Poems

The Plot

Won’t let your bad self.

Let go of your old debt.

Tiring of your old self.

Won’t let your made bed.

Let your bad blood let.

Your grown debt get.

Life in a Love

Escape me?

Never —

Beloved!

Dog Boy

ONE

Late at night in Oklahoma, a very small, an extremely small man ran across the road in front of my friend’s car. He does not doubt this is real, though the rest of us do, and it doesn’…

Ella Josephine Campbell

Slim, slight. Sinew and bird bones.

Cords of her hands like spruce roots.

Came from Ship Cove to Crow Gulch

with little more than the child inside her,

landed in a small shack flanked by

forgiving my father

it is friday. we have come

to the paying of the bills.

all week you have stood in my dreams

like a ghost, asking for more time

but today is payday, payday old man;

my mother’s hand opens in her early grave

Tractatus

The sun gave our shoulder blades ulu-shaped burns, and the sun gives nothing to our sort

I sleep now, and furiously

Clouds excreted shadows on the shoreline, and there were no clouds

The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter

After Li Po

While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead

I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.

The Ayes Have It

When I think of Trayvon Martin, I think of Emmett Till,

             when I think of Emmett Till, I think of young, black men in the South,

A Psalm of Life

What the Heart of the Young Man Said to the Psalmist.

Tell me not, in mournful numbers,

Life is but an empty dream!

From Summer Grass

The willows are thinking again about thickness,

slowness, lizard skin on hot rock,

and day by day this imaging transforms them

How One Winter Came in the Lake Region

For weeks and weeks the autumn world stood still,

Clothed in the shadow of a smoky haze;

The fields were dead, the wind had lost its will,

At Melville’s Tomb

Often beneath the wave, wide from this ledge

The dice of drowned men’s bones he saw bequeath

An embassy. Their numbers as he watched,

I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud

I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o’er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

What Is Poetry

(a twelve-tone poem)

trite yap show

rosy twit heap

Love (III)

Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back,

Guilty of dust and sin.

But quick-ey’d Love, observing me grow slack

The Men That Don’t Fit In

There’s a race of men that don’t fit in,

A race that can’t stay still;

So they break the hearts of kith and kin,

Dear Death,

Am I a praise poet or a blame poet?

Today I am a blame poet.

 O Death, face it, existence

doesn’t like you.

You can’t sing. You can’t paint.

St John’s Burns Down for the Umpteenth Time

Let’s say the fix was in. Let’s say history,
Being human and thus short on ideas,
Made change from an old bag of tricks. Say this

Lake Baptiste Ungenders Me

upon contact / head first / baptismal

the rind of me / peels into ribbons

of foam / and pearls / i re-brown at the water’s

touch / its two-way mudmirror / hands me

its own name / earthliquid / bottomless

Moment One

I remember my birth

like it was tomorrow, the unholy sensation

An English Speaking Doctor Translates the Concerns of his Patient with Google/Un Docteur Anglophone Traduit Les Inquiétudes De Son Patient Avec Google

écoute

à quoi bon être poète

beau dire

ce mal

semble dans la tête comme

marteau feu enclume clou couteau

ou l’éclat d’une baudroie ou des

aurores boréales

Invictus

Out of the night that covers me,

Black as the Pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

An Online Friend Dies Somewhere Outside the Internet

Freezes, goes blue screen, shuts down. Dead pixel, dark.

Ghost echoes, lossy in the source code. Time zones away,

people who have actually shaken hands with my online friend

How Not to Spill

Dad has creases on his hands so thick they could split with a

poke. He gestures for me to try so I do. His skin bends on a

hinge and out spills every good and bad thing: cattails from our