Classroom

I’m twisted by exhaust.
Silent halogens in
a prison filled with desks

Bridge

One wayward glance,
or one instance of paths crossed
in this lightless abyss
and the remains of a bridge
will show themselves dully.
If only I had the materials and
if only the light did not recede.

Lot

Concrete chunked and rent apart.
Lots liquefied and burnt.
I never want to hear a car again
in my life.
Great leaps and bounds of which
I am the product and proud I am supposed to be.
The trees don’t even remember
when we populated this place alone.
Most of them are products too.

Free Verse

You got an idiot brain dude.
Like wind blasts over a farmhouse,
your skull whistling bro.
Empty like space.

Exam Prep

that the Prince rarely visits
her after their marriage as
she is not his only wife.
Similar in structure to the
[REDACTED], though in this
case the prose is much more
developed in order to expose the
social and emotional context
of the poems, which is

Class 2

Six or seven individuals on the best lifeboat
the ship offered, leading a
ghostly procession of sinking,
cannibalized lifeboats behind.
The people on them
dissolved into the sea.
So too will those on the best.

Seminar

Frameless references,
empty glass frames blow up eyes.
Eyes flit up and down
searching places known and not,
plaque or place,
And “can I have both?”

Notes on “Essays in Idleness”

Dews of Adashino

  • the most precious thing in life is uncertainty
  • the longer a man lives the more shame he endures

Leading the Heart Astray

  • nothing leads a man astray as easy as sexual desire

A Proper Dwelling

  • a man’s character, as a rule, may be known from the place where he lives

Legs

Dried up rivers in the legs
like anthill tunnels,
or girders that don’t do their job.
I think one day the
careful, cultivated spitsand
will blow apart—
stuck between the weight
of a faithless torso
and man’s sterile soil—
and then the wobbling ends.

Church Mice

Church mice,
Placid in chapel walls and
alive on wayward crumb;
Band together! Unite!
Many is more than one.
A laudable impulse,
but laughed at by the lion,
and the pig with a gun.

Ladies

Sit, think about women
They’re always there
I’m just motionless now
inhale something
Make my vitality go away.
Rather I be still than
risk me be rejected
and my ego dead.

Wooden Boardroom Table

Just short of 50 feet
Symmetrical, lacquered:
an unconscionable sacrifice
but fortunately fake
like the fools sitting round.

Humanity

Fucking solipsist,
Useless dickhead with no cash.
Nobody told you?
We sink the world!
Ideas are dead weight
or pleasant jetsam at best.

A Weapon

Truth is like a hammer.
“So truth is a tool?”
Absolutely not.
A tool ceases to be
when it is not wielded,
and as with the hammer,
Truth is wielded best
when buried in the brain.