WINNER OF THE 2009 SLS CONTEST SELECTED BY LYNNE TILLMAN
ISOLATE
what chance for what was
now castigate.
not the hour
but what counts.
a bath?
or his entrusted belt.
even the petunias
may listen briefly
or glanced at,
thought beyond thinking.
Who, what roots?
Books crease everything.
Bracelets gleam their gamble.
The attached to
Eyelash cursive
dusty coordinates
drew upon, unaware.
much later,
doused in morning
liquor.
HIVES
Let Fridays decide
Our fate tho
There be no such
Thing as
Fate or date,
Bus stop y
Travel hex
Sits in city planners'
critical of a land
without bugs.
So it's a wire crossing.
Hatchet hatch
Does splits, "behaves"
Let Fridays decide
Hives
And recondite
Remonstration,
Self to self turns.
Let nothing or no one
Take the place of
That fundament
Iterate the gristle.
Kicks and kids
Venerate the treasure
Chest organs
Dissect or standby
Weapon in purchase
In chase in rats
In veritable
Crash
Let Fridays decide our fate.
This one will do me in—
I know it. Care about it.
Being done, this Casket.
Without One Question
But becoming One.
Sap or Venom,
Depend on Who You Ask.
I THINK I SHOULD LIKE A THING
for its stable inalterable Occupation.
and yet, there are such guilty things
as deficit and want may trumpet.
And shines.
I think I should like to shine
then and only, that this may be
the time when we could.
you, me, and the things
emulate each others' presence.
And anticipates
are things too.
with ghastly energy
I think I should like a thing
and anticipates are things
too.
That should flag a thing,
to look back on it
and all that it occupies
that breathy unalterable
archival gullibility.
I keep with Sound.
And anticipates are things too.
A COUNT
I.
For if he were to have any
of this, it would make him sick
not from lack of supplication
but the bent forms that find
themselves in the drink itself.
Such a custom, as by habit
and cunning, we end completely.
Capitulate.
II.
Very form. Its very form.
for if he were to learn of any
of it, the learned themselves
they make themselves sick in it.
This endowment of angles
would that we were in gear
and could drive away
as at that one part of the
movie where every character
ceases.
III.
Course legend.
He would die of custom,
himself sick,
in gear,
a movie character
ceasing.
IV.
I told you not to.
I warmed against it.
And even as you became
the act, it was cunning
of you to capitulate,
the gas fumes or these
heavy cousins whose
heft of heart
cleft lip banker plus dowdy wife
doodle up a storm
but do not drink of it.
V.
To not do it,
as in every relation
this venerable opposite.
My venereal cousin's
lips cannot speak and
I cannot speak.
Don't tell me of Volcanos
and this or that eruption
from your infected neck.
Use the one that talked
me into this earlier
when we were staging.
this one is tiny.
I'll send you a seven by morning
but will be of course late
for it. If you tell me you're tired
one more time, I'll toss up
too, just to upstage you.
Mine will be more intents
a little carnival,
to shave points
off the balance sheet that's
been inveighed for so long
I've lost count.
I will count each act throughly
I will douse us
by air, as
crop duster
to farmy coughing citizen.
Observant, you will take note
but as ever, miss
that you're the target
of an investigation of your breath.
And of your daemon's illnesses?
We will comfort it.
Perhaps a drink
and be sick of it.
Tell it the opposite of some
vast expanse that ends a verse,
hoping if we talk backwards
we can count our way into
its reversing lung-locked
unlanded Land of Mind.