Sing goodbye to song in songs:

protest is dead
and song shakes
that weight of
being for

to take the shiny robe
of summer breeze and
ecstasy, the golden horn
of song
                and imagine full
its elixir of abductions
and refusals.

song now serves the imaginary,
the secret catastrophe,

undone in its own
and open aftermath.

Jukebox Hero

Daydream is copied verbatim.
Its foreign alphabet keeps

            what narrative fancy
            makes real —

Fantasy abides little
precisions; feeds on
the slight incomprehensions

            of what doesn’t fit

into the scene
of fullness:

the excluded body
in open extravagance

engages this and that
future as
here.

Rivendell

Make no place sing its realness
            of endless light

and along the plain
encryptions of the withdrawn

the voice passes and doubles

in the analog technology
of small selves, songs and story.

Our Paintings

Under marvelous Titian sky
at road’s end

our slight errors
send animals

into the brush
after animals.

I suffered too the
murderous enchantment

and put on a lightbulb head —
fragile, luminous —

and lolled on the porch
awaiting dinner.

There was a ship sailing
We had died together —

Later we talked.
You were yourself.
I was mine.

Our voices were like coral.

Leave out the face to make more curious
this figure or place —
it is a solemn turn the breath takes
in aridity.

But I thought reading your words
of your name and the image of your mouth
open and empty


    2.

He put his teeth into wood to test its music
and was flayed: His insides were turned out.
“Someone mentioned to me”

writing into silence, I could see my hands clench
and remove clenched speech.

We must tell the world we are not here.