When I was in the Secret Service I would talk to my wrist. It was
part of my job and I was very good at it. I said Breaker breaker. I said
The Jackal is on the move. During the day, I kept everyone safe. At
night, I dreamed of standing very quietly next to doors. To work
at the White House one must be sophisticated and intense. One
must be dedicated to turning the knobs and lifting the pens that
make the laws. One must anticipate, relentlessly, the unanticipated.
Sometimes, to avoid suspicion, I would pretend to be a robot and
I would sing—like this: Beep boop. An impeccable camouflage.
Once, in a submarine, at the end of a long shift, in the terrible dark
beneath a terrible storm, in the blub and swell of it, sunk and fast-
stuck in a trench and far from home, cold-soaked and lost in the
plush of a velvet suit—an octopus costume, elaborately constructed,
with droopy arms spangled with buttons for suckers—I escaped
discovery several times. If I was undercover now I wouldn’t say.
Until tomorrow. I tell you this because I love you. I might be doing
it all wrong.

The ceiling is a woman buried upside down.
Let me start again—in Maywood, California there’s a library
that’s important to me. Its many ceiling lights: indifferent 
glass breasts pointing down at their readers. Each nipple 

a gathering of dead moths. At the hospital, I hear 
a nurse call cancer the big casino
as in the house always wins. A house is a many-sided die
always rolling on its spine. I spent 
my teenage years watching a good mother lose

her breasts, her hair. She screamed in the shower. She screamed
in the mirror. Each drain wreathed
with death’s jet-black wig. There was no Sesame Street episode
for this lesson: the first time you see a man’s hand

up Cookie Monster’s ass, your childhood dies a little. Every day 
I wait under passing clouds, feverish and eager
to see a flash of skin. Maybe a wrist, something hairy and flesh-colored
to point my pitchfork at. After that last hailstorm

the front yard looked like a fancy party
where the guests lost all their pearls.
Watch me busy myself with finishing line, 
string each bead of ice together. Let me start again—

this is a gift quickly melting in my hands.

^{translated from the modern Greek by Spring Ulmer}

Of late, he’s been preparing his lyrics with passion 
and contemplation 
as if writing his will, or more so 
like a dentist who takes measurements in old, naked, gaping mouths 
and busily fashions out of gypsum, rubber, porcelain, and gold, 
frigid, austere, sparkling dentures (for young and old, 
little girls, old ladies and tragic women), busily readying 
plaster and gold fragments of bare skulls, 
correcting ages, repairing cliff faces and ruined smiles, 
chasms of time or the wonder in the face of death.

He wrote his most beautiful poem on the eve of his birthday 
and it stayed there on his table like an abused, terribly shiny and 
     uncompromising pair of dentures 
worn the day of a funeral. But his mouth wasn’t closed— 
it was wide open, exposing his golden dentures, 
a radiant mouth of pointless dignity, 
an ultimate monument to the independent mouth 
that could no longer (nor did it need to) chew 
food and time and silence and words and pretense.

ΕΝΑ ΑΠ’ ΤΑ ΤΕΛΕΓΤΑΙΑ ΤΟΥ ΠΟΙΗΜΑΤΑ

Τὸν τελευταῖο καιρὸν ἑτοίμαζε τοὺς στίχους του μὲ πάθος καὶ περίσκεψη 
σὰ νἄγραφε τὴ διαθήκη του, καὶ πιότερο 
σὰν ὀδοντογιατρὸς ποὺ παίρνει μέτρα σὲ γεροντικά, γυμνά, χαώδη στόματα 
κ’ ἑτοιμάζει μὲ γύψο, καουτσούκ, πορσερλάνη, κρυσάφι, 
ἑτοιμάζει ψυχρές, αὐστηρές, ἀπαστράπτουσες 
τὶς ὀδοντοστοιχίες (γιὰ νέους καὶ γέρους, κοριτσόπουλα, γριοῦλες 
καὶ τραγικὲς γυναῖκες) ἑτοιμάζει, πολυάσχολος, 
γύψινα καὶ χρυσὰ ἀποσπάσματα γυμνῶν κρανίων, 
ποὺ διορθῶναν ἡλικίες, ἐπισκευάζανε γκρεμοὺς προσώπων καὶ κατερειπωμένα χαμόγελα, 
τὰ χάσματα τοῦ χρόνου ἢ τῆς κατάπληξης, μπροστὰ στὸ θάνατο.

Τὸ πιὸ ὡραῖο του ποίημα τὄγραψε τὴν παραμονὴ τῶν γενεθλίων του 
κ’ ἔμεινε πλάϊ ἐκεῖ στὸ τραπέζι του σὰ μιὰ κατάχρυση μασέλα τρομερὰ στιλπνὴ κι ἀδιάλλακτη

Sustained by poetry, fed anew
by its fires to return from madness,
the void does not beckon as it used to.

Littered with syllables, the road does not loom
as a chasm. The hand of strangers on other
doors does not hurt, the breath of gods

does not desert, but looms large
as a dream, a prairie within our dream,
to which we return, when we need to.

Oh blessed plain, oh pointed chasm.

All poetry is about hope.
A scarecrow walks into a bar.
An abandoned space station falls to earth.
When probing the monster’s brain,
you’re probably probing your own.
A beautiful woman becomes a ghost.
I hope I never miscalculate the dosage
that led to the infarction
of my lab rabbit again.
All poetry is a form of hope.
Not certain, just actual
like love and other traffic circles.
I cried on that airplane too,
midwest patchwork below
like a board game on which
mighty forces kick apart the avatars.
I always wanted to be the racecar
but usually ended up a thumbtack.
When I was young, sitting in a tree
counted as preparation and later
maybe a little whoopie in the morgue.
So go ahead, thaw the alien, break
the pentagram but watch out for
the institutional hood ornaments.
It’s not a museum, it’s a hive.
The blood may be fake
but the bleeding’s not.

A poem is a gesture toward home.
It makes dark demands I call my own.

               Memory makes demands darker than my own:
               My last love drove a burgundy car.

My first love drove a burgundy car.
He was fast and awful, tall as my father.

              Steadfast and awful, my tall father
              Hit hard as a hailstorm. He’d leave marks.

Light rain hits easy but leaves its own mark
Like the sound of a mother weeping again.

              Like the sound of my mother weeping again,
              No sound beating ends where it began.

None of the beaten end up how we began.
A poem is a gesture toward home.

I’m curled into a ball
like a dog
that is cold.

Who will tell me
why I was born,
why this monstrosity
called life.

The telephone rings. I have to give
a poetry reading.

I enter.
A hundred people, a hundred pairs of eyes.
They look, they wait.
I know for what.

I am supposed to tell them
why they were born,
why there is
this monstrosity called life.

Painting is a person placed
between the light and a
canvas so that their shadow
is cast on the canvas and
then the person signs their
name on it whereas poetry
is the shadow writing its
name upon the person.

poetry is evanescence
 

poetry is life sentence, release
on words, liberté sur parole
 

poetry is a blind guide to an ancient
enigma, to an inaccessible
secret
 

poetry is an argument
dynamic and jarring
 

poetry is a rag tag cos-
mology we can
raise and wave,
it's a small (abregée) cos-
mogony: unaware,
seamless, unstitched,
breathless, in tatters
 

poetry is to forget
forgetfulness
 

poetry is to separate self from
self
 

poetry is what's completely
left out
 

poetry is emptying without
exhausting
 

poetry is constraint to the remote,
to the not yet, the not
now, the not here,
the not there, the
not before, neither not after,
nor not now
 

poetry is breeching
 

poetry is to burn and give birth
in the same vocal gesture
 

poetry is being-there multiplied
by not being-there, remembering
to trans-be-there traversely
like a watershed
 

poetry is a misunderstanding about
what I don't know exactly,
but a misunderstanding
 

poetry is infinite impotence,
limpid, lucid, hallucinated
 

poetry is intersection
interjection
intersession
interruption
 

poetry is a low blow
 

poetry is transit and exit
 

poetry is infusion and trans-fusion
 

poetry is memory of what is not
and what must not be; that is
the culminating, liminal Self
the Self as an incomplete cosmos
never to be completed
 

poetry is tying—untying
 

poetry is the ritual scene of
infinite uncertainty, of the
inaccessible Infermity
(Infirmitas)
 

poetry is a streak
a swerve
a splay
a spade
 

poetry is crib—cradle
it's nook—needlei
of the Trans-Organ
of the trans-organic
of the Indistinct
of the In(de)terminable
 

poetry is ash
 

poetry is diagonal
it's ramble
inside the manifest body
of Universal Inexistence
of Global Entropy
 

poetry is stiffened laziness
an arm hanging from the
branch of the Tree of the Knowledge
of Good and Evil; that is
a Monkey in Brazil
always hanging by an arm
from the branch of a tree (it's the Preguiçaii )
 

poetry is terrorism in the domain of speech,
a bang in the cloister of language
 

it's terror in the depths of rhetoric
 

poetry is liberation from knowing
escape from the known
a release from mechanics
 

and at the same time it's falling, sinking
into repetitive, obsessive, iterative
mechanics, which are also the
mechanics of hinting, of the
norm, of ritual (of strict
obligation, of rhyme, of number,
of essence)
 

poetry is the implosion of zero time
and in(de)finite degree
 

poetry is unleashing, un-phrasingiii, a potential
threat, breaking, robbing,
destruction
 

poetry is smashing, shattering, shaking
 

it's a clash between
strength and restraint
that tends to erase.
We are truly
infinitely mad
 

poetry is almost everything: that is everything, less
what it really is
 

poetry is impermanence crossed with
trans-manence
 

it's impertinence
 

poetry is counter and encounter (spontaneous
and predestined) between neurosis and unconscious,
between archetype and Self
 

a monotonous and perpetuated ring between
impulse and obsession
 

poetry is aggression
 

to write poetry is to cut slits, produce cracks,
point out filaments in the
curtain, in the Barred
Wall
 

poetry is a fight against the night
 

poetry is night against the night
 

poetry is a rub against the voice
 

poetry is friction against the Dragon's skin
 

poetry is this
it's this and that
and so be it
 

ⁱIn the original Italian, this verse literally reads: it's cell—eye of the needle. Villa may have been thinking about the passage from the New Testament "It's easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for rich man to enter the kingdom of God." (Matthew 19: 23-24)
ⁱⁱPerguiça literally means "sloth" in Portuguese. Here Villa uses it in reference to the mammal that dwells in the trees of South America, specifically those of Brazil, where he lived for three years.
ⁱⁱⁱSfraso might derive from the verb "sfrasare," meaning to disrupt the phrase. It is, however, one of Villa's many neologisms and the interpretation offered here (un-phrasing) is merely hypothetical.

That’s what misery is,
Nothing to have at heart. 
It is to have or nothing. 

It is a thing to have, 
A lion, an ox in his breast, 
To feel it breathing there.
 
Corazon, stout dog, 
Young ox, bow-legged bear, 
He tastes its blood, not spit. 

He is like a man 
In the body of a violent beast. 
Its muscles are his own . . .

The lion sleeps in the sun. 
Its nose is on its paws. 
It can kill a man. 

Body of poem

Tail of poem

Refrain from poem

Poem coda

Reprise

Surprise rereprise

Tale of tailing off a poem

Cup of tea après poem

Neverending poem, the other poem, yet another poem

Poem behind the poem

Shadow of poem

That ol’ poem again

The Poem

the poem begins not where the knife enters

but where the blade twists.

Some wounds cannot be hushed

no matter the way one writes of blood

& what reflection arrives in its pooling.

The poem begins with pain as a mirror

inside of which I adjust a tie the way my father taught me

before my first funeral & so the poem begins

with old grief again at my neck. On the radio,

a singer born in a place where children watch the sky

for bombs is trying to sell me on love

as something akin to war.

I have no lie to offer as treacherous as this one.

I was most like the bullet when I viewed the body as a door.

I’m past that now. No one will bury their kin

when desire becomes a fugitive

between us. There will be no folded flag

at the doorstep. A person only gets to be called a widow once,

and then they are simply lonely. The bluest period.

Gratitude, not for love itself, but for the way it can end

without a house on fire.

This is how I plan to leave next.

Unceremonious as birth in a country overrun

by the ungrateful living. The poem begins with a chain

of well-meaning liars walking one by one

off the earth’s edge. That’s who died

and made me king. Who died and made you.