Less breakable the plastics everyday

2 d flowers
I wear your white/green
striped sweater
to smell your gleam
become you beaming
while you are dim in that there
den; under surgical light

Sporadic
and slow smurfs shuffle to points
dodging the cumbersome robots
feeling around the hall's walls at feeding time
like snails that serve to suck algae
from the tempered infinity glass
the doctors peek in as they pass
to read crises they expect
I am expecting a T.V.;
the nearest thing to color and movement true
anything to symbolize life in this piece--
slice slice moments.

They're trained to take your vitals
are they
doubtful they know
to test your vibrancy
masked by immobility
we have to question
timepieces worn elastic.

I miss you while you are under mossy rock
once lifted you peep
up out around the stone-colored
awake we cannot carry our shells.

We wish we didn't have to
learn how things work
by breaking them open.
It's best to abandon sometimes
to volunteer compassion
and witness.

To have today back--even with no clean laundry
wearing your last decent pair of socks
or wet shoes for the whole day standing soggy
instead of prostrate pulpy--
to keep premonitions as such
to shake your head at a man
making a petty joke
reducing wives to a simmer of authentic essence
calling him out to speak
on behalf of those he represents
clearly you compute it all...

to have a simple glitch in the sound system tonight
then shifting as a graceful globe
reading those equally accountable and innocent
for those who are still scanning
securely strapped to the crust of the earth
catching moments of radiant heat
significant anonymous pods
spreading over the surface area.

You recognize berries from the same branch
from which you grafted something similar enough
anything major you would give
to have the drama of a passing day
with errands and items on your list
to discriminate
whether your sibling or a stranger
is basing a decision on our best interest
to admire finally a father's characteristic concern
for his favorite thing:
a party.

in common

how fingers feel to land cubed and ice
how leaves and hair tickle and comb the wind
the tendon taut or tight to heroin
scalping strung tissue for injected vice

who is engineering islands to swim
for inhabiting guns strapped to our skins bared
to rift from rays of the sun and sex
and light personal moons lifting tides violent

and what the hawk achieves above
and what da vinci does to science

Sugar in a paper blanket

Thy sleeping thought alone
'Mid winter monochrome
Not ready until bleach
In clan'd secrecy

Be color: solitude
Spirits under sheets stood
Beneath the skin is will
Pumping stopping still

Night sets bright a frown
Battery kills all sound
From pretended heaven
Bells and bed are given

To preserve the perennial

We fight not to be fixed—
not to be some thing to someone.
We want to preserve the perennial
and peacefully mourn the ephemeral pretty
for the sake of seasons and cycles.
Other flowers will console
and rain drops to the same soil.
Seeds will scatter when our concrete explodes
and something new will grow.

For all our softness, we are impermeable--
numb only to numbness.
Quick violence razes careful buildings,
but a steady neglect decays deeper.

I wish we had imagi-
nations—to pretend we are not pretending
that uttering a word erases itself.

Clouds and moons we can create.
I will hold my own--keep shadows
of fondness on my drawing board
and cut the nervous out.

I still have time to become an astronaut
and learn not to worry about the bomb
but things like cabin pressure
or my distance from the earth without dying—
adapting to claustrophobic life
behind the glass to vastness. It will trouble me
not to recognize my own face in a bowl,
my body-obscuring suit, but I will not feel
susceptible to cancer nor be concerned
with conditions of the heart. It will be elsewhere—
compacted and new.
Some things will be the same,
like fighting artificial air.

Coaxing inanimate

You are the morning for purging
the collection for a new animation
I learn your evenings
posted to your window
R.I.P.ing solicitations
left by others
I am posted
to your console
coaxing pieces
from the bulk of you
your activity dust
your watercourse
my career
campaigning for your oil
I refuse your standard
ironed I am the one
who steams your glass
from my side of focus
I dodge your edges
cartoon by climate
your surface I draft
from your vanity
I judge you
none
the sole solemn Viking
on this block

Sleep-deprived at five

When the shopping carts halt
at midnight four Filipinos start fishing
for Chinese characters faced down
clacks continue to precipitate from the north
tiles tack to tabletop
in rows to be torn as soon as
tiles stack in the south
terraces sit timid to the monsoon

At five am
my mother’s Tagalog is muted amid
the shuffling mahjong tiles
taking a clacking tile to tile
tile to manicured and beaten nail alike.

I hold up five fingers
when they ask how old I am
I stare at the floor vinyl
recording pinoys droning
I cannot sleep churning
their fingers in the pile of blocks
popping in thick frying oil
empty shopping carts jerk and skirt
a gravel parking lot
mama is stacking poker chips
tucking me in she is not.

Constantly the Sum

Constantly the sum total of energy
wheels from this oddball universe
All forces of romance in nature
and satire hidden everywhere—
wicked heat & hilarious light
to magnetic subtlety
and electric tragedy

Paying high tribute
to low-paid predecessors
wings slip past ladders
incorporating planes
and movement into
a whirlwind that works:
from expressions of a princess
to manifestations of life-science,
buds to minds
classified ads to Supreme Being—
waves under criminal control

The secret of a student
subjugating the universal lattice
will be known to the structure,
the particulars of success in building
whether it be fascinating the body
or influencing a definition,
and the pull of others’ tumbling force
false names roll
bodily juices blend together
with clipped thread
and draws death
the love of wonder
how death is like silk, how uneasy
to weave how improbable it is
to move how difficult
to summarize