I
Detour left will not lead
That’s what I do daily rather than eat
Why question
When you can linger at the train station like a gas chamber
I have heard poets say they do not dream
Rather than rhetoric I use these words
Many of you and there are only a dozen in the room
Do not you are not poets
I only know the better option was to become a flower
I did that poorly but poverty did justice for me
I don’t have to admit I know nothing
But I will and won’t fake it with imagery
II
The road map that’s what some come in here for
I can’t even find my way to the road
I’m sleeping on
I remember yesterday she told me about good poetry
By explaining how bad it was
Listen to that fear
And do not fear
And do not snicker
In that poem you will find the door at the end of your life
And it does not help to stare at it
And blink
It will not go away once you see it
And it will not close once you open it
Only this is the book you have been reading
You set it down but kept listening
And now it is silent
III
What I hear makes its own creations
It does not get any less comfortable living in the mind
When the mind can make what happens
What I hear makes its own desperate sounds
Listen to the mind’s ease
I tell my mind
Even when I have to tell it with my hand
I make the mind obey this vehement body
This eye ever glimpsing off the precipice of the imagined
Ground I walk on
Feet hardly ever able to agree with the earth
This is not walking
As I sit here remembering I have walked
Into a morning that already had a shape
IV
A sliver creeps up the side of my spine
Drawing blood with a razor where I have no blood
I am sympathetic but not a surrealist
And would not scratch the moon with a nail to see behind it
I just want the noise to stop
For a second
And that won’t happen
I am fine with every animate thing bludgeoning me at once
Everything is smaller than me
And cannot win
And cries
When it must be put to bed
