I forgave myself for having had a youth.
					            —Thom Gunn

At the Fashion
Square mall,
back
of Waldenbooks,

I saw my younger self
haunting
the magazine rack.
Ripping out pages

of Blueboy,
tucking them 
in a Trapper
Keeper.

Turn back.
His eyes met mine,
animal
and brittle,

a form
of gratitude
that a man
kept his stare.

Any man.
I half-smiled
some admission,
and though

he couldn’t
see it coming,
I excused him
his acid jeans;

two Swatch
watches,
two guards.
He, I,

must have been
nineteen:
sex was “safer”
then—

scribbles
on the mall
men’s room stall;
malaise

of saxophone
and PSAs.
How
did I

even
learn how to live
in 1991?
Landlocked,

cock-blocked,
Spanish moss
festering.
I forgive him.

he said describing the fantasy novel he was reading 
as they walked the drizzled streets she was listening 
& laughing & realized she’d been walking through one city 
or another next to this man for more than twenty years 
longer of course than their kids were old 
their smart alecky sons who hadn’t yet met the person 
with whom they might walk through rain discussing 
ridiculous books with great sincerity & pleasure             
Seriously he said I can’t stop reading it but when they went upstairs 
to the good bed in the good hotel he did stop reading 
& found a place where her shoulder met her neck 
& touched it until her mind finally went away for a while 
& they became bedraggled & he went out like a light 
but not even the good bed at the good hotel after good sex 
could put her to sleep not the meditation app or the long online essay 
about the White Supremacy of Conceptual Poetry 
she missed her dead mother & her middle-aged cousin 
who’d died the summer before she wondered if miles away 
her youngest was whimpering was her oldest awake texting 
was her middle son worrying she wanted the husband 
to tell her the plot again but didn’t want to wake him 
he lay over the covers on his back his breath audible & regular 
folded hands rising & falling peaceful & fearless as if she’d 
never once meant him harm as if she’d always loved 
this warm animal as if this were not the same summer she’d said 
If that’s really how you feel this isn’t going to last & he hadn’t said 
anything anger sadness doubt & disappointment was a wave 
that slapped them down & under so many people had died 
& life felt shorter than how long they’d been together they had 
through so many omissions & commissions hurt & been hurt 
it was that same summer but she was alive & awake he was 
asleep & alive they were weak but still there

The diagnosis was god, twice a day until the spirit
untangles itself. I took a trip into unscripted
days past, teenagers submit to the window an open
facing yawn. A walnut fell into the grave
of my loved one and stayed there beating patient
like a word. I was still unmoved by disbelief watching
my father mumble the pledge and hot white stars
he can’t remember. Nobody got hurt, some un-
fulfilled potential exits the room. Enter, knowledge.
Men came to dispel ambiguity and raced 
my intention to a hard boiling over. Each new decade
we stayed was a misinterpretation
of genre. We showed our teeth over the years to those
who would listen. In the face of the absent subject 
I felt my desire go flaccid. The leaves fell dutifully one
by one from their limbs. But I wrote to you against
all odds. Money. Paperwork. Love’s heavy
open door. Critique. Indignity. Vision and often
enough time.

QUANTUM STATE OF THE CONFLICT DIAMOND
           STILL THROWING FIRE FROM THE PAGES OF YOUR NOTEBOOKS ¹

At the harbor, in the smallest hour of this
(Death stuff for sure), this softly tendered now, the Youngest Day,
this silvery clarion blast:	   I have no distance.

Free flow if you can through your very own little
reckoning:  10 yrs. ago today, as of this attosecond:  this area is not me.  
For I am sick unto death of your single deranged sense,  

so much light leaking away @2  minutes_  to_  midnight,
that I feel outside my body just before the 	factory steam whistle 
has blasted all 3 of us away.  

                                                                     As of that blooming, 
2 minutes from here, 10 years away, you’re my only witness.
& I’m yours, seconds from this drowned quantum (I feel
fragmented) in which we’ve been entangled for years,

seconds, days ago, forever.  All I did 	was sink into my own brain
which sucks the orange pregnant moonlight out of our wept corners,	
body inanimate, damp, dead—

continue to bleed us into these saturated rooms.
For I feel foreclosed.  I feel you collapsed on the quiver, on the dive, on the sink.
I feel edited but I don’t have the access code.

For you tug at my trigger-finger just so.
                                                               For the second shift of bodies
has been long underway . . . 

¹ It’s Sunday night, Feb. 12, 1994             It’s been zero degrees all weekend. I’ve been having a lot of strange fantasies about buying a .38 special at a pawn shop. I’ll cut out the middle of some secret old book where it can be hidden.

One morning the spirit of my lover’s uncle returned
there was no fanfare no terror only a blue silhouette

translucent above our bed growing dim
I was the sole witness to this specter quiet

as the rising sun waking overhead I awakened
cold to see an Aegean blue figure hovering bedside

through his gaze and mustachioed grin
on the other side of his face a dazzling tremolo

of morning light streamed into this darkened space
and later that evening as we moved

through the neighborhood streets dead with aging trees
frozen sidewalks led us freely into the moonlight ahead

Why does this written doe bound through these written woods?
                            —Wisława Szymborska

My handwriting is all over these woods.
No, my handwriting is these woods,

each tree a half-print, half-cursive scrawl,
each loop a limb. My house is somewhere
here, & I have scribbled myself inside it.

What is home but a book we write, then
read again & again, each time dog-earing

different pages. In the morning I wake
in time to pencil the sun high. How
fragile it is, the world—I almost wrote

the word but caught myself. Either one
could be erased. In these written woods,

branches smudge around me whenever
I take a deep breath. Still, written fawns
lie in the written sunlight that dapples

their backs. What is home but a passage
I’m writing & underlining every time I read it.

For Sylvia Marlowe

Out of her left hand fled
the stream, from her right the rain
puckered the surface, drop by drop, the current

splayed in a downward daze until it hit
the waterfall, churned twigs
and leaves, smashed foam over stone:

from her fingers slid
eddies, bubbles rose, the fugue
heaved up against itself, against its own

falling: digressed in curlicues
under shadowed banks, around root tangles and
beaver-gnawed sticks. She had the face

of a pike, the thrusting lower jaw and silvered
eye, pure drive. The form
fulfilled itself

through widowhood, her skin
mottled with shingles, hands crooked, a pain
I fled. Now

that tempered tumult moves
my time into her timing. Far
beyond her dying, my

tinnitus, I am still
through the thrum of voices
trying to hear.

Poem in which I have wisdom. 
Poem in which I have a father.
Poem in which I care. 
Poem in which I am from another country. 
Poem in which I Spanish. 
Poem in which flowers are important. 
Poem in which I make pretty gestures. 
Poem in which I am a Deceptacon. 
Poem in which I am a novelist. 
Poem in which I use trash. 
Poem in which I am a baby. 
Poem in which I swaddle. 
Poem in which I bathe. 
Poem in which I am a box. 
Poem in which its face is everything. 
Poem in which faces are everywhere. 
Poem in which I swear. 
Poem in which I take an oath. 
Poem in which I make a joke. 
Poem in which I can’t move.

                    What makes
                     a voice
                     distinct?
                     What special
                     quality
                     makes it
                     indelible?
                     Yours is plaintive,
                     as any singer
                     of torch songs
                     must be,
                     yet endowed
                     with confidence,
                     and fully
                     in command.
                     Deep and
                     resonant,
                     a bit husky
                     if you like.
                     A voice that rises—
                     or skyrockets,
                     rather—from
                     a wellspring
                     of pure emotion.
                     Manically
                     infatuated
                     in “I Only
                     Want to Be
                     with You.”
                     Desperate to
                     keep your
                     lover from
                     leaving in
                     “Stay Awhile.”
                     Despondent
                     in “I Just
                     Don’t Know
                     What to Do
                     with Myself”
                     and “You Don’t
                     Have to Say
                     You Love Me.”
                     All cried out
                     in “All Cried
                     Out.”  But then
                     amazingly
                     on the rebound
                     in “Brand New Me.”

                     I hear your
                     voice, Dusty,
                     and I am
                     instantly
                     whisked
                     back in time,
                     not quite
                     a teenager
                     all over
                     again,
                     full of longing
                     and confusion,
                     listening
                     to your
                     latest hit
                     on my
                     red plastic
                     transistor
                     radio on
                     a mid-sixties
                     Los Angeles
                     suburban
                     summer
                     afternoon.

                     Twice in
                     my life, I
                     found myself
                     in the same
                     room as you.
                     Can one fathom
                     anything more
                     miraculous?
                     The first
                     time was
                     in 1983, late
                     November,
                     in the basement
                     of a church
                     in Los Feliz,
                     around the
                     corner from
                     where I lived.
                     Sober only
                     a few weeks,
                     I watched
                     you approach
                     the podium,
                     but didn’t
                     realize who
                     you were
                     until you
                     identified
                     yourself as
                     “Dusty S.”
                     For the next
                     twenty minutes,
                     you told us
                     the story
                     of your
                     drinking.
                     How early in
                     your career,
                     backstage
                     before a
                     performance,
                     one of the 
                     Four Tops
                     handed you
                     your first
                     drink, vodka.
                     How smoothly
                     it went down
                     and loosened
                     you up,
                     lit you from
                     within,
                     gave you
                     enough
                     courage
                     to go out on
                     stage, into that
                     blinding spot,
                     and sing like
                     no one else.
                     The alcohol
                     eventually
                     stopped working—
                     it always does,
                     that brand
                     of magic
                     is transient—
                     and here you
                     were, two
                     decades
                     later, sober
                     and clean
                     and still singing,
                     so to speak,
                     before a live
                     audience.
                     In my youth,
                     your words
                     had come over
                     the radio
                     and stirred
                     feelings
                     of heartbreak
                     and infatuation.
                     Now they
                     inspired me
                     to keep
                     coming back.

                     The second
                     time, 1987,
                     four years
                     sober, at a more
                     upscale meeting
                     at Cedars-Sinai
                     in West Hollywood,
                     I sat directly
                     behind you.
                     It was hard
                     to breathe
                     being in such
                     close proximity.
                     I didn’t hear
                     a word the
                     speaker said.
                     During his
                     drunkalog,
                     I slowly,
                     surreptitiously,
                     moved the
                     toe of my
                     white high-top
                     until it touched
                     the back of
                     your folding chair.
                     Then said a
                     little prayer.
                     I hoped
                     (should I be
                     embarrassed
                     admitting this?)
                     that some
                     of your
                     stardust
                     might travel
                     down the
                     metal leg
                     of your chair,
                     like a lightning
                     rod, and be
                     passed on
                     to me.

                     It’s after
                     midnight
                     again, Dusty,
                     half a century
                     since, on
                     a suburban
                     lawn or alone
                     in my room,
                     I suffered
                     through hits
                     by Paul Revere
                     & the Raiders
                     and Herman’s
                     Hermits,
                     just to
                     experience
                     two or
                     three minutes
                     of your
                     sultry voice.
                     I’m on
                     YouTube
                     again, watching
                     the black-and-white
                     video of you
                     singing “I
                     Only Want
                     to Be
                     with You.”
                     Your 1964
                     appearance
                     on some teen
                     variety show.
                     I’ve viewed
                     it innumerable
                     times, but
                     it’s always
                     exciting to see
                     you dance
                     out of the
                     darkness into
                     the round
                     spotlight,
                     exuberant
                     as the song’s
                     intro, arms
                     outspread,
                     in a chiffon
                     cocktail
                     dress and
                     high heels,
                     your platinum
                     hair, sprayed
                     perfectly
                     in place,
                     as bright
                     and shiny
                     as the moon.
                     Midway
                     through the
                     song—the
                     instrumental
                     bridge—you
                     turn and
                     sashay around
                     the edge of
                     the spotlight,
                     the ruffled
                     hem of your
                     chiffon dress
                     twisting with
                     your hips
                     and intricate
                     footwork.
                     Circle circling
                     circle: your
                     full backlit
                     hair orbiting
                     the pool of
                     white light
                     in the center
                     of the stage.
                     I watch this
                     again and again,
                     like Bashō’s moon
                     walking around
                     the pond
                     all night long.

Say despite all the churches with their unlocked doors
and outstretched strangers’ palmskin, I hungered still

—squandered when, fell through like a crumb, I sat waiting
for discovery or disintegration—something marvelous
teething at the surface—a crumb, devotional, religious ecstatic
closer to being worthy

Desire me ruthless and naked but still in my Sunday dress 
you opened the window—we humid and slept open
into dreaming, yes, conduit. Conduit or nothing. Conduit
or bust. Nothing or busted. Hug the breakwater’s edge

more the grit, my fingers—whorl, the inches of all 
concrete make miles of this low, walled city.  

Pretend expansive with me like ocean.

River.  Lake.  Bodies.

If there’s one true thing, it’s that 
Google will make money off us no matter what. 
If we want to know 
what percentage of America is white 
(as it seems we do) 
what percentage of the population is gay 
(as it seems we do) 
what percentage of the earth is water: 
the engine is ready for our desire. 
The urgent snow is everywhere
is a line by Edna St. Vincent Millay, and 
many have asked, apparently, 
where am I right now. Also 
when will I die. Do you love me 
may be up there, generating 
high cost-per-click, but not 
as high as how to make pancakes, 
what time is it in California. 
So many things I wanted to ask you, 
now that you’re gone, and your texts 
bounce back to me 
undeliverable. Praise to 
the goddess of the internet search, who returns 
with her basket of grain, 
67,000 helpful suggestions
to everything we request: 
how to solve a Rubik’s Cube, 
what to do when you’re bored, 
how old is the earth, 
how to clear cache, 
what animal am I, 
why do we dream, 
where are you now, come back.

the black bird stripped off their feathers 
they issued the jubilee of plenary indulgence
in eucharistic communion expressing effects 
of anxieties intercessed and intersexed 

the black bird stripped off their feathers 
and threw themselves into a thicket of thorns 
protected by presence of viper and crown
a sacramental medal of uncertain origin

the poison was offered the glass was broken  
they issued the jubilee of plenary indulgence
the black bird stripped off their feathers 

                It turns out however that I was deeply
Mistaken about the end of the world
        	The body in flames will not be the body
In flames but just a house fire ignored
        	The black sails of that solitary burning
Boat rubbing along the legs of lovers
        	Flung into a Roman sky by a carousel
The lovers too sick in their love
        	To notice a man drenched in fire on a porch
Or a child aflame mistaken for a dog
        	Mistaken for a child running to tell of a bomb
That did not knock before it entered
        	In Gaza with its glad tidings of abundant joy  	
In Kazimierz a god is weeping
        	In a window one golden hand raised
Above his head as if he’s slipped
        	On the slick rag of the future our human
Kindnesses unremarkable as the flies
        	Rubbing their legs together while standing
On a slice of cantaloupe Children
        	You were never meant to be human
You must be the grass
        	You must grow wildly over the graves

^{with David Rothenberg, Nicola Hein, George Lewis, Dafna Naphtali, Andrew Drury, Tanya Kalmanovich, Hans Tammen, Sarah Weaver, David Grubbs, and Ally-Jane Grossan}

Logistics sounds like a work song. The bottom anticipates and tills and then it’s time to turn over. This limbned, uncoordinated independence is anagnostic. Flesh touches. I am because we are is some bullshit. I ain’t because we share air lore, more notes on Auto da Fé’s blacking of the presence of an absence. The abyss between frames, that dehiscence, indicates this refusal either to fuse or choose between tearing and binding, a careful preservation of wounding. The whole fade in a shuffle it projects and prepares, a soufflé of angles, a palimpsest of snares and rides, some continually hidden h, a heft of air, a thievish shift carnival, a tufted shear, a shhhh of whirr and bookfan. We wear a fan of books, page over other kissing inside lip to disappear into another outside in coming into view. We all come from nothing to hard tone row and that cool move, chafing against the new phasis of the history of displacement, sound like it got a three on it to me. Blackness is the revelation of that which makes a people uncertain, unclear and awry in its action and knowledge. I think I been thinking ‘bout that for ‘bout thirty years, Krupa become Krupskaya having lost their aura, but when I get a chance I ask Scott La Rock why I start to think and then I sink into the paper like I was ink, like I was a Chinese painter in the hold of the beholding. The zero degree is what he says; she says nothing in reply, a festival, irreparable. The age of quantum mechanical reproduction is giving tune away to rise. Collaborate elaboration, William. Infinite consanguinity, Dumbo. Fleeta Drum came with us, brought something with him, brought a swing with her to fold the document. Can improvisation be documented? Has it ever been? Lemme ask Scott when I see him—see if improvisation can be revised. Scott, can improvisation be revised? That’s an arctic jazz question, regarding whales and, further inland, elephants, and saxophone kids, non-expert users, autodidactic squirrels in task decomposition. Is there an analogy between improvisation and optimization, affirmation and ingardenation on improvisational gardening? What’s the Greek word for “reading”? Which is the point of all this rub and cyclone, when the eye falls into plenitude in a series of caressive abuse and kisses, oikopolitics and storms, good and bad time weather in a tore up propagation of clicks, which is when I realized you’d prepared the back of our throat for a speech about the tragic ship, the interminable line to it and the endless line from it, woodskin, wind’s skin, wound and drumbone, bowed, time to stay, string, till poise come back for poise, for our unsupported method and post-sculptural stuttering and non-purposive black massive hymn and sold, celebratory subcanadian scotchplain, plummets of bird patterning, the scotchirish hazarding of north ideas, habitually prenational birds, field recordings of syncrudescent birds flew down to tailing in the good and bad time weather, bird in the collective head of mama’nem at the blues university, Clyde’n’mama’nem and her and ask and think a digital conference of the birds, viola, ‘cause music is the fruit of love and earth and nobody gon’ buy it anyway, for there is nothing lost, that may be found in these findings, by these foundlings, driving ‘round vising and revisiting in the inescapable history of not being you. Our name is unnameable in this regard and miles ahead, feeling what you can’t see all incompletely. The half-fullness of your glasses makes you wanna make the word go away but you do have a capacity for massage that gives me hope. In the delicate evening software, I can understand Russell Westbrook. It’s ulmeric, oliveirian, in its unfirewalled all over the placelessness. We gig everywhere and it just makes me wanna giggle, or holler at you from way over here, party over there, if you can wait, we being behind the beat a little bit but right at the beguining, gynomonastically basic and maternal earth tones all out from the tone world, deep in the bass loom, twilight weaving morning in La Jolla/moonlight in Vermont someplace, some folks parking, some just getting dressed, everybody waiting with everybody for right now in right there, party over here. Well moled, old Grubbs! We all here in the ruins but we got something in our hands—an experimental bandcamp for news and flowers. And I appreciate y’all letting me sit in, being so far from virtuosity. I wanna be communicable from way back. I wanna be in your base community, grace abounding to the chief of sinners. Remember that song by the Spinners called “Sadie”? The one on Spinners Live! where he reverted—that contrapulsive, not just knee-deep conversioning he got caught up in? Soul Wynne was sewing that night. It was like he had a drum in his chest, just to let you know that nothing lasts forever. The improvisation of forgetting is redactive flow everyday with all these voices in our head. These are always revising herself. One said they told us to be Germanic so, with great surprise, we took a picture of your tech with yourself, our constraint, and it was undecidable between us but plantational, since we the police of different voices, to be your instrument in this sovereign fade. Go back and look at it again when we fade a little bit, when invention won’t let us come up on it from behind. I don’t know my own stuff well enough to mix it right now, but we been remixing it all along past the everyday fade. Mama’nem are the different voices in your head. Are you gon’ play me now? I wan be played with you. I wanna be down with you. My code voice is Stanley Clarke, rajautomatic mixive for the people’s quartet, no way to control it, can’t caul it, won’t be covered, some uncoverable cuvée, girl, some prekripkean cupcake, causally unnameable as that Krupa keep coming back, tense but casually anafrican. Scott says the Greek word for reading is writing. It could be, I don’t know. I’m undecidable between us but you can ring my bell. The night is young and full of possibilities, the only trace of which, when I go back, is how I sound for you from one diffusion to another, as if the room were our hijab, as if we were a roomful of people writing about Cecil Taylor, as if writing about Cecil were reading James Cone, as if I were Sharon Cone’s escort to Cecil’s going home, as if we were the temporary contemporary—air above mountains, buildings in our hands.

the shape
of this

&her smell

&the shine in the small
lit room
to the boy

replace him
w you &
let me love
that shine
in you

let me.

where the sea circles around the island in a star pattern – where in the center of grieving we are disoriented, skinless – where I wade into the field . . . the scent of sun on wheat – where the horses bow in & out, kick up a hoof, satisfied, perhaps, in their available bodies – where I’ve located a tiny refuge : the horizontal view from the house on stilts – where we hide the part of us that shudders, without a script – where in grief, even our own stories feel vacant – where you hear yourself telling the story & at the same time you think that’s not it, that’s really not it – where the ice plants glow in a translucent bandage across the cliff face – where impermanence is the direct expression of emptiness & emptiness is the best description of reality – where you wake from sleep to see someone leaving, but only the drape of their scarf across their back – if grief is a shining fruit

Say your body’s
life-size trip clock
starts in schlep

on the down slope.
Then the long hand
slaloms you steep

as your face tocks
the take of nine-to-five.
It’s just your timing

and mindset that’s semi-
rattled, and everyone
comes to the skit a little

pusillanimous to begin.
What is a kind of
smudgy justice:

the ancestors’ DNA
in full wig effect,
frizzy edges crimped,

oblivious to wind.
Are you really inside
that mirror slice?

Pacing over past
junkets still, a hybrid
hallucination got

stock-carded into
a being strange to be,
like that griffen

who slips so casual
onto someone else’s
map of laughing tropic

locales. Friend, look hard.
Mix. Step out. The center
bit by bit gets beiged.

You are one hundred
percent half-and-half.
In the hemi is the how.

Silence isn’t stillness, agitation has me in its grip

remember reading       Greeks were like us

restless            underneath and again underneath

water wearing away               crevices          the itch

of canyons             skin I didn’t outgrow as

the doctor promised     burns hot and stinging

allergic to what I bring to it            allergic to

what I’m thinking     how much older 

the underpass is     filled to overflowing

blue-tented absence                corners with the leftover

plastic and cardboard     happens so fast        it isn’t

even my heart that’s              broken, 

time stealing               & leaking the blue cold

what it would have been to be        Greek

no cortisone     a body       historians

also thought women leaky        restless        for  what

out of one’s own        skin      a future they never

knew  who’d have thought        a daily  underpass 

so many leftovers     pizza  fries           near the  parking

what skin did we come wrapped in

Do you want to come in?
Take a deep breath.
The repo man is gone.
All I had to do was show him
My favorite gun
And tell him about
My conviction
That a shame-faced galaxy
Mutters a homily of return. 
The repo man will return
With back-up
So I promoted the orphan
To vagabond.
Why do you think they call it
The chain of command?
Writing out of fear—
That razzle-dazzle
Of shackles and manacles
Makes angels cry,
And, admit it,
That’s what you wanted.
My first angel came
In a haze of Alice blue
That emanated
From a dulcimer she cradled
But did not play.
She did a little angel jig
And turned away.
I guess all angels are sad-eyed,
Like you.
Do you want to come in?
Take a deep breath.
Everything is about to happen.

When they finished burying me, what was left of me
sent up a demand like a hand blooming in the fresh dirt:

When I’m back, I want a body like a slash of lightning.
If they heard me, I couldn’t hear their answers.

But silence has never stopped me from praying.
Alive, how many nights did I spend knelt between

the knees of gods and men begging for rain, rent,
and reasons to remain? A body like the sky seeking

justice. A body like light reaching right down into the field
where you thought you could hide from me.

They’ve taken their bald rose stems and black umbrellas
home now. They’ve cooked for one another, sung hymns

as if they didn’t prefer jazz. I’m just a memory now.
But history has never stopped me from praying.

Dear Empire, I am confused each time I wake inside you.
                      You invent addictions.
Are you a high-end graveyard or a child?
                      I see your children dragging their brains along.
                      Why not a god who loves water and dancing
              instead of mirrors that recite your pretty features only?

You wear a different face to each atrocity.
You are un-unified and tangled.
                      Are you just gluttony?
                      Are you civilization’s slow grenade?

     I am confused each time I’m swallowed by your doors.