but the attraction that the earth exerts
pulls it back again — a little implement

made of desire
she called it

a trick of the amygdala

to cast off utterances half-thought,
bent on the table, except

when incidentally

the Apparatus reaches down

and cheats

the laws of its own creation

It’s better, if you want, need what was most in
the cells if scraped from the inside of her check,

If you want, mean to, that which spread and seeped, first

spend your days for observation,
mortgage your faculties to description;

then aim a tentative explanation,
impale the end of your senses;

scrutinize bodies in motion; make a stab in the dark;
infer your way to the existence of others,
their reactions to various stimuli, sounds they’ll make;

design experiments to test your predictions,
put your thumb in a vice

and hum:

welcome to my life scientific method
I’m a human now because of you, reason for us at present,

now at the hour of our evaporation
we, who are far from good thinking

I’ll send you a clip from a popular sketch-comedy television show, and one of a man
who injures his ankle in a gruesome way;
in between I’ll watch a hot girl do something, Saddam hanged until dead, and
trade you one kind of unfreedom for another,
and act toward your border states as if they were the developing world,
but a team of scientists finds a gigantic ring of invisible material left over from
the ancient collision of galaxy clusters; they announce it as this most
convincing evidence for the mysterious stuff called dark matter; but an
online social network popular with teenagers shares with state attorneys
the identities of members who are known sex offenders.

I’ll send you a clip of the gayest weatherman ever,
I’ll send you a clip of Japanese people, and a drunken kitten.

Let me treat you like a sparsely inhabited or virtually unsettled land —
let’s do what robots do.

before wiped off my stomach with a towel

it’s peculiar enough to make me think of your mouth
as a cow get its throat cut on a movie screen

for which you will not forgive me
with teeth worked in unfamiliar directions

and eyes wide-awake and twitching strained
these requests we make on each other that fail to keep

which remains there knowing it might could turn us to someone else

what’s hidden remains

a city’s collapse   its
            patterns of arrangements
            entirely
with movement being what it is
take heart and rejoice
nights toil upon us
wanes without our knowing

            what it means
to be here   the the of fissures
conversations held with ourselves
rehearsed by what forthcoming
in which we get someplace
                    or another

overwhelmed are we
            in containment
the repeated memory of
making a different decision
when reaching for your belt
seems a better way
                    I’ll
trace your skeleton
one hundred times a day
taste your eyeballs or any
part else that leaks

caught in conjunctions

                    give us
a little time
for some words between us
a little time to wait
                    give us
time for our hands
to make some occupation
a little time to put off
what must be done
time to give way to what

time we have to get us to

it amounts to little
and so on and so on
undertaken slowly
what would be left or
not at all

each minute as they say
for now unmentioned as ever
I want to lose you
in parts per thousand
as it is forgive me technically
not as it used to be