good war read

I’m out of my
jurisdiction

                                             but string infinite
                                             progress along

                                                                             in theatrical homage
                                                             to patricide

I’m lucky, I’ve the filthy powder
that tips the bucket
spilling itself entering into
is a displacement of
having been kindly invited

~ ~ ~

we arrived     the hardest work
already done
your hands smell of the salty cane
that stirs the oceans

                                             an aggressive mist where
                                                            
I’m unable to greet you
                                                            
at the door. Debts

we owe are clues
by a clock with infestations
of tics, dreams on the back of gazelles,
                 slap them on the ass

my fragrance has you grabbing your throat

~ ~ ~

likewise, an opportunist
picks from common demise

               To keep brooding!

               Swept glass onto a stiff page
                              where one imagines
                                             the end is successful,
                                             ends at all, upending

                                                             the world different I see
                                                             nature     and think
                                                                             heat, light
                                                             then smoke

If bruises place damage, bodies are nothing
more than banned
books. Complete waste
of images.

The book opens
with an evacuation. My father
scrapes into next century, but barely.
His wife a wilted centerpiece. In this child
names of displaced factories:
Johnson. Rand. Hamilton-Brown.
The Gaslight district and then
Hwy 70 replaces blue steel
shoes for boys. Roadspread —

              St. Louis before it was
              nicknames. Mound City,
              razing people into rows

~ ~ ~

Not to compare you
to him, but compares
the two of you
to clouds of wasted fuel.

If we do something because we must
it is not for love, but then what
more wrenching force?

              Leather splitter. Lock-stitch.
              Forget the factories. Prevents us
                               from any real work.

And your writing is like floating rafts of white pine
and what piano key
sounds like bruising? The river is clogged
with progress, bolted stories
unable to hold but personal
viewpoints are always that — personal
and incomplete.

              When they come, the others or God,
              who will tell our story,
              explain the past,
              what ensued the day of?
              Who will be there to raise
              their right hand
              in front of all to judge?

flockless, flightless —

One lugnut goat.

In the birth drawers,
              blazes of bandicoots.
And now, coming in threes
by a flute of feathers,
their tails
              shades of peeled citrus. I am
dinner in my knowledge.
You cannot push
yourself into the future
with your feet.

Beggar, it is you
              thrust from the crowd
to ask, “Let look us!”
Like lightening
reoccurrence flickers
on bleakest blackest
night.

I, Misbegotten, don’t have
              what I don’t know.
Maybe someone sings
from plucked rooster strings
a morning cast in broken bottles —

glass scampers
              to the four corners
in a great man’s study.

Good meat comes
from good animals.

I, Woebegone, look a disbelief
for things buried.
                                             Wind,
accuse loudly an undampened
ground. I hold vast in one hand
to be taken
              to the takeout
and with a good, final, pixilated view
live the rest
as restless as shutters.