from The Year of the Rooster

There’s a moment inside overhauls its own loose ends
Luxuriant staples in a mauve-lined room, romantic silence
Maybe the week’s non-consensual letup
Ambulance sirens coat the atmosphere around such latent arrivals
Everything by ship when it’s slippage I’m after

Rain soaked, the radio & its routine morning deliverance
make her half as overwhelmed as breakfast, but playing it
would only appease the other part of my tag-along wounds

Was it an atom, an aphrodisiac, or just Eve
turned confidant to a quiet study area
where disturbing others would be wasting space?

Either way, these metronome headaches settle radiantly
Nothing makes jousting more egregious
All suchness & other tragedies on tracing paper

***

Everyone’s an alien
  to squalor’s ghost, electromagnetic
fallout, snow & its interior silence

  Calling an asset an awful thing
wakes a cheap animal & yes already it’s yesterday
saw a bird the big so what made just a word later on

I’m not declining tenderness grinding against narcotic twilight

Something else to weld evening together

A few distant footfalls, dominant oblivion

This muffled practice stunning as a binder clip
makes the best furniture for adjectival distance

WELCOME TO THE YEAR OF THE ROOSTER

Bantam hypothesis: here history’s gone a half step into human verbs

After we crossed the water what’s left but to ask if I’m trapped
or is this an-acorn-drops-a-peculiar-orchestration symbolic

***

Wearing away the end
of a rifle, then pulling off thorns
to edge up the insects

Neurons firing in the ditch
make a bed for the river
a heavy rain brings on
I’m stuck on equations
passing like geese

An hour of pacing finds
a skylight to push them through

A moment’s fringe epicenter irredeemably stalling
so I take my graffiti haltingly—
                     here’s the word blue painted in green on a bronze rail
practically another vacant lot latched
in the Grand Museum of Symphonic Self-Avoidance
finding a human interest story to ease dead air over dinner
only the daily grind gone full circle, still at a red light
& the dog demands friendship graciously
not an excuse that’ll stay with you like buckshot

A bad day’s account gone bright with it
Appellate rejuvenation, accelerated change

The parking lot attendant’s playing holiday music

loud turbulence

a love song

***

Even statues lean into source material
A little less reverb on the veranda

Ha!

Rooster says that kind of routine letdown gets somewhere

Only thing I can’t tell is the starting point from the part already lost

A dead ringer for slim familiarity, a stranger
seen a half dozen times in a single day

Now, wind knocks its way past window ruts

Dramatic logics of a lone blue jay
beat against the back of my neck
& afternoon’s airing its pertinent grievances

How dim these cigarettes seem
when geometric patterns of the rug keep me occupied
until the dinner bell rings its egalitarian yes to a ruined offering

Sure I carry my nobility like a mule can’t sustain a human agenda

***

Drama mapped a cricket
               fiddling genderless noise

          Hello Hello
                                  Hello Hello

             mimetic heart means copy me

                 Light falls

                       or fails to sound grass

A bit of soft music
from the loud speaker
dufflebagged
in idiot rain
indoor animals

One more valley, one more hill
The intellectual thing was north

             Gray sky’s
overused objective
             wants in a green bottle

                                    green abundance

O attitude, what grows me like this?