Compatibility Report

When words began
to pile up at the corners
of my mouth,
I oozed over to
see
the city and its
night glands
throb
before choking.

Nothing much
was marching
when she called,
and she had so many
sonnets
like glances to squander,
I felt like
buying tattoos of pearls
or ropes of glossy wheat.

It was all
the way time
grunts,
shifts its weight:
a recognition of
kindred,
a hazy sameness
that loves
sitting by the fire.

I was in swoon
over courage,
a red
American
heart soaked
in letters and cities.

This the sort of night.

This the sort of night
where words fly down
in parachutes of water
blooming hard into sweet
phosphorous oceans,
no trenches of sound contained
therein.

This the sort of night
where my face is hot
and my skin shrinks
jives
and throbs
under the docks of sex.

This the sort of night
where against my will,
which is wilting
I wait,
an ever penitent
reader of looks that must
carve the map of time, and
crave
the route of lips.

This the sort of night
that shouts angles
in the curves of vowels
and the sort of dark that
screams at light to make it’s
get-away
in trails of rotten color.

This the sort of night
where I read out loud
the books you taught me,
the rough-hewn letters
like sand on the sheets,

I practically scream the
words of making,
I yell the ‘come-home’ cry
out into the widowed stars.

Daughter of Paper

Where were the fathers
the day that I found
a universe
of casualties so lovely, so vast?
I was a small child when I found you,
a vast ocean
in the lap of my mother.
Remember the cold clouds around her waist,
and even
in the green of gardens
the past knows how to find you.
I felt drunk before I even knew how to get that way.
I am the daughter of paper:
I dreamt pinks, or
wild golds crashing themselves
into greens into blacks.
Remember the blue
the vast, unstopping blue
of learning
and find for yourself
child
the soil of language,
and don’t forget when I was
a sky child,
drinking dust
before the time of art.
Where is the riot of the self
on the page?

Let me hold you there. Let me hold you there.
I was your baby, your first baby,
and it was you
who showed me how
to create the world.

I look at the horizon,
a sky coarse through the
grass,
dancing off,
washing the bellies of
birds,
making the backs of
horses heavy with joy:
Blue joy, pink joy, yellow joy.