For tints overheard in hues, white noise, and worn alarms;

For sonorous and porous text, rawly textured into suitability, fashioning you out of your ears.

Because she kept saying to me, “Clothes the loop.”

“there is no profit under the sun… For who will eat and who will hasten [to swallow it] except me?” —Ecclesiastes

thoughts rot in the head
stories defragment
always, i am 1000 strong
vanitas vanitatum et omnia vanitas

The thread, us, frayed.
You are a rainbow/brown braid.
Tied to your finger is a knot that reminds you of yourself.
I’m a brown rain brain.
Families of animals devour themselves behind my eyelids.
Podunk spiderwebs cross my mind, a public derelict.
My brain, an empty scrotum, fathers nothing.

To weigh your heart on,
A space to hang your hat on,
A way to heat your home
And lift your words beyond sighs?

A style I admire flies
Not unlike a Zeppelin (a leaden ship
That drops poems on bombs);
Which is to say, you must lift it

With something highly flammable
Inside like a credo or hydrogen, which
If caught, would catch
If not on fire, on sale or on time,

And propel the eyes with
Shear unwinding blindness.
But please do

not generalize.

It is always already winter.
Raccoons open each other for warmth.
The poor live under the bridge outside of time.
If we can speak of the poor. If you can call that a bridge.
At a fashionable retrospective, a woman soils her prewar dress.

In order to avoid saying “I,” the author eats incessantly.
The author experiences pleasure from a great distance,
like the bombing of an embassy. In the business district,
fire is exchanged. The media butcher the suspect’s name.

Every weekend, the law gets laid,
while these abstractions, hung like horses,
attend their semiformals stag. The last census

counts several selves inhabiting this gaze,
mostly unemployed.

John Ashbery wrote his first poem when he was 8. It rhymed and made sense (“The tall haystacks are great sugar mounds/ These are the fairies’ camping grounds”) and the young writer—who had that touch of laziness that sometimes goes along with precocity—came to a realization: “I couldn’t go on from this pinnacle.” He went on, instead, to write poems that mostly didn’t rhyme, and didn’t make sense, either. His aim, as he later put it, was “to produce a poem that the critic cannot even talk about.” It worked. Early on, a frustrated detractor called him “the Doris Day of Modernism.” Even today a critic like Helen Vendler confesses that she’s often “mistaken” about what Ashbery is up to. You can see why: It simply may not be possible to render a sophisticated explication de texte of a poem that concludes “It was domestic thunder,/ The color of spinach. Popeye chuckled and scratched/ His balls: it sure was pleasant to spend a day in the country.”

And again, in the hut with the life-jackets,
where I asked myself, “You’re supposed to
look like a stick, is that it?” accusingly.
Thinking, then, of watching myself
coming to the pond to sip water and take a dump (how ridiculous),

as one ‘off’ I preferred to stay back by a tree, suck leaves
for rain water, and i neither died from thirst, nor being eaten.

Everytime I come here, my words are not my own;
I run around like one possessed of the body by a wind,
and whose rotten mind is being eaten up by mushrooms and other odd fungi,
and whose potato-eyes are laid over with leaves felled by giant raindrops,
and whose coat buttons are filled with infested rain of storms made brown with diseased landlove,
and the toes of which are hungry food for cats
and the sleeves of which are dripping wet from sex dreams,
and where we all get celebrity status for how fast
we imagine we could run, if we felt like it.

But while my sentences,
driftwood to a logic through
surf (scurf and spry) spray,
my thoughts, anchors without chains
that weigh by sheer gravity,
or weight of words written in graffiti over
tattoos of radiant joy,
and my heart’s beat cackles under its own crispy
sunfried tomato skin,

there are layers over everything
without derision,
that I pin with derision,
which I faint from, a hole.