It's hard to know what lives/ in my hands when I'm not paying/ attention to who I claim to be...

nigga, tonight i'm bout to be too much// in this context the room is the nigga/ or maybe your reflection/ or the wood skinned sprites juking around your ankles/ & on top of shea butter/ or the whole …

Stumbling through the kitchen, tired and headed for/ the staircase, her hair || is slightly out of character...

For/ you, the/ first triangle:/ Father and Son and/ Holy Ghost, and you hear/ from everybody Southern fried in/ your life the devil be a master mimic--

Always a threat/ of cleanliness// and its failure to purify...

the ghosts of me sell bodies/ on the stairs || on the lake || in the snow/ lined up there || sidewalk-sale/ near-identical/ spectacle...

there's an Elmo on the beast/ fuzzy red blurry/ atop the train/ traversing middle earth...

All things are an effort to prolong the inevitable./ For example, my deep concern when the kids call/ top bunk it means they've acquired innuendo./ They'll get there, if they haven't already...

time when the turning birds silver time exploding brined like sweet lemons time wolves bark skunks slip into coops fishing line knots up roads slick proud with ice the boys I fuck all eat candy

When they asked me / to describe myself / I said I am / the opposite of an onion.

How often at night the mouth works / Its own words by itself for no one’s hearing / Not even our own. Grain sleep of dreams / In which snow again buries the river and fields; / And also, the …

You caught me up / old world / in obsolescent fabric / stiff & / loosely shaped / tabbinet, cambric / martin’s hide / lace

My inheritance is the names/ of flowers, my tongue / a red headstone speaking / the names of lilies.

I am the keeper tells Me the most popular exhibit You might not think this cheers me but it does I’m given many opportunities   I like especially to ask the groups Led by fat white men       I …

The word is in another language. / It means: Custer’s last stand. / It means: Ozymandias.

Where virtue / is bone-starved of pretense, / or fattened on the suet of sentiment. / Clear the streams, clear the air, / severe the politics, chalked harsh / the nail-head souls of women. / Fences …

He says it’s snowing & his sister is pregnant & his mother is dying so they probably won’t be able to go on as many rides at Disney. / I say okay & I see but neither is true. / The sky shuts its …

I’m no mango or tomato. I’m a rusty yawn in a rumored year. I’m an arctic attic. / Come amble & ampersand in the slippery polar clutter. / I am not the heterosexual neat freak my mother raised …

But what if I wish to sit still next to you / every morning and tell you what I really mean / when I say I can never go back / is that I know that country no longer exists, / not those brown waves, …

Imagine when she learned how to kiss / she was fascinated by lips & reached for them. / Her first love sported an elephant’s trunk / her second an owl’s boney beak.