Abecedarian as Ars Poetica Already this feels too much. The way a line can break anywhere. Here even, if we aren’t careful. Too often I’m caught off guard, having dropped suddenly from the place I was standing, like an elevator with its cable cut, like another word falling down the stairs. Do you remember when God was a sonnet you could stumble into, or how enlightenment was the volta neither of us was prepared for? I nearly fell off the page taking that turn, and in fact, j

While on an evening walk, we see two dogs mating in an abandoned lot full of tall grass. Holding your hand in mine I look up at the moon looking like a coin caught between two cypress trees. I wonder about the meaning of time, about disappearing fragments. To our right is a fortune teller with old hands. I wonder if she knows I wore blue tonight to hear you say I look beautiful, so I can believe in the future. Pale moths are flying above a closed divorce lawyer’s office to ou

beyond the trees as far as i can see there’s a small duck i’ve been waiting for. i tell the duck my name, who i am. it probably doesn’t remember, but that’s fine. i remind myself that when you find an acquaintance after a long while of not knowing, it’s both hard and easy to get them to like you again. at least that’s what i tell myself on those blue days by the pond, feeding the geese breadcrumbs, the duck looking at me like what the hell, man, where’s mine? i don’t bring it

Star of this soreness I laugh myself awake, sling deep into the heave. Straight out of dirt road walking and at capacity—this being the back-alley way; the heartbreak; the running away constantly. Interest’s beam catches the crowd which catches you before you collapse, tremendous, breathless, one hundred hands on your back. It’s true that at its best the thrum goes sugarwater sweet; I reduced from hypochondriac fractal to taut and trembling string. A vamp kid whose hurricane