—for Christian Schlegel
Like a boy green of face
You are looking else-
Where with your arms
“I feel this ribboned alarm
So I’m waiting as I was”
Period & end of sentence
I’d love with a klaxon
To move you in penance
Like a titanium friar
Across this wooded hell
What were you prior
You drained down your cell
& neutral as a fingerprint
Equal as a clog
We stopped to abhor
For until then I’d never
Sweated out a pair of doors
Which is so Noah’s Ark
I’m like my own eclogue
Talking up these idiot hills
I think cruelty is embrace
When on an avenue I meet
A horse dressed as a visa
Marching in place on pills
So verse isn’t blind
So much as vampiric
Plugged into its volume’s
Celestial drill
Reversible Destiny Housing
I was struck
By your brevity
Can you speak further
About honing that
Particular skill
The river firing
Out the window
Floods a melted fox
In present tenses
Hunting the ill
It tools through
Vague tombs
My friends are in
Another room
The Little Merm
I lost all my notes
I slurped of the Rhône
As I screeched off the tongue
Of la Ponte d’Avignon
Its current escalated & gathered to a tinct
At the glottal pink of the solitary
One I found among me
A bobbing swan distributing voltage
At a central border of the sea
So far from my department
A cygnet tron who sang with no
Auto-notes, wrong news
Delivered in stone
Falsetto said, “I could not
Speak, I was so child
Until I listened with my mouth”
Feeling as one with my device
An albatross above rhymed with it
Fathoms below a major chord
Went wild with metronomic rot
My suit was smooth, a river stone
Some damp hand plucked me
& skipped me west
Over the meniscus of this
Planetary clot
Until I slammed into a wave
My cochleae eel-bitten
Dumb as a cryptogram
& washed up at my employer’s door
& remembered what I’d written