The Matter

downtown in the just

lids place I get a Yankees cap and the girl

there says everyone likes a winner

and I see the pink of her young gleaning

what a deli meat and a burn victim both might I

take what I can from this since

I cannot give anything back and tell

her I appreciate voyeurism and the endocrine system for so few

know how good hiding and chemicals can be 

and she gets all quiet still like something felled dead

so I say the thing about hats like this

is they give your head an emblem and some

direction and she asks if I want a bag

but I just want to wear it out

as again the sun drops you

lean some fevered nearer being better

but lost a little and coasting bedded

in temperate messed up head thought

you might like some

books to pass time since times

like these you have to be

careful not to drown this way all wordless

hacking in a self under the bold yellow

sleep dream glow you have come to warm like milk

on your wrist where the blue lines

lead drummed steady life even

now in this dark sick bugged night

going home north feeling this

small way a hell of a thing that interrogating sun

your pink hands whittling the last

of the hotel soap bars toll

coins rattling in the ashtray our slow

passing barbed time through grim equator like day

and the rip hiss of the guard

rail and the tires humming 75 mph

I can’t tell you where it is

this weathered pavement becomes

asphalt again it’s a wonder so

far as we are now it has not happened

sooner you know I don’t care if you don’t care just

wanted to make a conversation is all damn

disengaged another speed high

crier tearing on a home made duct

taped bicycle frame forms slots

picks holes few can let be even

fewer can let in and so the squeeze

goes but a grip is found now

flipping birds to the universe so it can

screw off and the fractious pieces of free street

close fast all around snug in

this dissonant and consuming gut

and little else spurs but good tire treads

and nice tits and the pissed cabbies

blaring horns and cursing and the pressing

wasted vapidity of stopping

stays numbed my stomach slips

pained fills holes my god the thing

still listens to come here baby trust

the treats I have in my spooning

hands honey lie back disengage

the shears forget the losses 

that balled troubled body suffers today

just groom and give off heat and that clean

muting click toward sleep there is

no design to stir it now or stand it longer

and we will play when the hurting leaves

and the pills come out of the food

little of it is easy thinking godless even

being planed on the more measured theories and being

corrugated and helical like screw work

comprehending planets and ear bones and the pressing

black at the far corners of a polygonal nothingness

I cannot be equal to it and yet I am

a word problem and I am both shaped

and an undefined shape property and so

little of it is easy thinking godless even

letting it go on because there are

so many animals and vegetables and so

many equations and ugly imbalances and it is

so many years now since Sunday school

I am gone sunned and my wheels

settle and give and I continue this summering and mind it

is Petrojarl Foinaven I am thinking on

those great muddied drumming bowels and that raised iron

floor on the soured surface of the ever scabbing

Atlantic and its lolling in large sophisticate

agility this thing it is a monster

bigger than the bigger of us

and when this time I believe

I have grown too dense of it I

am diluted and there it stands

where nothing should be standing

and there it draws what the sun has not yet drawn

on me a contenting and yet a cancerous glaze

and more times than not I am easy

with a full tank and a paved space for my chromed babies

blown he questions what can

split tender the beams

that stay the animal

mind what can fracture

the permuted holds of folks

he knows

the fleshy

burrows between lovers and pornographers

and the irregular solicitations

of holes and chances

blown he finds

the insides of stones

event the pebbly black ones

crystalline so

much jagged

points to the vagaries

two way radio talk din over

head choppers long beam search

lights white on the city it is

hard to think this wasted off

this much minding the hard

in the hard substances that make the hours worth

something consider a life

without cells and shanks and wishing I had some

bullets and a leather belt and speed

reason even anything but head

work through a fogged sentence like this

existing with parking tickets and packed laundry

sacks and nobody having bleach or an eraser

just to make the day a little shorter

or at least to smudge it some