for an orator

You make a convivial argument
And the flag waves again
With laughter and cheers
From the swarm—
That heartfelt S of a worm.
It shapes and shifts
Like electoral magnetism
All the swords spun
By your pulsing dance of tongue.

I like my new friends

M. roars in peace now
With tired mood but purposeful soft smile.
After staying put on AB’s sketch of CB’s something more,
The lost boy somewhere could finally
Rest on the bus home.
Lonewood pines guarding like blinders,
These hanging threads hold tight to the
Hangers’ murmurs beneath the jazz.

All Too Much

Speak to me with that pen stick and ink drop of blood from the desert
Where some camel tried to make a living in philosopfizing
By painting the dreams of penguins who’d sussed tamed plots as well.

The merger of big-A aestheticism with big-A asceticism
Broke down the big-I big-DEA ologies of teenage colonial-oscopies,
Ushering in a Texas two-step regiment for the twelve-step pogrom to commence.

Damn be to all these piled grams of utterance!
I blame planet earth for this contusion.
The knee still aches with no help from the Qi bracelet
Par chanced from days of vous—

Yes, hear that call on the line,
My heroine, my exemplar, my star?
I feint a riddle in all ways without incense
Until again, again begins and becalms
Because a breath has deceased.

Oxtail Stew

And the time passes but you stay with me
The fuss I hissed when caught up in all those
Estonian whims that distract from
Where I’m meant to be

Gentlemanly homoerotica that keeps pressing
Into these walls of verse
From someone else who shares the same
Bamboo shoots of Satan’s diet

Speak to which can’t escape the figmented
Plots from those recreated from Neuteronomy

Tired and longing
Ready to hang up
Everything hung and hanged
Only for the sake
To pirouette forwards

Still and out of place
But finally homed and ready

To put these mistakes away

~

Outtakes of the night’s surroundings
Some words and secreted meanings
That began with the prodigal recollection
From some cerebral reminder that one would lead to the other and so on

Trailing off to a thought that you recognize
But also see glimpse away
And can’t recall despite the moment
You know it was there and forget

All spaced out with something of a standard
Operating procedure for these types
That you’ve never fully studied
Though you seek something exemplary

To model and imitate and form again
Into the owned reiteration that
Will produce a rest

~

In gaps and measures
The shadow flickers throughout
And you don’t want it to define you
But still the think twice about it
Lets you move on to the closer unspeakable

[an I for an I]

I writes for the
then
when this meditation
speaks clearly

while sitting
to do work
suffering
to prove its worth

so splattered
on the page
I sinks
to irrelevance

In Gaps & Leaps

You came back home for the first time this weekend
And you thought, this is a nice place.
Well, the weather convinced you of that
And so did your dog.

But something always goes missing,
Something here is missing.
You can’t say it to yourself, but you know.
So stare off to nowhere and keep trying.

…In comes the stalker from a springboard dream who held your hand and laughed and smiled and told you all her worries. You played together and walked together and stayed as true as you knew how, and then said goodbye.

…And you move from them and their influence to you and our desires, wishing that I would just point you in the right direction.

…And you can’t help yourself, and neither can she, and neither can they, but somehow we keep pressing through.

But now again you think of yourself and think of these other thems and want to let go of any she. So I make it happen. And something’s missing, again, again.

Who is she that you could calm all your troubles? Is it she or is it someone else? Something to come? The same that’s missing now, always missing—

The ____ that forever compels us to keep searching,
All googly-eyed from centuries of peering into that same ____
That forever persists for us to fill in the blank with all our permutations of A, B, C, ____, & she.

that word

bourgie reproduction of undisciplined method
recirculates bourgie disgust and bourgie guilt
all bourgie with these lined-in shorts and
collared shirts for more grueling splurge