Spring
Creatures of confused joy
are tasting the sunlight
made oblong by lemons
This goes on forever but I can’t
remember who I was anymore
Now I’m in a place I call here
but here is only one word and I
belong to all of it
I know words, like power, are nothing
‘til we move them by our will
It’s spring
My name is carnage
I see the impossible blossoms and they refuse
to stop bursting off their stems
If not for you, for whom
should I translate
the sensation of orange
streetlights streaming into me, thinking
how am I voice
not larynx, human not concrete
slab, seeing and not object of sight,
how am I memory
and not disaster?
You told me you only want poems
that feel necessary but everything
feels necessary
It’s the partial we hold,
the secret we mean
when we say the word
verdigris—
something we do
