Prodded to anything different—burned coffee, noontime, a stain on the rug

Unwelcome in any mispronounceable Midwestern

small town, no room for us any where.

now--no need for drama or insight,

just someplace to line up a pair of

shoes, just someplace to make any

object.

No craft, no ready-made, no butcher, no surrender, just the little bark-brown house.

I don’t have anything to give you.

***

Can’t reach or contract or angle toward or away

without flailing, screeching off balance,

whiskey too dear at noontime.

When the voice fails, what is there, but to listen.

We never were an anchor or a float, we never needed one, either. 

the lame lark says

‘misread ‘joy’ for ‘jay’

day stretched thin for once

to remember 

through you, sideways-eight like, through

and again, this road, too.’

Aim to be no president’s wife, no smooth-skinned symmetry

—that rain out there the

first proof I’ve lived this scam before. Deep

green the same as a light scar over real muscle and the

blood, yes, that’s there, too. As polite as all

get out, simile over treachery over 10-second-hugs.

window

****** ****** ****** ****** ****** ****** ****** ****** ****** ******

no window no clasp no betrayed no betrayal no ice no echoes no code no apology no peppers dripping with rain no skeletal ink no theft no dog and pony no prayer no old assent no primary contact no blame no nude photos no rind no injunction no writ no startling harmony no ice in the dams no bleaching sun no promise no market no big brass band no ill-fit archways no soil no shard no spying no chest pains no stick figure no reach no trellis in the spring no figure eight no polygraph no floating candles no trouncing no jaw no incendiary green no mirror no crow-tree

****** ****** ****** ****** ****** ****** ****** ****** ****** ******

blacked over, still a fine glass

Injunction

“Variety of keys, ways to be”

— of course these could never appear, scratchy lilt, meager sauces. The idea to be… well, you know that old story. No ending, or many. And all the signs to fill in along the way. It’s a revolving door, and no poets stop it, but you’re, at least, dribbling a little something in the corner. “If there were only a way to leverage this to make it more.” So what is outdoing it there, anyway, poking around, making it new, or whatever. But do, whatever you do, look.

Cleaning House

What one might think

notable shards --

evidence -- at the tip of whose

tweezers -- boxed,

unlabeled, falling

occasionally in increasingly

dirty arrays.

Proof, at least, of an attempt to prove.