i make a map to the place i want to move back to,
an alarming amnesty scheduling the picturesque
& forming chains around the insistence of my memory
on a soft, dirty sky, a game of killing language to settle
what’s to be in place, of standing for a framework
even as that framework pries chunks from the pavement
because the words, formerly unknown, can’t separate
rapidly enough to drift around a planet of junk. my nostalgia
for endless water on the continent flickers, knowing nothing
of the original. tools bloom & the eye blots & records less
a figurative parade than images of ruin.
i’d like to play capture somewhere in a dream
of languorous gardens with the smell of iron precision
& decayed houses on a dull afternoon, to wave life process
like a banner, this one & that one becoming a church,
a system of flowers, a prison of holes. something legible’s
never satisfied, a code of generosity in its armature,
infinitesimal colors & hands coaxed into vowels alive
against a ground faded & cracked, breathing
a necessarily surgical sky, tracing rags by dint
of a practiced highway. beasts at least have
velocity, collectively swaying, evanescent in their nests,
while nocturnal die eat away at greenbelts, persuading
place to be only the wind disturbing the commas
of old hills in a mythological future & convulsive
butterflies laden with historic folly, a contagion of multiple
breezes through which birds of traffic slacken
in the dusk, changing shatter to unshatter & back again,
living on the cusp. on the road, one bird more or less
glides across my windshield, a vacant buffer
against being there already.
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