Another

The body is a template, but who can read the blurprints [sic]
where we misspell misspell or use these footprints as sextants
as you were saying so recently famously in shrieky

electrostatic facsimile transmission frequencies, intermittence
disappearance broadcast on taxicab tickers, pixilated messages
trafficked far from the suspect junkyard cordoned and glittering,

detectives’ faces on laminated badges below the actual,
illuminated under a full moon gaudier and nearer in puddle water,
easier smithereens among the skeletal wrecks.

Questioning

Maybe now interrogate the atom, its ellipses,
ovals of whatnot and etc.

Ask the paper-
covered globe,
place names now antique
but still stretched spherical.

Birds know nothing
but return.

What bright light
and heavy phonebook,
car battery and minuscule clamps
to make that fucker talk?

License

A squad car lights’ theatricality,
the shimmying astronomy, vivifies
ignobility, makes any midnight plush.

Awash as the windows of a cocktail lounge,
one in which the drinking goes on
well beyond exhaustion and remorse,

these, our eyes, violated
jelly aglisten, swelling, look shifty,
I’m sure, criminal and skittish. We look

where light makes sweeping statements
in the dark’s discourse.
In the siren’s absence, a capella,

who won’t, handcuffed, beg mercy?
Who’d run, one back many bullets’ target?
Giddy this isn’t our trouble, we peer.

The moon hangs full and useless.
The officer’s eerie.
We’re graced, faces all lit up.

XYZ

The world is all that is on our case:
power line downed in clairvoyant water,
moonlight on the burglar’s crow bar.

Zoo animals rouse under facsimile foliage.
The little planets of our own eyes widen,
watching.

Or Houdini exposing hokum,
splinter from the true crucifix
needling a wound.

Blood drops
brown on unwashed
emergency room floors

seem real enough.
Better to be clever
or kind is the question

no one asks the authors
of signatures everywhere,
evidence of hands under brains.