NEC IUSTUS NEC PECCATOR

when that salt life or this, insipid, ends,
when ordinary ruth has been deployed
and while the tame dogs dice for dividends,
some corner drunk will slur into the void:

he was, like me, an old habitué
who loved, and tired of, the red café.

exercise 3.4.4: kitchen jigging for the tame and carbon-neutral

hard shoes for strangers and swift blades for friends:
kosher betrayals while industry ends
at a danish meridian drawn on the sea
where the last crippled man fells the last standing tree.

BUT GODS KNOW

but gods know
when you bared your forearm
and bastions fell
an architect began to dream
a man-high tower.

THE COMMUNE AT THE END OF THE SELF

... which was so resilient an hour ago,
which insinuated itself into my voids
and constructed there,
of the nothing,
houses-for-grandchildren
and wooden-legged bunnies close-held
to the chest

... which made of the silences
between our words
something lighter than air,
than having to be.

NOBLE LATE HARVEST

the vine is stripped, the summer's sugars rot
in well-lit sheds: jan boland throws the latch.
sad mothers, where their dull-eyed children squat
in private, fumble with the autumn match.

RUE GIT-LE-COEUR

his hard opinion finds himself amended
(he was no saint for sure whose bowel
has been evacuated here). thus ended
this his quest, his faithlessness defended,
he trades his english beef for free french fowl.

090612. thirtydawn

some bastard's gone and scrawled across her spleen
the slogan "HOPE": a vicious cri-de-guerre.
she's half a life away from where she's been
or else, by some accounts, she's halfway there.

PHOTOJOURNALIST (1)

he is hard as headlines.
she shoots him still and climbs the threads of his eyes,
unravelling him into the void of the night.

FORTY (3)

seen a man standin' over a dead dog by the highway in a ditch.
he's lookin' down kinda puzzled, pokin' that dog with a stick.
got his car door flung open, he's standin' out on highway 31
like if he stood there long enough that dog'd get up and run...

[bruce springsteen, "reason to believe"
from "nebraska", 1982]

FORTY (2)

once he reached for something golden hanging from a tree
but his hand came down empty...


[carole king, "tapestry"]

FORTY

he never had to pass this station, wave
in sad acknowledgement of absent choirs
lining bleak unbusy platforms... save
your laurels: this gift too, today, expires.

GARAGISTE (1)

the wives have claimed the kitchens, commandeered
the cockpits (not their oumas' oubliettes)...
this thirteen spanner and this greying beard
must muscle what the married mind forgets.

NEXT TO GODLY

how well you've polished out your body's soil
and combed your teeth of every fecund word.
see! hermes's squeaky loam-shy heel is (if not
wholly resurrected) disinterred...

MR BASSON'S DEATH IS DEFERRED

the rose is uncorrupted, and the greying
lung is harbour to no treason. chance
be praised for arbitrarily delaying
raw inevitable circumstance.

QUEER POLITICS

as if the broken bread of galicia
would be unbroken here. asof die skewe
been die pad sou regtrap. he would be a
ginsberg of the heerengracht... sy lewe,

weg en waarheid stol, and he appeases
tame incubi, this straightup square queer jesus.

THIS IS THE LIGHT HE TURNS FROM

this is the light he turns from, which insists
that every great-and-small should integrate
and specify itself... he unenlists,
an evolutionary apostate.

unbind the protein-chain,
suppress the algal bloom,
restore his early void,
his unbred gloom.