting micropositions on the windowsill, by

the glass of water & grease I have forgotten. Double grapevine. The cradle that ends everything. By that I mean the cradle which puts the lilies to sleep. By that — it

is argued — I have meant the cradle which rises, the moon. Some expound further:

Cradles, dreams, the clearing. Others understand: How cradles speak

space into our hearts. Right from underneath our legs, swept up, cradled.

A brown chicken, eating rye out of my hand. My mother

is scaling a huge carp. Scaling a wild pack of carp. Scaling humanism, carp, modernity. If I stood

on the other side of the crust I could see you standing on the other side of the crust because

of the curve of the Earth. Pure attention. Pure fishiness. Scales blasted all over

the movie we were going to watch about cowboys & the technicity inseparable

from being-processed-by-life. Commentary &

universal mathesis. Commentary & the cowboy form of life. Life &

clarity. How clear the rosemary leaves turn when they’re burning before they’ve dried. Life &

the buttons in my shirt, each of which is an early-chapter-landscape from the theory of

incompleteness Benjamin never wrote. Each of which is the head of a carp

on the table. Each of which is a scene in a play in a novel in a dream. Each of which

is a reversal. The year. The head.

The Material. Priestly garments which barely

belong to the Material. Wrestling shoes which reconfigure the Material.

Possession. Wrist-control, flying ankle locks and

kisses. Renouncing this world. Pg. eighty-three: We renounce the world.

Pg. eighty-two: We write the play. You never understand the things I have in mind. I always tell you but what good is telling? I have to hear you

tell me the world. I have. Pg. eighty-one: handwork and chickens. My great-

grandmother,

the early morning, before we all wake up.

Are we under strangeness. Yes. Will we command shiplessness. Literally,

the stars. Literally, our composured elements recompose wordliness. Strange, a

ring before the proposal you night-magnify when. Wickedness and. Strange, world-

stunning hallways. Wicks, chandeliers, semiosambo. Semiostrangeness.

Dearest belove, Beruth Sebald. Brutalruthless, for angelology's collapse —

I don’t know a lick about the past. Pastcome!

When mint kicks up us. When willingness

-

- backfires we

shut the fuck window.

Lunar days, bio-stars -

- Sebald, choosing death. Mackerel-heavy life. The sadness, that

looks fishy. Your musi[?] comesee tides, me, believing.

Your feet pressed against the kitchen window because you’re

lying in the sink, reading about giant bloodhounds in the spaceship

where we are not in & where we belong. I’m deglazing the caramelized

onions with black wine, cherry pits. You just don’t understand

how I can sleep in the boiler room. Hm. Well, try to imagine seduction

without heat. Or dreams without religion. See, nothing comes to mind.

The words are meaningless. In that order, they don't show anything

much. That's why I sleep there. Wheezing charcoals and lime. Sometimes I

roll over and burn my shoulder on a pipe, and sometimes the boiler itself

speaks to me in beautiful ways. It recites poetry in Yiddish and

in a garbled-up kind of Polish. Commanding a perfect sense of rhythm.

Hearts and chicken livers, cutting all the symbols loose from

even my most powerful dreams. I’ve been waiting for you to impress me

for years, watching you fumble the switches in the cockpit, the reactor, & all you’ve

done is grow lovelier. More lost & more lovely. Olive oil gets all over

my copy of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, the book we will one day pretend

both to have read & my glasses steam up when I leave

the shower. I think I deserve to be happier & even more weightless

in space. Even more aquatic when I sleep. When I cut off strips of electron tubes to

have for myself, like a negative necklace. Fuck my heart up. Heart my fuck up. Just

tell me we’ll kidnap the captain & we will. I know you hate the speed

of light when we aren’t moving that fast. I know you don’t trust the sensor

readings the captain shows us by her angelic canopy. You can just

break the myth into little tiny fables, like this… I'll show you…

Thunder! Dissolve the floor in vinegar! The ritual bath is spilling over

and the quarryfields are collapsing! Fire, Time, and Thunder! The more

flesh, the more worms! The half-orange on your nightstand is as red

as the Hounds are! Your eyes! The doves are blackened with soot! Hail!

Hail the size of dreameteors! We're dancing, we're dancing! Your pearls

are flying across the room and exploding like pure Visions of pearls!

The wind is blowing backwards! I… Its shape is only half-human! The orange

is spilling blood onto the bed yet it's growing full again! …the story is the

dream of the story, and the dream's dream of the story, and even that

dream's dream of the story, possibly forever. Can you feel time reaching

out for you? Can you hear loons drifting off to sleep? Impression. History is four

histories. Love. Polytheism. Uncomposition. A black, wiry beard, with tight

curls, like nighttime. Just like nighttime, actually… you can even see stars

turn inside-out, turn into the chimneys we will never fly over again. Over cities

where I think I can see you walking down the street across the cafe

where I am writing this poem with a hammer & all I have to do to talk to you is stop

writing this poem, cross the street on my hammer. I think the stars are blazing

because, unlike us, they are not wearing necklaces of pearls to clamp

down their cloverlight. I AM SO SAD. I FEEL SO SAD. My pants are still covered

with pine tree sap. Why did you let me sit under that pine tree? It was a cloudy

morning and I didn't need the shade. The world is unnecessary. Everything

is pearlfalse and crazy. You tried to open my bedroom door because you

thought it opened to the laundry room. Woolens. The clothes we cut up for tablecloths to dress & undress on.

You're breaking the blindwindows before

we start. Now I hear cicadas and speech.

The bedroom in the windmill reminds me

of flickering pageants of affliction. Now I

sense a contradiction. There is a God and

there is no God. Raucous, our wedding & the

gentleness of our enemy’s wedding. Lightning

rod on the dinner table. The storm’s revenge

as we wring chicken necks. As a pearl necklace

came out of one... “the thief!” Then another one…

“the fountain.” We will have to challenge each other

to understand each other’s life before our own-

derstanding destroys us. Marriage & Challenge.

Convergence. We're young, life-in-itself, the play

of desert jars by the white sink. The play of

hummingbirds inside the fog machine. Why never

hurts more than always. Beautiful iron bridges

hanging by the Earth's heart, the play. Dreamterfalls

without which all of my twin sister’s boats would sink

out of Locarno. I’m messing myself up. Dreamlava

coming out of your little novel. I wanted you to commission

me for a cover piece. I wanted to usurp your fame, lilies.

I wanted us & all our friends to get… really drunk

on pisco, on vodka gas. Bursts of memory that turn the stone

into flowing water. The whole world, the Earth, the

universe. Upholstery and pure violence. Your vague simplicity

& mispossession. The scene in Solaris when both

of them float by the painting by Brueghel & both of us start

misunderstanding. I want to do a fantastic space scene

in the play too, but we're stuck on Earth. Miserable. No coffee.

No geophysics. So where were the marvels. Did

we ever eat mint ice cream in a garden & cry into

our hands? Did we get married, or was I in a dream?

Where are you, Tekla? I don't have the right papers…

I’m getting confused. To be honest, I’m very scared

& lifelonely. Granite is digging through my table & it’s my last

piece from the old house. In case you forgot, it's a brilliant

dark pine red. The legs're warped a bit inwards. We'd sit on it

& eat seafood & play chess. Try to sting each other

with a chessboard full of bees. Just because the window broke

you'd stake it all on this table… Soot. A toybox. You'd… Honestly,

I hardly remember you at all. Act IV. Exasperated. “and I'd leave them

crushing.” Act V. Shot w/ panchromatic iso 50 film. “faces

in shadow at the commune-cruise in Luna Park.” Act VI. LAMENTATION.

unfinished. Act VII. BRUTALITY, ALL TIME. unfinished. Act VIII. THE

WILL OF THE PEOPLE. unfinished. Act IX. JUDGES. “Tekla! Another!”

New mattress topper. Originalinfinite posture. Worlds where a river

actually does become something else. Only in the morning, though.

Binary stars above this field of scallions and daisies. The question buried deep underneath: the soul, the history of the soul,

what does it think of elegance. At dawn I can see rain falling through my childhood

slippers. I can see the bowl of chopped scallions soaking in water in the

bathroom kitchen. When I bite my fingers it’s like growing older, turning

the observatory slowly. Huge, terrifying sinkholes, in the psalms of my hand. What did

you expect? What kind of poetry did you want? What kind did you think

would heal your absolutely broken heart? Bays, unidentified flying objects, rain before you held out your hand for rain. Somehow, poetry doesn't exist.

Somehow, somewhere, supercomputers are running softly, poetically, and efficiently

just to calculate the harm we would like to do. You wanted inner jungles. You wanted bedrooms

filled with gold parakeets. Somehow, that doesn’t sound unreasonable to me. When

I try to think about how we’re part of this world I think of palm trees vanishing

into another world. The mist clears and all you see around you are tiny cute wasps

like moths. Every single kind of moth in the world: A refiner's fire,

a refiner's fire (the chorus)

a refiner's fire (an exact replica of the chorus, generated instantaneously after the big bang)

towering over this place, waiting for us to finally slip up. We don't

slip up though. We don't look at the refiner, or the fire. Moth history.

Generations of moth countries and moth princes. Moths bribing their way into office, moths committing perjury. We listen closer: “I am a cross-section of the End. I am the old, sloping barn where a series of owls have made nests on a mess of forgotten tax records.”

“I can’t fucking believe it. I can’t believe how much tax we paid to be gorgeous. How many films

by Bergman we had to watch while in that potato field, refinery petroleum getting

all caught up between our toes while we peed in the orange-blossom bushes where

the lizards lived.” Hi to the red desert. Now we can care for each other the way

we thought we would unearth each other like frozen lions from the dirt, all

sobered up and ready to finally write poems. I'm sorry. I didn't know all of this came before, but… I have to throw it all away. I don't like it here. I… it doesn't match

the drapes and it really makes me quite upset. I hope you'll understand.

This place is like an unfamiliar version of Jupiter's surface. That's where we could kid ourselves. That's where

our flower mugs would never spontaneously self-combust.

Whenever I look into your eyes I see affliction. Whatever Wrath unleashes on you, I'll unleash on Wrath tenfold! Take the first deep breath

of your life. Take us

to your affliction and then take us home, drunk on wine fumes & SHOWER WATER & our own nonchalance

in the face of affliction. Oh my god please change affliction. Please change affliction. When

we destroy the known world we’ll have to destroy all the beautiful glass showers as well. Goodbye our bodies soaking in soapy warm water. Goodbye eel soup. Goodbye affliction.

Goodbye barbeque in the middle of the night. The rest of the poems of your life, all

armed and dangerous. The very first soul to drink from poetry

won't be either of our souls. Steelchalant counterweights keeping my windows open.

Now we can look out: The house next to this

one, crumbling. Us, wide-eyed, because we know we're next. Us, wide-open-

souled, because moths keep falling asleep in the computer room. Like, inside of

our desktop hard drives. Like moths more prescient than human speech. Like the

wall opposite the one Goya never painted, and quite possibly (but not definitely) will never paint. Saturn never devoured anyone. Time: Friday

night. Scene: Fuertes observatory.

Benjamin: dead & brutal & sexually unsatisfied & kind & kickin’.

Tonight we’re going to sit down by the dam and drop the four-sided hammer and just do everything we can to learn to fuck.

Another swing'a'the ol' tetrahammerton and this'll be over with.

Once our simulation finishes compiling, we'll see the bloody fruit of our labor. When a golden wreath is hanging off of every streetlight, then we'll

know we did something completely, utterly, terribly and fantastically wrong. I permutated this entire poem: History inexorably devours us. I

swung the hammer.

I left the room, it was spinning. The drapes didn't match. I forgot all

of my calculus. I swung

the hammer. Countries fell apart. I swung the hammer

and became prince of the wreckage.

I swung the hammer. The water went cold, then boiling hot, then

cold again. All the leaves fell off the ground. People bargained for hats and pastries in the street. I swung the hammer Oh we've all died:

I saw you carving letters into the cliff face. I saw you falling through the chimney so narrow you could only land safely on your feet on the ceiling. You put

your hand on my shoulder (right now, this is happening right now, I just want to make this clear for us while the smoke detector becomes an ice-machine) and point to the hydrangeas growing straight

from the wall, and tell me that up is that way. That’s the way we’ll never fall.

You didn't notice me

trying to free Honey Poland.

Roma dances. Proud, lithe, the sun.

The flowers in a sinking pool, lemony with

bloody maries. Armspans, like fantasies

of a better music. Of sleeping on the bookshelf

like settin' Io, thru ballroom windows,

past Reményi (1828, Miskolc — 1898, San Francisco)

and past his dreams (1828, the Stage…

the ἀγών) the Prettiness) the Pearls)

crashing into ambition's opera hall.

Nothing fits in Brahms’s piano: Not

flowers anymore, not the slightest more,

not abyssal love. Not abyssal ghostliness, love

won't come 'till much later. Like recordings

of us, eating soup on the sidewalk’s fate.

Ede, watch closely. Reversal, watch his name

turn off the Brahmslight, the windowsill, the

first movement. Your agony, the violins,

Brahms’s beautiful nightfall trapped in your

shins. What's freed is freed. What's beautyfall

when we’re not falling. Not reconciled. Not

too serious, but serious. Still your disbelief,

while not reading. It’s a rock wall of loveliness,

like the impenetrable sonatas he left

mistakenly. Rock wall of transfiguration. Your carabiners

and all the realists. Folk halls, and novels

and seafood. And dizziness. And mistakability.

Ede, H isn't in attendance. Brahms, the bay.

My face in seawater. My paradise headache. Emerald gray.

My counterweight, dizzy with lightness, dizzy with the way I am always less than more unlit than you are. Our vegetable garden

is made of malachite tablets and low-background steel. Only when we're dreaming

do we grow anything other than tomatoes and miserosemary.

Where does the light pour out from all of our things. Why is every room in the house dark while we look fungal-fluorescent.

Howintheworl' are you trying to open Truth up? I've just started to howl open truth.

We can get past brilliant light. Then we can get past dazzling light. From what I've read, we're gonna have to stop before אֵין סוֹף. Moveonouttothesouthwest.

Liveasmonkandmonkess. There'll be a big green river.

There’ll be celery hearts soaked in hot sauce. There’ll be relief. Deruta porcelain. Daybreak in medieval Umbria. Dangerous monotype Pokémon battles. Something that holds our heads together while we roll down blizzard alley because we want me to die for exteriority, the outside’s sake.

Something that suspends us just above the river's surface for all our hesychasms.

When we drop in, we'll be inside Merkabah mysticism. No light filters on down there, absolutely none at all. We'll have to survive just off our memories of light. Periodicity and porcelain. We'll kiss Ezekiel. I wonder if those'll be half as good as our own kisses? Uncreated porcelain.

I wonder if our old math homework will still make sense. That’s why you were kissing me anyways so sloppily. That’s why the love we have is cave-temporary like we know it is. I make you menemen on Saturdays. I make you gambas al ajillo when you’re sick, with a side dish of Catalan tomato bread. I make you vesper-sourdough, for Venus himself. I wonder why water doesn't just fall through the porcelain dish

into my hands on the crown of your head. All I want is rest. Ninety more years of

this, of recreating death. All I want is to understand cloud formation. Why

do they always have to look just like you? How did they withdraw from formlessness like that, and can I? I wanna loosen-up language so we can use it to fight monism. And the porcelain. I was kinda serious about the south west.

Death-serious. The green river was made of the shekhinah. Truth, and the whole monism of angels inside the truth, gets fuller and fuller each day when we

wake up outta bed. One'a these days, real, true light is gonna be born

so we better load up on forehead kisses while we’re still glowing. We better light up all the candles we can, in the muddy canal where otters play. We better inject chlorophyll into our nightly coffee, memorize the face of every angel during early mornings in the unknown librarycafe. Death-serious. What does that mean for us. Us.

The US. I never want to die.

The stars, every day of the week. The stars, every letter of the alphabet. The stars, every state in the US. The stars, every possible universe where

we're in love. The stars, every number in my phone. The stars, every name for

creation. The stars, every outfit you bring out west. I only know of one.

It doesn’t mean anything if the day keeps getting bigger so I hope it does. The solace

when I cuddle with grass doesn’t have a direction. I keep

trying to run through the stars while holding your hand. The stars are cuddling us.

When we worked at the reactor, we knew all of it. We knew why. Artificial stars, here on Earth. You had those funny aviator glasses on. Ya

know, you never struck me as much of a poet.

We do Cherenkov radiation so well. The blue light in your apple juice on your birthday

while we were linked to the reactor by long electrical cables. The next time we head to the stars let’s say goodbye each to the other’s parents, gasping on couches. Clearly, we won’t

see straight through the world like we want to. I think… we need to dream

deadlier. The program you wrote to siphon all the dreams out of those Gould records we've got. Let's finally activate it. I wrote something up last night that can transform dreams into deadliness.

This is going to get really bright blue. Take my hand-thru-the-stars. Wonder-siphons

-of-palmistry. Of tea leaves we swallow instead of reading (to get hollower). And yea, just like you said buddy, it’s going to be really bright blue for all of us. Ming Smith’s

photos of Sun Ra blue. Caravaggio’s headache on the beach blue. The new life. Thank you (the reader) for watering the trees while we were gone. I think that helped us find our way back, gralapsing through the fighter jets in the stratosphere. Life me up you (you, the you of Yo La Tengo) asshole, and come on:

I feel like I'm being lifted up in great arms of guilt. They feel so soft, though. I feel like

you're right here next to me, but for you, they're arms of ambition.

You shot a look of mysticism right through me. We both shot looks of death-

mysticism right through the flowers. Does this feel like a good direction? We can

change if you want to, we can actually change directions here, it's not hard at all.

What's harder is changing directionlessness. I think we're gonna need more Gould records for that. We're gonna need a smarter program and a bigger love. Boulders huge enough for our entire lives.

Angels huge enough to blindly look inside themselves-boulders.

And I guess what I’m wondering is if life matters. What I’m wondering is about the ice swirling around in the vase you water flowers with. Glenn Gould

you did nothing right. Yo La Tengo, you did nothing right. We do so much loving work just filling in the holes you leave behind in my eggplant garden. The holes in my pistachio leaves. The holes fucking up my hand when I type. Glenn Gould, the dynamic

totality of music is gonna leave us behind if we can't escape the Earth.

I'm eating those little lemon candies you gave me. Let me know if my crunching is too loud, I know you're trying to go to sleep. My headphones are under the back seat if you need them. We've got to get more dreams up online by sunrise. We've just got to make it all fishy-perfect. Glenn, don't fuck it up this time. The dynamic totality of music, you stay quiet. You… yea you. Help me out. Hook this guy up to that thing. I wonder if we…

When we're deep-away, when we're all angelic. When the things we touch heartbeat-themselves-inside-out, when the depth-blindness kicks in, that's when we can start shooting.

Rise with watch cat. Drink blood of watch cat.

Watch cat shows me how to breathe, while Wonder

plugs his phone into the aux. The sea is so dark this morning I

can imagine the seafloor flipping over. We go fishing with

our fathers-nightfall and they get even older. The night

gets stuck, my flashlight is helpful anI literally don’t know where I am but

the walls smell so good around me. d beautiful and ambitious.

Bring watch cat back from the terrifying world of the dead. The small oil

lantern I inherited from my grandpa. It's this old-fashioned kind

of matte green. I filled it with paint thinner and I'm gonna throw it thru

your window. So we can light each other up. So we can understand

the world of the dead precisely by not being part of it. Watch cat, bring

berries back. Bring dark, throaty music back. Bring body back. It’s

2am and the sky is turning blue. I’m all decked out in leather-

fishing-gear, ready to catch the seven-colored fish. I'm gonna throw

all seven colors straight thru your heart. I'm gonna permute the seven

using just my left hand. DAWN. DWAN. DNAW. DWAN. Ok. Time still

works. I'm glad. You set off half a stick of dynamite in the shower one time.

What the hell were you trying to do, anyway? I never got to ask you. The air

feels so still but I know the flowers are just goin' wild… I can

understand why while you study the Bahir now. I can understand

the spontaneous affinity between soul and history. I just don't get

the showerbang, the distortion, everysingle decoration hanging

from the ceiling. The 21 remaining permutations of DAWN

are all driving toAtlanta in shower-trucks. Of course we’ll go

as well, but whose car are we taking? Your Lamborghini Huaracan or

my Lamborghinithe only thing i can imagine is ben Uziel playing a sparkling red guitar on the rushingfloor of my room. Distortion-World? Goodnight fascination. Goodnight

racecar-desperation. Goodnight Pasolini. It’s so dangerous

to eat flowers. Good morning flowers-in-watch-cat-blood. The more I learn about it the more I realize how dangerous it is to eat flowers by the side of the road home with someone new.

___how did u..._ ← an ocean for empty dogs, whitewater rafting, giant berries which yet

go!

we literally preserve everything. growing the berries through the first pages of your autographed bible. hunting us down because we've turned the dial to the world, but there's no numbers on it so we've still got some static, captain. HEY BRING THAT BACK-STYLE

creating-archaeology-style.WHAT WHAT WHAT

i literally won’t haha. u have to bring it back for me. ………...

oohhh, oh that makes sense. (reconstruction) go!!!oh, nooo

Sappho (and her acquaintance Neon Indian), taking acid with us in a night-mystery.

Ohppas (and her acquaintance Naidni Noen), making fun of us again!!

go. and bring that back. right now. thanks...

WOW OH WHAT…

I care… I care so freaking' much…-style

(this is the line after the last line of our NEW sonnet)

(yea! i… guess so

hmmm read it??)

Is the fountain falling inside of us? All the oysters just sort of… went away. But you're buying semi sour pickles now. They're really green — and I'm really not supposed to say this — but your eyes are too. It's so bad. We were doing 95 in a 30 and all I could think about was how, if I looked over at you, we wouldn't even crash. There'd be green hills.

There’d be more letters in the trunk. There’d be melted Tuscan chocolates in my pocket, fragrant when we open them and fall asleep, 100 (years) in a 30. There’d be no more marriage. No more prisons. No more metal-hopscotch on a windy beach, the one

true love. I mean, the boundary of a Poincaré disk. Fuck, wait wait. What I meant to say was, I think we could take down geometry together, once and for all. Make it fear us. Blaspheme infinities together. Like chase 'em down to the end of that beach. Crush living mussels with living stones.

E.B. White is not ok, by which I just mean that there’s no way he could be healthy right now. The birthday party was heartfelt and confusing. No one understood the mussels or why they were so happy. No one understood infinity, real dripping infinity, the one in comic strips, pea soup, I don’t think anyone got it. Ok, now we steal E.B. White’s dwindling health for ourselves

but we leave his letters the hell alone. When we were on the very bottom, feeling for strange stones with our feet, I was feeling quite hopeless. I thought you were lying, you know, when you would describe the odd shapes to me. I thought the empty spaces around our hands were our hands? I knew you threw out The Elements of Style but I also knew you photocopied all your favorite pages first. Every thing under water was so quiet and dry,

like solace in a teen movie, the blinds drawn each morning to let the light in even better, let it beat its way in where there’s anywhere to go. The basket of oranges. The bed absolutely undone in the corner, all my clothes beneath the printer-scanner-combo. Brie cheese. Wait. I think I’m forgetting something:

The way you would eat raw, whole jalapenos when you were trying to think. You'd call me and say your mouth was burning. You'd say, in these deep husky tones, that all the beauty in the world was draining out with the rain. I almost forgot all about that. Your penchant for Kalamata olives, too.

Ok, get ready. It’s gonna be a Vespa night. Archaeological sites by Thessaloniki, us on our scooters fitted with titanium mesh jumping wheels, no one loves, really, I mean really, no one loves or runs as fast as we do, as hopelessly as we do, as caught as we are. None of us happens. None of us. None of us. I mean none of us. I mean none of us. None of us matters.

Justice is sticking sparklers up our shirts. Lament is lifting our laughter, glittering, into the pure olive sky. It's okay. I think we're gonna be okay. E.B. and I have been hanging out on the awning recently, just because it's way too hot inside. He says that Justice is secretly in love with Lament. I want to write a love poem for them but, as soon as I try, we all fall off the awning in a lifting-kind-of-origin. The world's great big machine, deep and wide. The world —

all the beauty in the world is wavering. Love, you look so beautiful in my roller skates while we masturbate (the precipice). You look so beautiful by the tumbling lightbulbs and little baby dogs (the precipice), so beautiful in a communal spacesuit (we’re not about let Earth get away even a slice of the moon). See? We made it. We didn’t take the acid. Our hands are shaking. Like Eurydice, we’re in Freeville. The car (105 in a 15) didn’t crash.

Studying orthochromatic real-life. Mottled Moloch Nectarines in your pockets. You spring-loaded Julystorm to “articulation” for our warm, fuzzy son.

Cynthia where flowers godtear. Sweat Ingres Veronese becauseless. Emmyyourbeauty, Emmynthiaourflowers, your last notebook. Thesun.

fine. Anyon miracle. Kattler, Friedrich. what love shows less than nothing? what ice returns nothing? weight, our door swinging weightlessly when we fuck-and-come <3.

belief doesn’t kiss yet but belief keeps the world fastguessing. battle entirely me, shots of revenge. because your belly grows whitewater daughters. song-of-and-without-you. Abelian, glacial, wonderdoves, bunnyrum.

If I give bunnies habaneros you might actually shoot dreamworld bunnies. Ruinous angelsofdeath comeforme,hard. Grandmother chessangel disguisesme.

What if the Ithaca Oranges Street Runway Diner were open? Woooohoo! I would dismember angelology foryou. Amor, virtousily, Runaway you'vejustkilledme.

like lightning in airports? my ticket was pure stucco, colder than

the fantastic-rushing-cold. everything is bathing in the manifold soft bells.

I light a cigarette in the cold rain. Bang bang raindrops hit my forehead. I’ve lit the cigarette in hope of hitting the thunderbolt

where I bury me! like a grand hotel of loveliness?, filled with sticky brown bees (never go back)

that remind me of self-annihilation. My sister's cilice fell off the loft and landed on my head splat devotion

But what she really wanted to do is to pin the paperflower to the top of my head.

But what I really wanted was to go back to always, to messy sensitometry (bring it back), to your-father’s-dictionary, my-head-

in-between-your-legs. human, but trapped in matter. god, but trapped in flowers. going back, but trapped in ridicule.

You once asked me to what extent, are we different from a soft robot, I really don’t know, especially now, seeing the airport shrouded in evening shadow, (yes you asked me that), I see the arms and legs and stomachs of the plane just like I see your head in the grand hotel (I’m coming back!!) —

the last part of the blessing. The part where the blessing ends, I mean, for real. Wholeness in a retreating. There are trees in the city streets, like in the middle, and they intimate your stomach when you come. There is a going-back. It's not here. The whole-

without-a-part is not here, trees-without-stomach is not here, stomach-without-lightings is not here, stucco-without-my-ticket is not here. I am the paper and the flower

but not the arriving and yet I do. I sit down next to your revisions and battle you to change it all back. And yet the coffee is dripping all over our legs in the virtual garden (haha!). Yet the departure still hasn’t broken your engine-heart (cool!) Here’s the ticket I just

drank I'm waiting for it to kill me. The Little world is a replica of us. We are the Manifold. We are the bells. Summertime's hills are us, too. I've been sleeping in the living room because it's too hot in my bedroom and there's no air in there. I've been taking cold showers. This is all literally happening to you.

then beachwards does me in. beachdownwards mancalaing, to forfeit you without “in.”

fuck shit my time. heart doesn't let me grow. salvage, salty, shesirous, i serene, peachperfect.

ever kinder. once-burnt tinder (“tender”) guides (“tender”) thru (“please”) thelandofthevalleyofdeath.

and I’m grinding myself into gold. i’m grinding my parents into gunpowder and

I’m telling them that I've done it. I've finally done it. This morning I threw the core of life right through it all,

grinding nightfall through into-ocean-sinking, right-through, remembering the persistence of moments in my hair. I don’t want to be more true to

the big stuff. So I'm starting a new book. It's a children's book. About an oil rig that swims by swinging a giant iron hook back and forth I've called it The

Earth and the Inhibition. Yes it’s true that, in a sense, I have already given up on life. Still, I want gold and gunpowder, lay all my possessions on the floor of the kitchen, walk blindfolded to bed. I’m grinding you

into submission here we go. I'm giving you a kiss but also the eleventh commandment and we're irradiating momentness. It's literally shining. There was a lightning storm but we're so bright we can hardly make it out. I'd cut down hell for you. I-

Hell. I-Big-Blue-Hell. You-Shining, in the way that makes me happy for my own loveliness. You-Miserable, in the way that fills my nothingness, a second-chance.

I can't wait to shoot you out of the sky. I can't wait to get out of here. I'm at Goethe's dinner table too, Walter, and I'm the only one not crying. I've got my own theory of colors. It has to do with love and ballet. It has to do with desire and big-desire. Rye. Ry. I

want to drink apple juice with you and talk about wax. I’m unglued from the wall so now you can pick me up. Everything gorgeous was in a room so now you carry me to another one. It wasn’t a chandelier on the ceiling, it was a halberd, a suit of armor, a way

to pass off as poet-ruffians so we could get in to the fight. You with the halberd, facing justice, me with the suit of armor, facing a charcoal portrait of St. Sebastian, so, I guess, facing justice too. The rye is blowing all around, and there isn't even any rye. Out of everything, I just want us to

be less true and more lovely. Literally all I care about is loveliness. Literally I couldn’t care less how strong or determined we are. You with the foldable halberd with painted flowers. Me with the armor plated short shorts and soft running shoes. Out of everything, I just want everyone-not-us to be

more catastrophic. You don't have the halberd anymore, you lost it on Buffalo street three nights ago. I'm pretty sure you were showing it off to some girls. I couldn't for the life of me find my suit of armor. I can't even remember what it looked like. I just want to go back, I really do, out of everything. You won't take me back though, I know that. I wasn't

true like you were but we were still too bolts of coffee sinking through the sea. We were still recovered, slapping each other with bushels of cherries… damn!

To Jakob. I'm leaving the world for you. A burying kind of speed. Tall trees, bending in brutal remembrance. What we couldn't tell each other because we were so embarrassed. Just make the firmament stop. Marriage,

the sex in it, and that alone. I’m so fucking embarassed. I guess the meaning of materiality is solace. Do you know what I mean? Like when you love not a person but an object you can feel it becoming peaceful. Being not material, we are lovely. Being

material is such a blessing, I think. We can have sex and worry about righteousness. I want to go back to the core of life for a second, though, and the children's book. Critics are way off the mark. It's just for you, Jakob. They think they know it all, but it's just for you. The core, the critique, the heart-of-love, the-origin-wrestling-you-out-of-a-breaking, all of it. I'll never get to marry you, because your parents hate my fucking guts. This is the

world we can leave. Sometimes I’m so sick of living, you know? Hey, draw a little sleepy bunny on my arm — right there, where my hip meets my soul.

roast No. come home.

with the guilt. I'm happy. Quite happy. Fresh fish

does not understand it…

and yet it matters so freaking much… I can’t sleep at night…