Four Poems

Hopeless Debates My argument was, yeah, impassioned paradox-laden, but true, so true … to me. The lexicon, textbooks change us— when leaf becomes blade serrate or entire. All entreaties make their way to the distressing rooms. The encore dazes. We are changed, altered. We sit for hours! just sitting, listening to the highway, the insect cities, drink beer and listen. Many iterations scare, scar us: but the play doesn’t phase, our obedient bodies are—that’s right— organisms. The Religious won’t concede it. And we don’t need them to, the interrelations are too in our face: breath, the bat eating stars, this year’s rare Monarch fucking with the cat. A sparrow drinks the pool.   Reading Fanny Howe It’s gotten to a point where it isn’t anymore about an image but the drug of itself. Every calamity has its certainty-music and by contrast its virtuality. True, I’ve been wanting to be someone at all. Wires swing like skipping ropes, but I promised it wasn’t about images. Sun in the haze a milky bulb. I promised.   Reading Phyllis Webb All this caution- work, caution-music. All this smoothing out despite the horrible radio’s news the wishing I had your blues. All this desire goes out to the impossibly beautiful: props as it were, to beauty.   Xen Vayl: A Game of Scrabble Pious, I trust the randomness. Letters spill like I Ching. And I get your profound love of the animal, the blameless wild, the uncanny transformative effect of a hat (the gearhead high school boyfriend). Unfeasibly I must think of new thoughts: spiritual realty on the outskirts, night lake making ocean-noise. I must awaken the merry brain before the sad one. I have had medium faith in the distribution evolving the concept of leisure versus work: X E N  V A Y L— with no dictionary I’ll contest it.