Something I have always
admired is that
few poems tell you
the provenance of their language.
It's not a dictionary
you know.
The words are
divested from their
accumulating bodies
and the conditions of their production;
so basically they are shit
and still Emission
therefore remain unvoiced.
the body ends with the body.
Often the showers
above our homes
would have leaks
Many books of poetry would be ruined
and slide into sewers or canals.
I was told by colleagues
back covers are valuable
for many reasons!
For starters they keep consumers
from regretful decisions
and bad hygiene often they consist of
fashionable dust jackets and bindings
to keep foreign bodies outside
and not muddy the good word
and they keep you
from silverfish Mainly it gives an anchor
to hold to
as a reader bores down further,
down further,
such that the reader is falling and
is adequately aware of the careful incision
your hands make between
front and back.
The lichenous body and The poem
the appendix torn out of it.
I heard a Kennedy was back
in the White House
So we are reading
pages backwards
which sounds unsanitary, also addictive,
sixty pages back and
standing watch
the shuddering voice saying
Her body was so small
and forty pages forward
the boss is telling me - yeah I'm letting him in
he's not old enough to drink
but also, he isn't going home
Also, I'm not going home
I don't want to play
house like this anymore.
already we are approaching
the basin of hell
which is really a secret
rock of caramel consistency.
It was inside the borehole
deep in the trenches of the bookcovers
I declared I was not guilty
so naturally they declared my trial over.
instead all my friends
would feel terrible pain
(in gums and abdomens)
because they loved me
and the dying world And its doctors would
need someone suffer appropriately;
know that to be
hated is infectious,
suffering spreads
There is no love
before golgotha.
Execrate them twenty times
as much as they hold
any sap of passion. still
that spite will roll overseas
a radiant red fog
on airplanes to Madagascar
and Greenland
and mine like piss on
the beach.
They want a contagious man
on Mars. The first sick man
on Mars.
I am learning about prions and
Apophis and fruiting bodies.
I heard the scream
of a wasting deer
and maybe I listened to
a prion speaking?
I think there is something different
about poetry when it is
read aloud.
real the body ends with the voice
and now you finally resonate
after so long
Listen to that low frequency,
your harmonics dwindling:
how did you learn to pronounce
"prion"? Prions, they are
a silvern bird, a petrel
they are silent by day
and coo at night.
Etymology is "PROteinaceous INfection",
which is an ancient Greek
word meaning "saw",
like their serrated bills.
Clearly they are rooting
for the poet.
Maybe they
are piloted by the CIA.
They are scavenging
in the Antarctic and
picking at the brains of
dead cod. They are small.
They carry the flu. They are
too alive.