Jean

I don’t eat this bread
The things you get
Jean
the things you use
will stop pleasing you
They stop pleasing you by directness
It never tasted good but I was hungry
You might not rot soon
Jean
In the community you’ll prosper
I don’t drink this water
The ones you lie to won’t be fine for long
Jean
I don’t eat this bread
The night we first met we drank
I was thirsty and was open
You put your hands around my neck
I don’t taste this cracker
The day we last spoke
Jean
you put words around my neck

Refuse Disciples

You eat well and transcribe
You shit quickly in the morning
You only slander in self-defense
You manufacture affection
You get up, shower, and check your messages
You network, correspond, advance
You write preening, disposable statements
You wash come off quickly
You drink bottled water and monitor headlines
You check your money and messages
In sorrow you’re seductive, in catastrophe a fascist
You think precisely what you read

Remains

So long I was hungry
for your love, and lonely
when it didn’t come, which was
always. Now I find love in others,
doves, daughters, lovers.
I feel you every day,
fury at what you could not
love, or take care of. I’ll meet
you in heaven where I won’t
live but will visit for its wine
and warm winters.
I’ll love you even then
as I love money, tin,
to crave, dark days.

M Row

Who cares what had become or not become
Look off into the reaches with description
Everyone away, an enemy, or in the ground
while radially all things extend
and the revolution shoehorned into texts
Though I was alone what was to happen
would be the craft of generations
In the surveillance camera I saw myself pay
I begin again to play back the tapes
In bed you could play all these parts
The desire to be abandoned by art
My gun to my head that morning was not
Murmurers, mourners tied to doors
pushing each day in a room
The community will convene to prosecute
A word is fucking empty until I use it
not present when the sentence was passed
The faces in tapes more than trust
Start again with the story of buried relations
Too many words already commissioned
Once started the queries are shovels
Lose a little blood as you find family
The poem a series of antitheses
I am terminal. You must recognize this
Newcomers are marked by a darkness
The machine is fixed on initiates
It’s the thing you hear about and pass on
Spahn Ranch would be one
Loyalty is of a piece with autumn
Perhaps the simplest way to give the information
is a thought too dangerous to be found
Waste and amphetamine name the son

Limbs of Life

Gazing at flame in a locked room
unable to leave, sleepless, relieved only in daydream
I reanimate a bed in which I’d lain
loveless and ill once
and heard somewhere outside
provocative, despondent song
whose source I soon sought
and found high up in a nest
I struggled to reach    I thought
This creature is also not well
With each higher bough I mounted
the coal-colored bird also climbed
For weeks I brought it seed
bread crumbs, grubs, honey
fudge, crushed nuts, each morning
replenishing a fresh dish
and its caution turned slowly to trust
It was caught, carried home, put into a cage
in a small room from which care had been taken
to remove other such cages
A bird released will resume its flight
as in flameshapes I see gold trees again
and red