still when the last of love is dashed
there is a litany in skin
and in the blush and flex of limbs
the blunt percussions of blind trunks
the budging bludgeon of bone
and bone
on bone.

in our last deciduous visions
deciduous evergreens
in the vast brush of trees
in the clip of wind
in the wild, fast flush of the spitting breeze
there is an acquisition that is loss
a promotional valediction, hawking mourning.

Hello, how are you? I am writing this killing time at the zoo in the darkness of voodoo light
And I will see you at the zoo, the dead cup full of whooping, the cold zoo
Our bodies full like zoos with jibbering and shrieking and disease
And pacing felines
YES! We are making our brouhaha quietly inside
It's all the rage, it is no scowl, no, it is like whispering dimly "hi" and slipping out
dark as loam. If i were to go softly from this place
To go softly out of this place squeezing shut my eyes til there were no more gaps left open
In my fool heart (a heart ajar) would they observe me?
Instead I will start jumping, whiling my will away
No stars to watch cold through the blue day as I whirl
No stars to open between the leaves, instead
we will be surrounded by little blue gaps, hard leaves of sky pattering
down on us through the canopy as if the wind were an "as if"
as if the the wind were a senseless thing outside of time.

i loved that mouth. i wet it with my joke cold teeth, tongue
dreaming of lethe wharf and queen mab moistening. inside she was as coal.

i was full of impressions - i could not remember if she
were my wife or my sister, that cool dove.

Thickly alive he leaned greasily in the dirty café chair. Wearing the complex bead necklace that looked like a swarm of locusts feeding at his neck. There is time with every piece of writing when it is time to let something *in* he said, though he had not read it, leaning in. Paragraph 3 for example. That was going to be your aleph. But you lost it. *Here.*

From her vacant yet engaging eyes, stilled beams of empty, ossifying light. If only ice could bend. He has a mind to lash out. He feels like a boy in a zoo, at the enclosure of some dull animal, wanting to throw a rock to make it dance.

From her pretty lips, spilled beans.

The hedgehog and the badger lie together, wildernestled.
Restless and passionate stars holepunch the hard hull of night
Exploding in their millions in his head, a wildernest
Her touch nettles through him, in his lungsblood he feels a huge vocabulary of different sighs fight for breathingroom. He can feel it is about to hurt, he can feel so little but he feels above all things this love like mutiny, or the theory of a rebel scientist.

A story, The Million-Dollar Clock. The college. She's just a receptionist. Call her the receptionist. [Write this out, as instruction to reader]. Use the infinite sadness. The dropped plums. The barge of aisles limbs the drained straining of the autopilots, the shoppers, their bulging plastic baskets and emptying eyes and there somewhereelsetobe and the loudspeaker colleague announcements and the two-for-one three-for-two reaching of the toomany women and the sexless men and the tumbling through the fingerdirtof mushrooms for those that frown least. And the baldness of the balding woman on the checkout with the hairnet holding what was left of her hair in place so you had to stare, eyesnared, netted, lost in medical speculation and nameless regret.


On a sudden impulse, taking up the apple:
"Oh, this one is my apple, I bought it in another store." The lie feels right, wild on her tongue. The shop girl hasn't the least interest in suspecting her in this, the pettiest of thefts. She feels the thrill, an airless rising in her chest. She feels the pressure of her bra's underwire gudging into her ribs.


Inside her, he was a speculum, obtrusive. She could not bear the sweaty scrutiny of sex.

The scotch poured in the petal cracked the pot calling the scald scale the rabble the sable scrabble the circus fish with their bright hard mouths the sea mice with their mouthtraps the clowns with their gapemouths
Gary quite contrary how does your garden grow with silver cells and pretty wagers all in columns and rows
Under the river tavern where the death barge bobbed, flippant shiverlets of light
His brackish accent racketed in the dockyard beams.
Outback, the pitched cicadas and the fluent huzz of bees.

A solarium of earthquakes.