Open Source Corollary 1
What if I mutter?—am I a fish?—
can you hear me?—did my eyes burst
when you first smoked my little fish body?—
how about now?—did you gate my low-end
waves?—I recite my alphabet, the beads
strung along only my right wrist,
do you need me to sing?—I forget its tune,
the alphabet they laughed at me for showing,
my first scales greying in the neon blue heat
after what cloudleast day you held me
between the thumbs and for fingers
of your heart, yours is a slower pulse, now,
isn’t it?—it is not your facticity, checking
my mic now. No, this tech sur-face smiles
with less folds than you break into.
Open Source Corollary 2
I didn’t learn anything today.
Men died in an on-fire country,
I couldn’t pronounce the name,
but the photographic limbs bent
in the same directions as mine,
here, like this and the wind was
on fire, there,
the paper made
no mention of the woman,
nor their death, I forget her
name now. I forget the scent of her
scarf, the austere weight in wind,
I nap leaning upright, the angle
my father coaxed me into.
I water the rained-on plot of mint,
I hum to it, fruit
flies crowd around the tomato’s equator.
Gorging on the red shift of window air,
we can see her voice, that if we close
our eyes or fixate on our respective
socks, then the paper
can speak back to us, a commune of news
like every fox and foxhound can,
like the signal range for my plastic
cells. I tape the page to the face
of the fridge at eye-level,
red sashes slash each lacuna of skin.
Open Source Corollary 3
From this instance, reader,
Be encouraged to diligence in thy calling,
And distrust not providence,
is there written for Josiah and Abiah
by their son, one Benjamin Franklin,
I mark the azimuth angle, once hung itself
to dry, now downs itself earlier,
the red ants of fear
set about nibbling at my stomach’s lining
in anticipation of tomorrow’s ceremony.
I hold no role in the ceremony tomorrow,
I remind the seagull, studying a pink flash.
Sliced and arranged in their plastic beds,
sandwiched among Frozen Dairy & Oriental
(sic), my wife gasps and does not fake a gag
in aisled discovery, the kangaroo meat
bistres behind the breath-stained glass.
I was guaranteed failure by registering
for nutrition courses, for I starve
∄ my harangued self.
Forgetting is a mode of starvation,
and I fail to reconcile this thesis
with any image of any seagull.
I’m to be set about not a single task
in tomorrow’s ceremony, my doughy
clenched jaw hints at the rest
of my mirror-image, shoeless,
the noose of a starched collar lies limp,
designer bags sagging beneath cold eyes,
what are their names?—the names
given to the children tasked to carve
into the known universe the manifestation
of a blear pleather bag?—they could be
warm, I nod, they could be warmed
once held in the laic hug of alloy, hands,
the runnels sloughed together, hands,
forever, joined in harmonica harmony,
the two home-smells becoming hands,
and becoming one-home smell—
I just stand there, right—?—hand-
to-hand alchemy, the study of it
posits tabled synonyms for hands,
and if, for the tablespoons of beads
left to molt in bins within bins∵
I hold hands closer to the heat
of run support⊧ appatterns,
prescient protean,
and tardive appatterns.
Pine Needle Fires 21
Hex forgets hex, your hand
is their own logic set
and teal light over teal water,
night,
nihilism is the ultimate decadence, I hear
the professor, accused of touching one
of their charge inappropriately, leering
in their nameless, stentorian drone.
Undying perforations coat the mirror’s olive surface
confirming my beliefs in imperfection, the easy-bake
oven might, still beneath the ornamental
dust in its storied storage place of resting.
Junipers in the wasteland, the rocks rent,
the Glozel tablets, in anticipation,
the text redeems the text
into ash,
the death of death is not death.
Death of death is the rat’s memory
gouging about the man-made maze.
I forgot the repair’s cost.
I forgot to spool the threads I lost.
Pine Needle Fires 22
A common crow rifles through the bins.
In bathwater I plunge to drown ancestral sins.
Myour voice as soggy leaves everywhere.
As myour simple code dark wine traces
as mere vowels in their excoriated dialogic.
Poiein, irreligion, the canoe’s clear gears.
Scream to the little self-referential blue flowers,
roil in the mud, ruin your favourite perfct
fulcrum, bothears, they’re perfct,
if only for an ephemereality.
Alien Buddha Press 