Did Cavewomen Come
after Stephen Rodefer
at the start of the century
the radio recruited me
into relational self-shattering
the radio was still the radio
come with me my love
through the sea
the unimpeachable sea
is all understanding a private feeling?
is receptivity redemptive?
everything that goes to make up the air
“what its being asked makes happen”
the tone bearing thrust
the song and its mouth
the coin and its mint
conflating structures of knowledge
with structures of vision
peep holes
at the bulbs
of the vestibule
they sell all that
shit at the mall
O sovereignty
of the tongue
felt venturing
who
and what
and where
shall this
or that occur
what its being made
makes happen
it goes 1 2 3 4
experience, interpretation,
codification, remembrance
to take up a position inside stats
no, stars
what its being made
asks of us
who happen
to have been
brought to question
to demonstrate my happiness to myself
no, understanding
no, feeling
to call the burn
of the lush I need
to be the warp
and the weft
guarding the milky tanker
prodding the ghost bridge
my national flag is wet nuance
the only flap worth flying
a luscious spittle
Everybody Loves a Runt
The morning after
on the couch of what would being
an agent feel like
I’m talking to my shoe
Where is that balcony
beaming skyward
what do my lungs do
and my liver
on this earth
having this body on this street
and emptying spent
If in my ear
there is a choir
I am not alone
and lifted by that number
into the temperate air
where bulbs like buds be strung
I cave my breath and back
over the bar’s amber pleather
and make a knot
over the dull closure
of safe-keeping
Flowering cacti,
generous middle
if eating is aim-inhibited kissing
perversion is a turning
away from the earth
I want curiosity
over consolation
fantasies of function and
I’ve got legs
in the pointless humidity
of a Thursday morning
Total Vocation
If I press my upper territories
against another dream
to coat the loss of merging
is desire a thick set band
so tight about the jaw that it breaks
the belt and the jaw both
If I tug up from under
fluttering attachment
If I reduce drift and perfect alignment
is there any space left in the breathing world
within site of that sweat beading
on the right side of your open neck
with pants so tight everyone
will understand the conditions that produced them
The connection will hold, or it will not
There is copper and industry
for the structure to take
or there is not
Where the lap and where the head dunked in brine
Where the coax of a toe dipped in a tub deferred
Is this not refreshment or refinement
or the flecked soup of what won’t be
I linger in that residue
uninitiated and dumb in repetition
“employing all my strength to be resigned”
My landlady paints the whole thing forest green
the beak, the hole
and the emotional austerity
which precedes and surrounds it
O malleable heart
O irreducible cement
I am left-footed in deliberation
in domination’s lusty grip
I’m clamoring for enlargement of the spheres
The indication on the outside
represents the tokens on the inside
Sound only exists as it is going out of existence